Cervantes to Melville, Parnassus to Nantucket

The Battle of Lepanto by H. Letter (?), late 16th century; National Maritime Museum, London.

I previously wrote about Miguel de Cervantes' participation in the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, which pit an allied European navy against the Ottoman fleet in the waters outside Nafpaktos, Greece. Though ill that day, Cervantes led a boat of men into the battle, for which he was repaid with three bullet wounds, including one that rendered his left hand lame.

Recently I unexpectedly ran into Cervantes so far from his Spanish shores and deluded comic heroes. In Moby Dick, as Ahab's Pequod leaves the whaling port at Nantucket, Herman Melville extols the ideal man in every man, that divine spark which gives rise to the dignity of the democratic state. And there amongst the men raised aloft by the "great democratic God," I was surprised to read, is Cervantes and a reference to his injuries.

Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commoners; bear me out in it, O God! (Chapter 26)

Cervantes himself wrote about his wounds in his 1614 work Viaje del Parnaso - "Voyage to Parnassus," referring to the mountain above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and the home of the poetic Muses. Dressed shabbily on the road to Parnassus, Cervantes meets Mercury who addresses him as "Adan de los poetas." And Mercury notices his "stumped and paupered arm."

Que, en fin, has respondido a ser soldado
antiguo y valeroso, cual lo muestra
la mano de que estás estropeado.
Bien sé que en la naval dura palestra
perdiste el movimiento de la mano
izquierda, para gloria de la diestra.

Thine is the answer of a soldier true,
Of antique glory, testified aright
To all by that maimed hand which now I view:
I know that, in the naval bloody fight,
Thy left hand shattered lost the active power
It once possessed, for the glory of the right! (Capitulo I, 211-215; trans. J.Y. Gibson)

Cervantes at Nafpaktos reaching forth his right hand.