"The Sources and Genesis of Melville's "Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow

IN THE FINAL MONTHS of I853 Herman Melville completed a series of ten sketches about the Galapagos Islands, entitled Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, and sent them to Putnam's Monthly magazine where they were printed in successive issues, March through May, i854.1 As was his habit and perhaps his necessity at this time, Melville relied heavily on secondary sources for descriptive detail and narrative incident in Encantadas, using documents of exploration and adventure in the region to augment his own rather limited acquaintance with the islands.2 The eighth and longest sketch, however, Norfolk Isle and the Chola Widow, the narrative and thematic center of Encantadas, has seemed to be an exception to this pattern and to have neither autobiographical nor literary origins; scholars have generally concurred with the description of the tale offered by Leon Howard in his critical biography Herman Melville, as one story connected with the islands which he [Melville] developed at some length, either from some unidentified written source or from some tale he had himself heard in the Pacific.3 Though the sketch has drawn an impressive body of critical commentary since that time, the origins of the story in Melville's experience have remained a mystery.4

Ancient history · Archaeology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History

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