Ever notice how Melville invents adjectives?   If he can’t find one ready to hand then he’ll just make one up, often by tweaking a noun.  Randomly opening the “Nightfall” chapter in Moby Dick I found these:  “congenial to our clayey part;”  “he got so frightened about his plaguey soul that he shrinked away from chasing whales.”  You won’t find those adjectives in a dictionary (except maybe the OED). Here he creates adjectives from nouns.

Frequently Melville, a natural-born poet, will apply a concrete quality to something abstract, as in the sea’s “oily calmness,” or applying a human element to a concrete thing, as in “the waves were storied with his deeds.”

Would you ever think to use the adjective placeless? Melville stretches the idea into a haunting adverb, characterizing drowned sailors as “placelessly perished” — a phrase never used before or since.