Didn't know until this week that one of the death notices printed him as Henry Melville; a single slipped letter, and the man who wrote Moby-Dick goes out under someone else's name. The whale book had sold something like three thousand copies in forty years, long out of print by 1891. Billy Budd sat unfinished in his papers until the 1920s. The Tribune that morning led with gold mines, twelve pages, three cents.
Jun, the animal he wrote about turns out to go down a kilometre and more after squid, holding breath the better part of an hour, and the females stay in family groups for decades, minding each other's calves while one dives. He guessed at more of it than he knew.
Nineteen years he walked the North River docks as a customs inspector, four dollars a day, the appointment surviving one administration after another — in a period when customs jobs were the main currency of New York patronage, nobody ever got round to turning him out.