Herman Melville's multiculturalism has become a critical focus since the 1960s. Ahead of critics, African American novelists such as Wright and Ellison had perceived Melville's social consciousness in the 1940s. This essay explores the origin of Melville's impact on the African American mind in his autobiographical novel, Redburn (1849). In contrast to romantic portrayals of Liverpool in traditional travelogues, Melville renders the city with dismal realism. Redburn's voyage is overshadowed by the presence of a sailor who had served for Portuguese slavers. Entering port, Redburn notices a slave ship loaded with gold ore from the Coast of Guinea. Cotton ships from the American South also frequent the dock. He sees people starving to death in an alley lined with cotton warehouses, which exemplify the storage of profit generated by American slavery and British mercantilism. Facing the statuary of Lord Nelson in front of the Merchants' Exchange, Redburn is drawn to four naked figures in chain around the pedestal, which are emblematic of Nelson's victory in the Battle of Trafalgar. The manacled captives remind Redburn of African slaves in the market-place of Virginia and Carolina. Melville's perspective on the city 
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thus undermines the monumental history of imperialism on both shores of the Atlantic. The ship bound homeward to New York carries innumerable impoverished Irish immigrants. Melville's allusion to 18th-century slave narratives evokes the Middle Passage, which was beyond comparison with the immigrants' voyage to the American Dream. Redburn remarks in the home port : 'Down goes our old anchor, fathoms down into the free and independent Yankee mud.' This statement is not self-content nationalism, but a declaration of the need for ceaseless transformation of the self into the ideal. With the hero's rigorous will to behold 'the real sight of this world,' Melville’s travelogue confronts the modern era from its multiracial standpoint.