Ed Simon at Literary Hub:
For nineteen years, until his retirement in 1885, Herman Melville would awake, slick back his dark hair and unsnarl the snags from his beard, don a uniform of dark navy pilot cloth and affix to his chest the brass badge of a U.S. Customs Inspector. Operating at the Lower Manhattan docks, Melville’s task was to examine ship manifests against unloaded cargo. “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” said Ishmael in Moby-Dick. “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
Before penning those watery books Typee, Benito Cereno, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd (and of course the one about the whale), Melville had been a sailor on the St. Lawrence in 1839, a harpooner aboard the Acushnet in 1841, even a mutineer briefly on the Lucy Ann a year later. In middle age, though, the only seaway Melville encountered was the brackish Hudson and his journeys consisted of tabulating the wool unloaded from Manchester, rum from Havana, and tea from Calcutta.
More here.
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