Redburn
Herman Melville
 Unable to find employment at home and deciding to go to sea, young Wellingborough Redburn signs on the Highlander, a merchantman out of New York City and bound for Liverpool, England. Representing himself as the "son of a gentleman" and expecting comparable treatment as such, he very soon discovers that he is just a green hand, a "boy", the lowest rank on the ship, assigned all the duties no other sailor wants (like cleaning out the "pig-pen", a longboat serving as a shipboard sty). The first mate promptly nicknames him "Buttons" for the shiny rows of them that adorn his impractical, unseamanlike jacket. As his education at sea commences, he begins to understand the brutal workings of ship politics. As a common seaman he can have no intercourse "behind the mast" where the officers command the ship. Before the mast, where the common seaman work and live, there is a man named Jackson, the best seaman aboard, and a bully who is feared by all. Uneducated yet cunning, with broken nose and squinting eye, he is described as "a Cain afloat, branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat near him." With an iron fist, Jackson rules "before the mast". Redburn soon experiences all the trials of a greenhorn: seasickness, scrubbing decks, climbing masts in the dead of night to unfurl sails; life in the forecastle with its cramped quarters and bad food. They eventually land in Liverpool where he is given liberty ashore. He rents a room and every day walks the city. One day in a street called Launcelott's Hey he stumbles on a sight that will haunt him for the rest of the voyage. From a cellar beneath an old warehouse he hears "a feeble wail" and looking into it sees "the figure of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on each side. At first I knew not whether they were alive or dead. They made no sign; they did not move or stir; but from the vault came that soul-sickening wail." He notices the child lift its head and then the mother looks at him for a moment. A woman and two girls "with hearts which, though they did not bound with blood, yet beat with a dull, dead ache that was their life." He runs for help but everywhere is met with indifference. A ragpicker, a porter, his landlady, even a policeman who tells him to mind his own business. He returns with some bread and cheese and drops them into the vault; but they are too weak to even lift it to their mouths. The mother whispers "water" so he runs and fills his tarpaulin hat at an open hydrant. The girls drink and revive enough to nibble some cheese. Something compels him and he clasps the mother's arms and pulls them aside to see the most haunting image of all: "a meager babe, the lower part of its body thrust into an old bonnet. Its face was dazzlingly white, even in its squalor; but the closed eyes looked like balls of indigo. It must have been dead for some hours." Judging them too far gone for any medicine to help he returns to his room. A few days later he revisits the street and finds the vault empty. "In place of the woman and children, a heap of quick-lime was glistening." On the docks he meets Harry Boulton, a sailor looking for a job, and Redburn helps him procure a birth on the Highlander for the return voyage. They become fast friends and make a trip to London where they visit a male brothel. The ship soon departs for New York where Bolton's deficits as sailor become apparent. He is persecuted and tormented by the crew. Jackson has been ill, not leaving his bed for four weeks. His first day of active duty he climbs to the topsail yard but suddenly vomits "a torrent of blood from his lungs," and falls head first into the sea never to resurface. The crew never speak his name again. His death is their deliverance. At port Redburn and Bolton go their separate ways, the former to his home and the latter to ship aboard a whaler. Redburn later hears that Bolton, far out in the Pacific, had fallen over the side and was drowned.