Having read Moby Dick (which I loved) and now this, I come to several conclusions. One is that Melville wrote what he knew, and the other is that he was a cranky man.
His father died when he was 13 and the family finances went from precarious to worse. Melville was not a gifted student, nor could he teach, and so, at the age of 20 he signed on as a cabin boy for a merchant ship called the St. Lawrence, which traveled from New York City to Liverpool, England, and back. Two year later he embarked on his second sea voyage after being hired to work aboard the Acushnet, a whaling ship. After arriving at the Marquesas Islands of Polynesia in 1842, Melville and a crewmate deserted the ship and, soon after, were captured by local cannibals. Although Melville was treated well, he escaped after four months on board another whaling ship, the Lucy Ann, and was jailed after joining the crew in a mutiny. He eventually wound up in Hawaii before catching a ride back to Massachusetts on the USS United States, arriving home more than three years after he left.
What he lacked as a sailor he made up for with his powers of observation, and this short novella is a summation of his impressions--not favorable ones--of the Galapagos archipelago. To be fair, he had a point about their lack of hospitability for human habitation, but he completely missed their other charms, or they were wasted on him. It is possible that he would have had a chance to read Darwin's account of his journey on the Beagle, but it did not open his eyes in the least.
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