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The Lusiad and "Isle of the Cross"

Evidence of the existence of a literary work by Herman Melville titled The Isle of the Cross, now lost, appears in Melville family correspondence. In his 1990 chronology of events surrounding the book, Hershel Parker presents “the Agatha story,” a project discussed by Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as the book’s likely content (Parker, “Isle of the Cross” 2; see also Melville 2.136–61). Here, I propose that Melville’s title may be an elided reference to the “Isle of Holy Cross” in Edward Mickle’s translation of the sixteenth-century Portuguese epic poem, Camoëns’s The Lusiad; or the Discovery of India. Melville had a lifelong fascination with Camoëns and may have found some inspiration in Book 5 of The Lusiad for the title of The Isle of the Cross, parts of which may have been salvaged in The Encantadas. Let us look to Herman Melville’s literary life in mid-1852. The popular international recognition of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) had been undercut by the befuddled and increasingly hostile reception of Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852). The frustration for Melville was both artistic and monetary. His discovery of an older but kindred literary spirit in Hawthorne has been preserved in correspondence; what we now know of the title for The Isle of the Cross derives primarily from Melville family letters that came to light in 1983 and from the surviving Hawthorne-Melville correspondence. The case of abandonment and bigamy that is the likely source of The Isle of the Cross was first related to Melville by an acquaintance in a meeting on Nantucket in early July 1852. Melville’s interest in the story of a sailor (Robertson) who leaves a pregnant mate (Agatha Hatch) on a remote island has been extensively documented elsewhere (Parker 2:114–15, Hayford, NN PT 482–83). In an October 25, 1852 letter, Melville urged Hawthorne to write up the story of Agatha and Robertson (Parker 2.141). Hawthorne considered the project while vacationing on the Isles of the Shoals, eight barren and rocky islands ten miles southeast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and came up with the title The Isle of Shoals in early September 1852. (Parker, Melville 2.136–37). Presumably, the change of the setting from Nantucket to the Isles of Shoals