OMOO (oh-MOO)
A
Melville non-fiction work about a whaling vessel and exploring
Tahiti
Common clues: "Typee"
sequel; Melville novel; 1847 Melville work; Melville effort;
Melville novel set in Tahiti; Novel of the South Seas; Melville
romance
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
5 times a year
News: Descendant
of Herman Melville uses his failure as inspiration for play
Video:
Herman
Melville: The Real Story
A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. – Herman Melville
Herman
Melville
Omoo was Herman Melville's sequel to Typee, and, as such, was also nonfiction. After leaving Nukuheva, the main character ships aboard a whaling vessel which makes its way to Tahiti, after which there is a mutiny and the majority of the crew are imprisoned on Tahiti. The book follows the actions of Melville as he explores Tahiti and remarks on their customs and way of life.
CHAPTER I.
MY RECEPTION ABOARD
IT WAS the middle of a bright tropical afternoon that we made good our
escape from the bay. The vessel we sought lay with her main-topsail
aback about a league from the land, and was the only object that
broke the broad expanse of the ocean.
On approaching, she turned out to be a small, slatternly-looking
craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and
bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of
affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her
a whaler. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the sailors,
wild, haggard-looking fellows in Scotch caps and faded blue frocks;
some of them with cheeks of a mottled bronze, to which sickness soon
changes the rich berry-brown of a seaman's complexion in the tropics.
Continue reading at Project Gutenberg…
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Omoo".
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