In a prose piece that opens John Marr and Other Sailors Melville tells
the story of John Marr, “From boyhood up to maturity a sailor
under diverse flags.” John Marr suffered a disabling wound, and, after spending some time drifting from sail-making to carpentering, settled down in a frontier prairie town. Soon he married, only to have disease claim both his wife and infant child. “Being now arrived at middle-life, he resolved never to quit the soil that holds the only beings ever connected with him by love in the family tie.” But the staid, hard-working prairie people were not a group with whom the former sailor, who took pleasure in telling tales of the sea, could feel very close. In his desire for easygoing companionship he took to invoking visionary friends of the past, carrying on with them such conversations as that in the first poem in the volume.
A possible source for John Marr exists in the Rebellion Record, where Captain John Q. Marr is mentioned twice. The stories of the two men bear no resemblance, however. Captain Marr was a Confederate officer killed in a skirmish at Fairfax Courthouse in the opening days of the war and apparently had never been a sailor. A New York Times note (Rebellion Record, I, Doc. 89) refers to him as a “member of the Virginia State Convention, and a member elect of the Legislature from Fauquier County.” Similar information is provided in a Richmond Enquirer note (I, Doc. 322), and it is added that Marr was a “brave and efficient officer, the support of a widowed mother.”
But the passage most likely to have made an impression on Melville and to have caused the name to stick in his mind is an obituary notice reprinted from the Nashville Union (I, Doc. 322), in which Marr is described as “the first soldier of the South to baptize the soil of the Old Dominion with his patriotic blood.” The account goes on for a page, praising Marr in extremely lavish terms, as well as promising that “the good old Commonwealth” will avenge his death.