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This article endeavors to unravel the various strands or strata of time in Herman Melville’s novella, “The Encantadas,” and uncover the manifold layers of the text and its intertextual interplay. Melville re-envisioned the American Revolution in the light of Deep Time but he also called into question Darwin’s theory of evolution by disrupting its underlying time scheme. In particular, the text unsettles the assumed “origin” of species by redefining it as a mere side-effect of social struggles displaced and disguised back in time as “struggle for life” in a would-be state of nature; more largely, it highlights a plurality of disjointed times within the unifying course of so-called “evolution.”