“The Stone Fleet: An Old Sailor’s Lament”

For “The Stone Fleet” Melville went to the New York Tribune account in Volume III, Documents 503-508. He printed part of the first paragraph of this account as a note to the poem:

The terrible Stone Fleet, on a mission as pitiless as the granite that freights it, sailed this morning from Port Royal, and before two days are past will have made Charleston an inland city. The ships are all old whalers, and cost the government some $2500 to $5000 each. Some of them were once famous ships. Melville comments that this quotation is “From Newspaper Correspondence of the day.”

The stone fleet was made up of sixteen old whalers, loaded with blocks of granite, and it was sunk at the entrance to Charleston harbor. The sinking of these old ships was a natural source of inspiration for an old whaler like Melville:

I have a feeling for these ships,
Each worn and ancient one,
With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam:
Ay, it was unkindly done.

Melville’s phrasing reflects in two places his reading of the Tribune account. In stanza one the epithet “great bluff bows” echoes the Tribune’s description of the Potomac: “and her bluff bows nod to us rather gratefully” (Documents, p. 504). In stanza five, when he is describing the death of the ships, Melville says, “They sunk so slow, they died so hard,” a line clearly indebted to “Some stanch old ships died very hard, settling very slowly, and still upright when they had felt the bottom” (Documents, p. 508).

Melville singles out the Tenedos, “a glorious good old craft as ever run,” for especial praise in stanzas two and three. The Tribune writer had done the same, nostalgically commenting that “The Tenedos is one of the oldest, if I may trust the mate of the Catawba, who confidentially informed me that her keel was laid when Adam was an oakum boy” (Documents, p. 504). Melville expresses his feelings about the sinking of the stone fleet in his concluding stanza:

And all for naught. The waters pass—
Currents will have their way;
Nature is nobody’s ally; ’tis well;
The harbor is bettered—will stay.
A failure, and complete,
Was your old Stone Fleet.