- description
- # SKETCH EIGHTH. NORFOLK ISLE AND THE CHOLA WIDOW.
## Overview
This is the eighth chapter of Herman Melville's collection of sketches, "The Piazza Tales." It was extracted from the file `the_piazza_tales.txt` and is part of the larger "Melville" collection. The chapter details a visit to Norfolk Isle, one of the Encantadas (Galapagos Islands), and recounts a peculiar encounter.
## Context
This chapter is situated within "The Piazza Tales," a collection of short stories by Herman Melville. It follows "Sketch Seventh. Charles’s Isle and the Dog-King." and precedes a chapter titled "The Encantadas." The narrative appears to be a personal account, with the author reflecting on the significance of Norfolk Isle as a place of "strangest trials of humanity" due to his own experiences there.
## Contents
The chapter begins with the author and his shipmates preparing to leave Norfolk Isle after a two-day hunt for tortoises. As they are getting underway, a seaman notices a small, fluttering object on the shore that others on board miss. This observation leads to the unfolding of a story, the details of which are not fully contained within this excerpt but are hinted at by the seaman's elevated vantage point and keen observation. The text includes several poetic epigraphs that set a somber and melancholic tone, referencing themes of loss, sorrow, and remembrance.
- description_generated_at
- 2026-01-30T07:58:24.395Z
- description_model
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- description_title
- SKETCH EIGHTH. NORFOLK ISLE AND THE CHOLA WIDOW.
- end_line
- 6992
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T07:57:25.492Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 6946
- text
- SKETCH EIGHTH.
NORFOLK ISLE AND THE CHOLA WIDOW.
“At last they in an island did espy
A seemly woman sitting by the shore,
That with great sorrow and sad agony
Seemed some great misfortune to deplore;
And loud to them for succor called evermore.”
“Black his eye as the midnight sky.
White his neck as the driven snow,
Red his cheek as the morning light;—
Cold he lies in the ground below.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed, ys
All under the cactus tree.”
“Each lonely scene shall thee restore,
For thee the tear be duly shed;
Belov’d till life can charm no more,
And mourned till Pity’s self be dead.”
Far to the northeast of Charles’s Isle, sequestered from the rest, lies
Norfolk Isle; and, however insignificant to most voyagers, to me,
through sympathy, that lone island has become a spot made sacred by the
strangest trials of humanity.
It was my first visit to the Encantadas. Two days had been spent ashore
in hunting tortoises. There was not time to capture many; so on the
third afternoon we loosed our sails. We were just in the act of getting
under way, the uprooted anchor yet suspended and invisibly swaying
beneath the wave, as the good ship gradually turned her heel to leave
the isle behind, when the seaman who heaved with me at the windlass
paused suddenly, and directed my attention to something moving on the
land, not along the beach, but somewhat back, fluttering from a height.
In view of the sequel of this little story, be it here narrated how it
came to pass, that an object which partly from its being so small was
quite lost to every other man on board, still caught the eye of my
handspike companion. The rest of the crew, myself included, merely
stood up to our spikes in heaving, whereas, unwontedly exhilarated, at
every turn of the ponderous windlass, my belted comrade leaped atop of
it, with might and main giving a downward, thewey, perpendicular heave,
his raised eye bent in cheery animation upon the slowly receding shore.
Being high lifted above all others was the reason he perceived the
object, otherwise unperceivable; and this elevation of his eye was
- title
- SKETCH EIGHTH.
NORFOLK ISLE AND THE CHOLA WIDOW.