Liverpool is a hinge in the book’s maritime and personal histories: it recalls Herman Melville’s first sea voyage, becomes the setting for his last meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and figures in the route by which Philip Hoare’s Irish great-grandfather left Ireland. The city’s docks join separate passages through time, but Melville’s return also ends in separation: after their meeting, the two writers never saw one another again.

A Port Recalled

Liverpool first enters Melville’s story through memory. When he returned there years after his first voyage, the city carried the past of that departure into the present. He lodged at the White Bear on Dale Street and set out in the rain to find Hawthorne, whose address had gone out of date. The search failed; the following morning, Melville went to the consulate and found his friend there. The failed walk and the eventual meeting give Liverpool a double role: it is both a city of remembered beginnings and the place where an old friendship receives one last encounter.

The significance of that maritime memory extends beyond Melville. In the book’s larger account, the ocean remains wild and difficult to know even as cities and civilizations rise beside it. Liverpool’s port makes that contrast tangible: the docks belong to an inhabited, worked city, yet they are also a point of passage toward the sea. The book describes the ocean as enduringly unfathomable and as a wilderness reaching around the globe. Against that scale, the city’s importance lies not in mastering the water but in connecting lives to routes across it.

Melville and Hawthorne

At the time of the meeting, Hawthorne had spent four years as American consul in Liverpool and lived with his family in nearby Southport. He was in his fifties and balding. Melville, in Hawthorne’s account, looked a little paler and perhaps sadder. Hawthorne attributed his condition to literary labor pursued without much success and to a troubled state of mind; he also understood the journey as a need to get out into the world after years of work and domestic life, following Melville’s adventurous youth.

The two men took the afternoon train to Southport, then a faded resort whose former splendour had receded. The next day, they walked along the beach in the wind before sitting in a hollow among the dunes to smoke cigars. There, Melville spoke about Providence, futurity, and what lies beyond human knowledge. He said he had largely made up his mind to be annihilated, expressing a deathward outlook rather than confidence in an afterlife. Hawthorne’s journal records his sense that Melville could neither believe nor find comfort in disbelief. He nevertheless judged Melville’s nature noble and reverential, and considered him more worthy of immortality than most people.

Hawthorne’s response gives the meeting its emotional weight. His praise reads as a recognition of the faith Melville had placed in him, and as a possible reckoning with what he had not done for his friend. The account does not suggest that Hawthorne could have rescued Melville from his distress; instead, it leaves their conversation poised between mutual regard and the limits of what friendship can change. Liverpool and nearby Southport thus mark an intimate encounter, not a reconciliation that resolves Melville’s uncertainty.

Departure and Separation

A few days after the beach walk, Melville sailed from Liverpool for the Holy Land. He left his trunk at Hawthorne’s consulate and took only a carpet-bag with him. That practical detail makes the departure strikingly spare: the consulate keeps what he does not carry, while the voyage takes him away from the friend he has just seen. The meeting was their last. Liverpool therefore holds both reunion and final separation within a few days, its port turning conversation into departure without offering a return to the relationship as it had been.

The contrast also sharpens the book’s recurrent attention to the boundary between human knowledge and the sea’s larger world. Melville and Hawthorne had spoken of matters beyond human ken on the shore; Melville then left by ship. The narrative does not claim that the voyage answered the questions raised in their conversation. Rather, departure follows uncertainty, and the sea remains a route outward rather than a promise of resolution.

Family Routes Through the Docks

Liverpool belongs to a different history in Hoare’s family account. His great-grandfather Patrick James Moore, the son of a Dublin blacksmith, joined the exodus from Ireland and passed through the same Liverpool docks that Melville had explored. By 1882 he had arrived in Whitby with his wife, Sarah, a housemaid from Faversham. The juxtaposition places a family migration beside the literary voyager’s passage: the same docks connect an Irish emigrant’s movement toward a new life with Melville’s remembered maritime travels.

The book also notes that one of Melville’s shipmates on the St Lawrence was an Irishman named Thomas Moore. This detail does not establish a family connection between Thomas and Patrick James Moore; its force is instead in the recurrence of Irish names and migration routes within the maritime record. Liverpool gathers these histories without making them identical. For Melville it is a place of return and farewell; for Hoare’s family it is a threshold crossed on the way from Ireland to England. In both accounts, the docks register how the sea’s routes carry individual lives into wider histories.