He maintained order through his group of vicious attack dogs, but was eventually banished by the colonists who instituted a "riotocracy" of escaped sailors that protected them from their former captains and "gloried in having no law but lawlessness.
Hunilla, a "chola" (mestizo) from Payta, Peru, had come to the island with her newlywed husband and her brother to hunt tortoises; the French captain who dropped them off promised to return for them, but never did.
[5] On November 2, the Acushnet and four other American whalers hunted the grounds around the Galápagos Islands together; in Sketch Fourth Melville exaggerated the number of ships, though the story itself is told from the perspective of the fictional Salvator R.
[6] Like all of the stories later included in The Piazza Tales, Melville wrote The Encantadas while in financial straits after the failure of his novels Moby-Dick and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities.
Putnam's invited him to contribute material in 1852; he began to write, but never finished, a story on the abandoned wife Agatha Hatch Robertson that year,[7][8] and submitted his famous work "Bartleby, the Scrivener" in 1853.
[1] The ten sketches of "The Encantadas" go back to Melville's whaling years, during which he visited the Galapagos Islands, supplemented with material from his reading in at least six books of Pacific voyages.
According to the editors of The Piazza Tales, reliance on personal experience seems most prominent in the first four sketches, yet even here Melville drew upon "a number of other writers", though he only named William Cowley.
Neither is the attribution at the end of the fifth sketch—where Cowley, Colnett, and Porter are mentioned—complete, for Melville borrowed from James Burney as well, probably from A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, published from 1803 to 1817.
[11] A month after the collection was published, Melville's old friend Richard Tobias Greene, on whom Toby in Typee was based, wrote him a letter expressing how the Encantadas sketches "had called up reminiscences of days gone by".
[12] The work was first published as "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" under the pseudoniem "Salvator R. Tarnmoor," in three installments in Putnam's Monthly Magazine for March, April, and May, 1854.
[16] For the Southern Literary Messenger the sketches were the product of the author's extraordinary imagination, which took the reader "into that 'wild, weird clime, out of space, out of time,' which is the scene of his earliest and most popular writings.