Racialized Ecology: Melville's Chola Widow, Tortoises, and Dogs on the Galapagos Islands

Archipelagic crosscurrents in Melville’s “The Encantadas” (1854), from tortoise-hunting to imperialist colonization to outright enslavement, rape, and plunder, animate the circulation of resources and people around the... [ view full abstract ]

Archipelagic crosscurrents in Melville’s “The Encantadas” (1854), from tortoise-hunting to imperialist colonization to outright enslavement, rape, and plunder, animate the circulation of resources and people around the Galapagos Islands. This paper will focalize around the half-Chola Indian woman from Sketch Eighth of “The Encantadas” (1854), stranded alone on Norfolk Isle after a tortoise-hunting trip goes awry.  Tracing the flickering relations between her statuesque portrayal as a tragic Indian/mulatto figure and the circumstances of nineteenth-century resource extraction surrounding her losses, I will discuss how Melville’s formal and thematic construction of the sketches represent an ecological network of elusive and tenuous relations that is shaped by nineteenth-century racialized understandings of biological and evolutionary development.  Highlighted by Darwin’s Journal of Researches (The Voyage of the Beagle) (1839, 1845) and his monograph on coral reef theory (1842), the Pacific’s islands are the historical and geological sites of an archipelagic form of extraction, erosion, endurance, and transformation that also become the setting of Melville’s rendering of a mutable and mixed Nature.  This paper is part of my book project, Rain bow: Partial Readings in American Regionalism, Race, and Nature, where I will place my reading of “The Encantadas” within a larger argument concerning the sketch aesthetic and technology of literary regionalism and its engagement with a racialized natural history.  Through critical versions of sketches like Melville’s we can see how the form engages with the difficulties of portraying a subject of nature, one that is neither as pure nor native as it would seem.