Fittler after van de Velde the Younger. A Storm

Melville’s copy of Fittler’s 1810 engraving after van de Velde the Younger’s A Storm would have had deep meaning for him as an author, print collector, and son. To Melville as an author, this print provided the perfect pictorial analogue to “The Lee Shore” as depicted in chapter 23 of Moby-Dick. To Melville as a print collector, it was a perfect companion to Bryne’s colored engraving after Vernet’s lee-shore Shipwreck scene (our CAT 163). To Herman as the son of Allan Melvill, this print would have represented heartbreak and inspiration. 

The central ship in van de Velde’s A Storm is a classic visualization of the plight of the “storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land” in Melville’s “Lee Shore” chapter. “With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only fried her bitterest foe!” (NN MD 126).  

This print shows van de Velde’s extraordinary ability to depict the peril of a ship at sea in a lee-shore storm. The force of the high, white, billows breaking above the bow and against the port side of the ship show the power of the sea pushing it toward the land. The direction of the pennants at the top of the masts show the power of the winds that would push the ship against the land, as does the absence of the sails high on the masts that would push the ship even faster toward the shore.  The crests on the waves leave no doubt as to the way the wind is blowing, and the diagonal lines and fringed edges of the clouds in the sky heighten the feeling that the ship, already listing strongly to the right, will eventually be pushed against the base of the high promontory whose face appears to guard the shore.  

All of the nautical drama of ship, sea, and sky inherent in this image is further heightened by the bright sunlight from out at sea that fringes the tops of the waves and the edges of the clouds as it whitens the billows of spray into which the ship is plunging, edges the one remaining sail, and softens the high rockface of the land before fading into the darkness at the right. The perils of the foreground ship are echoed visually by the ship sailing ahead of it, out toward the horizon, but its more billowing sails seem to suggest that it is past the worst of the crisis and is sailing more freely at sea. 

All the above elements of this engraving of A Storm would have resonated with Melville as the seaman/author who had sailed treacherous seas whose force he had conveyed in words. Engraved by John Fittler in 1810, this print was included in William Young Ottley’s 4-volume Engravings after the Most Noble the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery, 1818 (see Humfrey; Appendix A, 222; WYO no. III.127). The original painting by van de Velde the Younger is dated c. 1700 by Robinson and cataloged as a sketch for the larger canvas now known as An English Ship in a Gale Trying to Claw off a Lee Shore. Robinson notes that van de Velde had painted several shipwreck scenes “on a rocky coast with the distinctive jutting rock shown in this picture. This rock might be the Bec de l’Aigle or Ile de Aquila between Marsailles and Toulon,” an area that was “very dangerous for ships” under “certain conditions of tide and wind” (Robinson, nos. 515.1 and 515.2, pp. 1081-83).