Including an audio window as well as gracefully arranged text are two facets of this thoughtful curatorship, discovered as I searched for the original—or something more ancient fallen into his hand...

This poem was written in the last generation of The Age of Sail, an important juncture at which to consider the European consciousness, as, at that time, the rest of the Old World and all of the new was helpless, at Europe's knee. Latin America would only gain independence with the aid of British naval officers such as Corcoran. Britain would soon enslave a quarter of humanity in the Opium Wars and young America would force introspective Japan to open its doors to the hyper-materialistic world, even as Melville sought the sea to escape its clutches and found it monstrously there.

I have found this rime to be a useful meditation, read a verse or two at a time, between transitioning between writing on widely separated subjects and back again, a handy time-trance device.

How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country...