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speak the unvarnished truth will gain for him the confidence
of his readers. 1846.

INTRODUCTION TO THE EDITION OF 1892.
BY ARTHUR STEDMAN.
OF the trinity of American authors whose births made the year 1819 a
notable one in our literary history,--Lowell, Whitman, and Melville,--it
is interesting to observe that the two latter were both descended, on the
fathers' and mothers' sides respectively, from have families of British

New England and Dutch New York extraction. Whitman and Van
Velsor, Melville and Gansevoort, were the several combinations which
produced these men; and it is easy to trace in the life and character of
each author the qualities derived from his joint ancestry. Here, however,
the resemblance ceases, for Whitman's forebears, while worthy country
people of good descent, were not prominent in public or private life.
Melville, on the other hand, was of distinctly patrician birth, his
paternal and maternal grandfathers having been leading characters in
the Revolutionary War; their descendants still maintaining a dignified
social position.
Allan Melville, great-grandfather of Herman Melville, removed from
Scotland to America in 1748, and established himself as a merchant in
Boston. His son, Major Thomas Melville, was a leader in the famous
'Boston Tea Party' of 1773 and afterwards became an officer in the
Continental Army. He is reported to have been a Conservative in all
matters except his opposition to unjust taxation, and he wore the
old-fashioned cocked hat and knee-breeches until his death, in 1832,
thus becoming the original of Doctor Holmes's poem,'The Last Leaf'.
Major Melville's son Allan, the father of Herman, was an importing
merchant,--first in Boston, and later in New York. He was a man of
much culture, and was an extensive traveller for his time. He married
Maria Gansevoort, daughter of General Peter Gansevoort, best known
as 'the hero of Fort Stanwix.' This fort was situated on the present site
of Rome, N.Y.; and there Gansevoort, with a small body of men, held
in check reinforcements on their way to join Burgoyne, until the
disastrous ending of the latter's campaign of 1777 was insured. The
Gansevoorts, it should be said, were at that time and subsequently
residents of Albany, N.Y.
Herman Melville was born in New York on August 1,1819, and
received his early education in that city. There he imbibed his first love
of adventure, listening, as be says in 'Redburn,' while his father 'of
winter evenings, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire in old
Greenwich Street, used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous
waves at sea, mountain high, of the masts bending like twigs, and all
about Havre and Liverpool.' The death of his father in reduced

circumstances necessitated the removal of his mother and the family of
eight brothers and sisters to the village of Lansingburg, on the Hudson
River. There Herman remained until 1835, when he attended the
Albany Classical School for some months. Dr. Charles E. West, the
well-known Brooklyn educator, was then in charge of the school, and
remembers the lad's deftness in English composition, and his struggles
with mathematics.
The following year was passed at Pittsfield, Mass., where he engaged
in work on his uncle's farm, long known as the 'Van Schaack place.'
This uncle was Thomas Melville, president of the Berkshire
Agricultural Society, and a successful gentleman farmer.
Herman's roving disposition, and a desire to support himself
independently of family assistance, soon led him to ship as cabin boy in
a New York vessel bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, visited
London, and returned in the same ship. 'Redburn: His First Voyage,'
published in 1849, is partly founded on the experiences of this trip,
which was undertaken with the full consent of his relatives, and which
seems to have satisfied his nautical ambition for a time. As told in the
book, Melville met with more than the usual hardships of a sailor-boy's
first venture. It does not seem difficult in 'Redburn' to separate the
author's actual experiences from those invented by him, this being the
case in some of his other writings.
A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840, was
occupied with school-teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now
East Albany, N.Y., he received the munificent salary of 'six dollars a
quarter and board.' He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass., 'boarding
around' with the families of his pupils, in true American fashion, and
easily suppressing, on one memorable occasion, the efforts of his larger
scholars to inaugurate a rebellion by physical force.
I fancy that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana's 'Two Years
Before the Mast' which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville's
breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of
everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own