Melville's Van de Velde in "At the Hostelry"

The “cloud voice” in Melville’s poem speaks for Van Tromp “through the bolts” of the broadside of his ship, but in the poem itself this action is not attached to any particular time or place in Dutch naval history. Melville had, however, provided such a context on the heavily revised leaf 34 of his manuscript for the poem. Right after “the swart old Dunderberg” displaces “the tall black Guilderland” as Van Tromp’s ship in Melville’s revision of the first reminiscence, we read that “Off the Texel it was, the foe . . . under her lee / When like . . . the . . . belched cloud-voice from the . . . mountain rolled, Van Tromp through the bolts of her  . . . broadside spoke” (NN BBO 709).

Off the Dutch island of Texel, north of Amsterdam, is where the last major battle of the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74) was fought. The allied English and French warships had hoped to invade the Dutch mainland but were repelled by the Dutch ships led by Lieutenant-Admiral Tromp in The Gouden Leeuw (The Golden Lion) and Lieutenant-Admiral de Ruyter in De Zeven Provincien (The Seven Provinces). This decisive Battle of the Texel on August 21, 1673 was documented for the English court by each of the van de Veldes, now living together in London. Van de Velde the Elder made his customary ink drawings which his son transformed into oil paintings on canvas. Perhaps the most magnificent of the paintings the Younger made from this war is The Gouden Leeuw at the Battle of Texel, 21 August 1673, completed in 1689. Here Tromp’s ship is at the center of the action, “belching” its “smoke clouds” in both directions (fig. 8). 

After the above reminiscence about “Van Tromp,” Melville’s narrator tells us, Van der Velde “lapsed in thought / Of yet other frays himself had seen / When, fired by adventurous love of Art / With De Ruyter he’d cruised, yea, a tar had been” (5: 8-11). This passage is sometimes taken to apply exclusively to Van de Velde the Elder, since he is the one who had famously sailed into the midst of battle to make the incomparable ink drawings (grisailles) that inspired the oil paintings his son created in the studio. After the Elder and his son had moved to England in 1672, however, van de Velde the Younger was himself given royal commands to witness warfare at sea, perhaps as soon as 1673, as Melville would have surmised from some of his written sources. In his copy of the catalogue of paintings at Hampton Court, thirteen of the fourteen van de Velde titles were of battle scenes.

The essay on van de Velde the Younger in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters mentioned battle scenes the English court ordered him to observe, but stresses that it was his love of the sea itself in all its moods, and his love of ships themselves and the men who man them, that had made him “the painter of the sea.” This essay includes a charming story about van de Velde’s painting of a meeting of the “united French and English fleets” attended by Charles II, two of whose commissioners begged of the king to cut it in two so each could have a part, a plan the painter foiled by keeping the painting until the death of the king (Works 1:52-54). Melville had the original source of that story in the copy of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England that he acquired, and annotated, in 1872 (MMO 543a, 249-51). 

After Van de Velde’s first burst of words in Melville’s monody, featuring the “smoke” through which Van Tromp “spoke,” followed by his unspoken thought of “yet other frays he himself had seen” when cruising with De Ruyter, the narrator continues with this portrait of the painter: 

Reminiscent he sat. Some lion-heart old, 

Austerely aside, on latter days cast, 

So muses on glories engulfed in the Past, 

 And laurelled ones stranded or overrolled 

By eventful Time (lines 22-26).

Those lines could have served as a suitable conclusion to musings of this dreamy, seafaring artist. Yet “He woke anon, / Or, rather, his dream took audible tone.” After “filling his cup,” Van de Velde spoke from his own heartfelt memory, not from a chance word heard from Brouwer: 

“On Zealand’s strand  

I saw morn’s rays slant ‘twixt the bones  

Of the oaken Dunderberg broken up; 

Saw her ribbed shadow in the sand. 

Ay—picturesque--! But nought atones 

For heroic navies, Pan’s own ribs and knees, 

But a story now that storied made the seas!” 

After this more inward, dirge-like burst, “the gray master-marine / Fell back with desolated mein” (lines 18-27). 

Van de Velde’s dirge for the broken bones and “ribbed shadow” of the oaken Dunderberg on Zealand’s strand reaches directly back to Melville’s elegy for “old oaken navies” in “The Fighting Temeraire” in Battle-Pieces, the book of Civil War poetry he had published in 1866. Melville’s poem was inspired not only by The Temeraire’s heroic service in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 but by J. M. W. Turner’s 1839 oil painting The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838 (fig. 9). 

Melville had seen Turner’s painting of The Fighting Temeraire at the Turner Gallery in London after arriving from the Continent on April 29, 1857. Not sure how to spell the  French word in its title, he listed the painting as “The Fighting ________ taken to her last birth” in his journal entry for that visit (NN J 128-29). At some unknown date, he acquired J. T. Willmore’s 1859 steel engraving of The Fighting Temeraire (to be cataloged and discussed with thirty other engravings after Turner in our Chapter 7). 

In van de Velde’s life as a painter, the poetic elegy to the old oaken warship that emerges from him dreamily among his fellow Old Masters in Melville’s “At the Hostelry” relates perhaps most closely to the glorious life and inevitable obsolescence of The Gouden Leeuw, pictured at the peak of its glory under Admiral Tromp in van de Velde’s painting of The Gouden Leeuw at the Battle of Texel, 21 August 1673 (fig. 8 above). In 1686, during one of his visits to Amsterdam from London, van de Velde the Younger saw The Gouden Leeuw off the waterfront in the river IJ. Before returning to London, he painted what is widely considered to be another of his masterpieces, Cornelis de Tromp’s former flagship ‘The Gouden Leeuw’ in the IJ in front of Amsterdam (fig. 10). 

