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take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
    Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon…What do you see?–Posted like silent sentinels around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries…Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land…Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
    Loomings,
Moby-Dick

    Nowadays Pearl Street is covered with asphalt, but once it was strewn with oyster shells, like the glistening white paths you can still see on Cape Cod. On 1 August 1819, when Herman Melville was born here, this thoroughfare marked the lower limits of Manhattan. And if it is hard now to imagine what New York looked like without its towers, rising to the sky in an insatiable search for space, then it was a notion familiar to Melville, for the city changed utterly within his own lifetime.
    In 1819 much of Manhattan was still farmland; Central Park had yet to be born out of the common ground where freed slaves and the last Native Americans lived. Most New Yorkers were British or Dutch by descent; this was not the polyglot city it would become by the century’s end. The shallows in which the oysters grew were yet to be clawed back from the sea, and at the end of Pearl Street was the Battery, a promenade where citizens could take the sea air. Its Castle Clinton was still an island, although it would later become the home of the New York Aquarium where, in 1913, Charles H. Townsend exhibited a live porpoise.
    The house in which Melville was born was demolished long ago. Set into a wall nearby is a memorial bust of the author, covered by perspex like a square porthole and overshadowed by an office block. Across the road, the river ferries spill out their early morning commuters from Jersey, in the shadow of the moored, anachronistic masts of South Street Seaport.
    The sun shines through the cables of Brooklyn Bridge; a down-and-out stirs from a riverside bench. This is still a fluid place, accustomed to reshaping itself in its own image and leaving its history behind. Yet the past remains imprinted in these streets, and in the memory of the people who once walked them.
    They were what we would call middle class. Herman’s father, Allan Melvill–the ‘e’ was added later as a claim on their noble Scottish ancestry–was an importer of fancy goods. A dandified figure with his brushed-forward hair, he had made many trips to Europe, bringing back French antiques and engravings over which his children pored on a Saturday afternoon. ‘Above all there was a picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons, and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly.’ Such images left his young son with ‘a vague prophetic thought, that I was fated, one day or other, to be a great voyager’.
    On both sides Melville sprang from heroes. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, was one of the ‘Indian’ raiders who tipped tea into Boston harbour in protest at British taxes; the family kept a phial of the tea leaves in his honour. His other grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, after whom his brother was named, had held Fort Stanwix in the 1777 siege against the British and the Indians; Herman would call his own son Stanwix in memory of this famous victory. The sea was in the family blood, too. One uncle, Captain John D’Wolf II, had sailed from the Kamchatka Peninsula and onto the back of a whale. ‘It was like striking a rock, and brought us to a complete standstill,’ he recorded. ‘The monster soon showed himself, gave a spout, “kicked” his flukes and went down. He did not appear to be hurt, nor were we hurt, but most confoundedly frightened.’ A fine, handsome man with white hair and a florid face,