Rio Janeiro fountain and its piebald parliament

[Stephen]

Some thoughts I want to share with the group before we move on. I have a couple excerpts from CM ch 2 that I think link together thematically. Following are my responses/insights.

Excerpt from CM ch 2 

Though her voyage of twelve hundred miles extends from apple to orange, from clime to clime, yet, like any small ferry-boat, to right and left, at every landing, the huge Fidèle still receives additional passengers in exchange for those that disembark; so that, though always full of strangers, she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange; like Rio Janeiro fountain, fed from the Cocovarde mountains, which is ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with the same strange particle in every part. 
... 
In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man. As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb. A Tartar-like picturesqueness; a sort of pagan abandonment and assurance. Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide.

 

First, I offer an image of the fountain illustrated in Vue de la Place du Palais, à Rio de Janeiro, a color plate found at NYPL from a book published about 1835. If you enlarge the image via the link provided, you may detect a social structure to the city-scape. Surrounding the fountain, we find a group of slaves, many of whom will spend their entire day transporting water from the fountain to their masters' homes. To the  left, right, and front we find sailors who climb the stairways from the harbor beach to fill their casks at the fountain. A line of soldiers on the left faces the palace. A group of fashionable citizens stand about while government officials arrive or depart in their fancy carriages. Black slaves are found in every corner of the square.

In the extract above, Melville compares passengers to water particles. Even if we haven't visited Rio de Janeiro harbor, we understand the nature of cities and fountains, The water particles are distributed among all kinds of "pilgrims" travelling to the fountain in a continuous stream of mingled humans, white, brown, and black.

http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-7b6d-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

This leads us to Melville's use of the term "piebald parliament." The fountain at the palace encircled by its patrons aptly fit this description. Note that the derogatory term "piebald" is a synonym for "motley", each expressive of the garb of a harlequin or fool. This matches as well the derogatory use of"Tartar-like" and "pagan abandonment" for this "cosmopolitan and confident tide".

At this point in the book, I imagine Melville wanted to work in "The River" fragment. If you re-read this fragment, consider that confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi may stand for the entrance to slave territory. Traveling southward from Galena, a riverboat passage enters Missouri territory on its starboard not long after it passes the rapids at Fort Madison Iowa, a few miles above Hannibal. The Missouri was entirely within slave territory from Kansas City to St. Louis.

[Ffrangcon Lewis]

Dear Stephen,

                      Many thanks for this informative post, and for the striking and significant illustration.  Melville as a sailor had called at Rio, hadn't he?

Ffrangcon Lewis

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[Hardeman]

Stephen,

Your Aristotle golden mean linkage to litotes was superb. I am wondering why you judged  "piebald" as a "derogatory term."  It is distinguished term for horses with random black and white patterns that many find pleasing. To me Melville use piebald to describe the black and white congress of pilgrims associated with Cloots and all who believe in the universal nature of the mankind. It may be a wishful ideal and its implementation during the French Revolution a failure,  I am convinced that Melville proclaimed the Piebald equality of the Rights of Man from "Queequeg [as] George Washington cannibalistically developed” to the comparison of the Billy Budd to an ideal black sailor.,

 I much prefer your ".all kinds of "pilgrims" travelling to the fountain in a continuous stream of mingled humans, white, brown, and black".as I also think Melville was open minded enough about "pagan abandonment" to accept them and their Tartar counterparts to come before the bar as acceptable human beings.

It is also worth noting that Cloots died nobly proclaiming his confidence in the people and the future of mankind. His death not unlike Billy Budd's was carried out by his friends, piebald pilgrims  all.

Hardeman

[Stephen Hoy]

Thank you for your kind words and cogent responses. 

Ffrangcon: the Acushnet stopped at Rio in 1841 and the United States harbored there midyear 1844. White Jacket offers quite a few words about the latter visit.

Hardeman: I agree with you in substance. In CM, the author offers a puzzle of perspective for the reader. In this chapter, the narrator's tone is wittily derogatory about the indiscriminate assembly of contrasted opposites aboard the Fidele, even as the author employs irony to convey a message of unity to the discriminating reader. (This gives a partial answer to Phil's earlier question about the narrative voice.)

Note that "piebald parliament" is not an original turn of phrase. The term "piebald" in the sense of a collection of ill-matched political opposites can be found in several mid-19th c publications. William Nugent Glascock used the term in his Naval Sketch-book (1826) which HM ,the promiscuous reader, likely encountered. Carlyle uses the term as well in a caustic essay a decade later (1867).

[Phil Walsh]

When I first read the "Rio Janeiro fountain" passage, I wondered to myself if Melville was alluding to a well-known landmark that most of his readers would be aware of, or if the reference was more obscure. Stephen's observations suggest to me that maybe it isn't so much the hydraulics of the fountain that interest Melville as its role as a gathering place. Interesting.

And speaking of 'moving on', I'm going to be otherwise-occupied for the next several weeks, and probably won't get back to the Confidence Man until early October.