This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,

the show where America is the star and the American people,

coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas.

Herman Melville's life reads just like his books, full of adventure, color, and penetrating genius.

William Faulkner confessed he wished he'd written Melville's Moby Dick.

But the highest dean he commands today is far from the reality he experienced during his lifetime.

Today we're going to go on an adventure with a man who is now considered America's Shakespeare.

Let's take a listen.

On June 23rd, 1842, an American whaling ship dropped anchor 2,300 miles southeast of Hawaii in the Marquesas

islands in French Polynesia.

Two of its young sailors, sick of conditions on board, quietly jumped ship and melted into the forest.

Without maps or compass, Herman Melville and his friend Toby Green fought their way through the jungle, uncertain of their destination.

Here's Melville from his first book, Taipei.

On we toiled, the perspiration starting from our bodies in floods.

Our limbs torn and lacerated with the splintered fragments of the broken canes,

until we had proceeded perhaps as far as the middle of the break.

I sunk down for a moment with a sort of dogged apathy,

from which I was aroused by Toby, who had

devised a plan to free us from the net in which we had become entangled. Melville and Toby had, in fact,

fallen into the hands of the Taipei natives. The Taipei's placed the young Americans under

...