“Bridegroom Dick”


Portrait and column on Lt. Morris, U. S. N., Commander of the Cumberland. —Harper’s Weekly, April 5, 1862.

“Bridegroom Dick” consists largely of the reminiscences of an old sailor. Howard Vincent calls it “in a sense, a companion piece to Melville’s novel White Jacket,” and adds that “Characters and events of that novel . . . undoubtedly appear in the poem” (Poems, p. 470). Vincent’s assertions appear well founded, but there seems to be ample evidence that at least part of the poem was suggested to Melville by the Rebellion Record.
When Bridegroom Dick comes in his reminiscences of the country’s naval history to the period of “Secession’s foul weather,” he tells of two friends, both old tars, who go separate ways—one North, one South:

Lost in the smother o’ that wide public stress,
In hearts, private hearts, what ties there were snapped!
Tell, Hal—vouch, Will, o’ the ward-room mess,
On you how the riving thunder-bolt clapped.
With a bead in your eye and beads in your glass,
And a grip o’ the flipper, it was part and pass:
“Hal, must it be; Well, if come indeed the shock,
To North or to South, let the victory cleave,
Vaunt it he may on his dung-hill the cock,
But Uncle Sam’s eagle never crow will, believe.”

Dick follows this passage with some musings on the war, and then he gives an account of “the fray / In Hampton Roads” (the only battle actually described in the poem). He tells how a frigate (the Cumberland) and an iron-clad (the Merrimac) come to close combat, the iron-clad commander issuing an ultimatum:

And a trumpet from port of the iron-clad hails,
Summoning the other, whose flag never trails:
“Surrender that frigate, Will! Surrender,
Or I will sink her—ram, and end her!”

‘T was Hal. And Will, from the naked heart-o’-oak,
Will, the old messmate, minus trumpet, spoke,
Informally intrepid,—”Sink her, and be damned!”

The encounter between the Cumberland and the Merrimac is then described, in a passage to be discussed separately later. Melville indicates by an asterisk that Will’s reply to Hal is “Historic,” but none of the official reports given in the Rebellion Record mentions such a verbal exchange.
There is, however, in the Rebellion Record (IV, Doc. 465-468) a document entitled “Reception of the Heroes of the Congress and the Cumberland,” which provides accounts by two sailors, one from the Cumberland and one from the Congress, of their engagements with the Merrimac. The sailor from the Cumberland includes the following statement in his testimony:

Could we have kept her off at arm’s length she never would have taken us, but she ran her steel prow into us, when Mr. Buchanan, the man who commanded her, asked our commander: “Will you surrender?” He answered, “Never will I surrender!” and he took his infernal machine off and ran it into us again. He then asked again, “Mr. Morris,” calling him by name, “will you surrender that ship?” “Never,” says he, “if you sink her!” (Doc. 466).