This visual elegy became much more material one year later when this most glorious flagship was in indeed “broken up . . . on Zealand’s strand,” anticipating not only the fate of the Temeraire eulogized by Turner a century and a half later but also the moment in which Van de Velde muses on the fate of “laurelled ones stranded or overrolled / By eventful Time” in Melville’s unpublished 1891 manuscript poem [cite Robinson and/or online souce].  

Melville is likely to have been thinking of both Van de Velde and Turner when writing and revising his poetic tribute to Van de Velde, for on April 24, 1857, one week before seeing Turner’s Fighting Temeraire at the Turner Gallery in London, he would have seen van de Velde’s painting of Cornelis de Tromp’s former flagship ‘The Gouden Leeuw’ in Amsterdam (NN J 127, 523). The latter painting had arrived at the Trippenhuis, Amsterdam’s municipal gallery, by 1808, where it remained until being transferred to the Rijksmuseum. In the 1854 edition of The Works of Eminent Masters that Melville acquired in 1871, this painting was listed as “’City of Amsterdam,’ a very fine production” (1:54) among the five other van de Veldes that also included The Capture of the Royal Prince (fig. 6 above). 

The elegiac monody for van de Velde that Melville was still revising at the end of his life would certainly have had resonance with the arc of his own personal and professional life. So did the fate of the old oaken warships with which Turner and van de Velde had each identified so deeply. Melville had known considerable glory as a young American novelist in the late 1840s and early 1850s, but those early laurels had long been “stranded or overrolled / By eventful Time” during the decades in which he worked as a full time inspector at the Custom House until his retirement in 1885 freed up more time for literary and artistic pursuits. Those pursuits he had kept impressively afloat, if decreasingly public, as he published Battle-Pieces in 1866, Clarel in 1876, John Marr in 1888, and Timoleon in 1891, while also assembling the 420-plus prints that are the subject of this website and 600-plus books that have so far been cataloged from this library.

At the time of Melville's death on September 28, 1891, many who had known him had assumed that this once famous novelist from forty years ago had, like the Temeraire in Turner’s painting, been “tugged to [his] last berth to be broken up.” Just as Melville had, perhaps unconsciously, transformed “last berth” to “last birth” in his 1857 journal entry about Turner’s painting, so have his literary reputation and cultural influence been reborn, energized, and disseminated in ways that would have been unthinkable in 1891. Just as the The Gouden Leeuw and The Fighting Temeraire live for us most vividly today in the paintings of van de Velde and Turner, so are the thoughts and feelings of the world Melville envisioned in his mind and expressed in his words reborn in the eyes and minds of those who read, and make them their own, today. 

One anomaly remains to be discussed. Early commentators on “At the Hostelry” had assumed that the Dunderberg alluded to in the poem must have been the name of one of the ships commanded by either Marten Tromp or his son Cornelis. Dennis Berthold pointed out in 2004, however, that no ship with that name then existed in the Dutch fleet. Rather, Dunderberg was the name of a highly anticipated iron-clad warship that was being built in the Brooklyn Naval Yard for deployment in the American Civil War when the Melville family returned to New York in 1863. Melville would have known of this ship from visits to see his cousin Guert Gansevoort at the Naval Yard as well as from engravings that appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1863, 1865, and 1867. The Dunderberg was a hybrid ship that combined a steam-driven engine with wind-blown sails (fig. 11). The design of this ship was so complex, and its cost overruns so endless, that it was still unfinished by the end of the war in 1865. It was purchased by France in 1867, after its first run in New York Bay, when it was declared "the largest, staunchest, and most easily handled engine of naval warfare which has yet been built in this or any country" ("The Steam Ram, Dunderberg," 325). The ship was scrapped by the French seven years later. 

One reason for this anomaly is that Melville’s poem is unfinished and we don’t know his final intent. Dunderberg is a good name for a Dutch ship in Melville’s poem because its name means “thunder-mountain” in the Dutch (and Swedish) languages, entirely appropriate for a Dutch ship whose cannon-smoke exploded “like the cloud-voice from the mountain rolled.” The surviving manuscripts seem to indicate that Dunderberg replaced Guilderland as the name of Van Tromp’s ship, that name being quite similar to the Gulden Leeuw actually being commanded by Admiral Tromp in the Battle of Texel that Melville had in mind when drafting the poem (NN BBO 709). By invoking the name of an ironclad warship from America’s recent history perhaps Melville was trying to evoke a contrast such as the one he had created in Battle-Pieces by juxtaposing poetic tribute to “the navies old and oaken” in the “The Temeriare” against modern warfare in which “rivets clinch the iron-clads” in “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” (NN PP 42-45). "By inserting a union ironclad into Van de Velde's verbal seascape," Dennis Berthold declares, "Melville inscribes the strichtures against modern warfare evident in Battle-Pieces into a poem concerned with art and aesthetics" (101). 

The name Dunderberg would have had yet another association from many of Melville’s contemporaries from the state of New York. The ship had itself been named for Dunderberg Mountain, overlooking the Hudson River near the military academy at West Point. The early Dutch settlers had christened it “thunder mountain” because of the thunder and lightning storms that would surprisingly burst from its side. This linguistic history along the shores of the Hudson River relates to the moment in Melville’s poem in which Van de Velde compares the “bolts” which spoke “through” the “broadside” of Van Tromp’s ship to “the cloud-voice from the mountain rolled." Melville would have been familiar with Dunderberg Mountain through his many trips up and down the Hudson River from the time his father’s bankruptcy caused the family to move from New York to Albany. Herman’s Gansevoort ancestor Harmen van Harmense had helped to settle the Hudson River valley in the late 1650s and early 1660s, during the time of the Anglo-Dutch wars vividly recalled by the "Van de Velde" in Melville's poem (Berthold, 101-02).