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In the 1920s, the first generation of professional anthropologists began to enter the Pacific to conduct fieldwork in Polynesia. Peculiarly, they readily turned to Herman Melville as an ethnographic informant while writing up their findings. In the years before the so-called “Melville Revival” had accelerated into high gear, Melville’s early travelogues were indistinguishable from his nineteenth-century contemporaries, consumed by a readership eager to learn about the Pacific and its people. As Melville’s literary renown has grown, his detour as an ethnographer has garnered little attention from literary historians. I argue that if anthropologists have found some utility in Melville’s literary corpus, the inverse must also be true. By properly situating Melville as an ethnographic informant, we can uncover his literary indebtedness to the Pacific worlds he traversed at the outset of his career as author. This can provide insight into canonical works like Moby-Dick, bookended as it is by Ishmael’s friendship with the Pacific Islander Queequeg.