The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the fact,that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago,the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain,but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder.Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however,in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days,the captain’s authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the vessel;while over the whale-hunting department and all its concerns,the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery,under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained,but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer;and as such, is but one of the captain’s more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless,as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends,and since in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat,but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his;therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands,that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast,and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them,familiarly regarded as their social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is this—the first lives aft,the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike,the mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too,in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the after part of the ship.That is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s cabin,and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all voyages now or ever made by man),the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom,high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck,together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work;though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally;yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may,in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least,of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed,many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy;nay, extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption;and though the only homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience;though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck;and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed,he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or _in terrorem_, or otherwise;yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages,as it were, he sometimes masked himself;incidentally making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve.That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested;through those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical,available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments,always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is,that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings;and leaves the highest honors that this air can give,to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert,than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them,that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when,as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain;then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor,will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing,ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in his art, as the one now alluded to.
But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess;and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings,I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore,all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab!what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!
CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.
It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread face from the cabin-scuttle,announces dinner to his lord and master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat,has just been taking an observation of the sun;and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallion-shaped tablet,reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg.From his complete inattention to the tidings,you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But presently,catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to the deck, and in an even,unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Starbuck,” disappears into the cabin.
When the last echo of his sultan’s step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir,has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude,takes a few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says,with some touch of pleasantness, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” and descends the scuttle.The second Emir lounges about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace,to see whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden,and with a rapid “Dinner, Mr. Flask,” follows after his predecessors.
But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for,tipping all sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes,he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk’s head;and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf,he goes down rollicking so far at least as he remains visible from the deck,reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music.But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and, then,independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.
It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of sea-usages,that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation,bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one,let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that same commander’s cabin,and straightway their inoffensive, not to say deprecatory and humble air towards him,as he sits at the head of the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this difference?A problem?Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar,not haughtily but courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur.But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private dinner-table of invited guests,that man’s unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time;that man’s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the greatest.Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Cæsar.It is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now,if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a ship-master, then, by inference,you will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.
Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sea-lion on the white coral beach,surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In his own proper turn,each officer waited to be served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man’s knife, as he carved the chief dish before him.I do not suppose that for the world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation,even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No!And when reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked,Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck’s plate towards him,the mate received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if,perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it noiselessly; and swallowed it,not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation banquet at Frankfort,where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors,so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence;and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb.What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below.And poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary family party.His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have been the drumsticks.For Flask to have presumed to help himself,this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree.Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless,never more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all,did Flask presume to help himself to butter.Whether he thought the owners of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless waters,butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas!was a butterless man!
Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask is the first man up. Consider!For hereby Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in point of time.Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even,who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite,and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir himself,he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day;for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private,that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer,from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less.For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer;but, how I wish I could fish a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle,as I used to when I was before the mast. There’s the fruits of promotion now;there’s the vanity of glory: there’s the insanity of life!Besides, if it were so that any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask’s official capacity,all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was to go aft at dinner-time,and get a peep at Flask through the cabin sky-light,sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.
Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod’s cabin.After their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival,the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward.And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees.They made a sort of temporary servants’ hall of the high and mighty cabin.
In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain’s table,was the entire care-free license and ease,the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooneers. While their masters,the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws,the harpooneers chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it.They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego,that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast,often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk,seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it,if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump,then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back,harpoon-wise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor,assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up bodily,and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand,began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward;the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse.And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab,and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages,Dough-Boy’s whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly,after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded,he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining,and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was over.
It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego,opposing his filed teeth to the Indian’s: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the floor,for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low carlines;at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin framework to shake,as when an African elephant goes passenger in a ship. But for all this,the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to say dainty.It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless,this noble savage fed strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air;and through his dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds.Not by beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal,barbaric smack of the lip in eating—an ugly sound enough—so much so,that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms.And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself,that his bones might be picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging round him in the pantry,by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets,for their lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner,they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives;that grating sound did not at all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy.How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one,must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas!Dough-Boy!hard fares the white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm,but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous, fable-mongering ears,all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.
But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived there; still,being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes,and just before sleeping-time, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains, who, as a set,rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship’s cabin belongs to them;and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that,in real truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than in it.For when they did enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house;turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin was no companionship;socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom,he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world,as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri.And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods,burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so,in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body,there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!
CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
It was during the more pleasant weather,that in due rotation with the other seamen my first mast-head came round.
In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port;even though she may have fifteen thousand miles, and more,to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. And if, after a three, four,or five years’ voyage she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her—say,an empty vial even—then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last;and not till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port,does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.
Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat,is a very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I take it,that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in all my researches,I find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless,by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either;yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board,in the dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore,we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians.And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers,is an assertion based upon the general belief among archæologists,that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes:a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices;whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs,those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars;even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight.In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times,who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit,hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle;in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads;who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet;but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who,though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight.There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded,some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below;whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too,stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules’ pillars,his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson,also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square;and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there;for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson,will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze;however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future,and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned.
It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head standers of the land with those of the sea;but that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy,the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,that in the early times of the whale fishery,ere ships were regularly launched in pursuit of the game,the people of that island erected lofty spars along the sea-coast,to which the look-outs ascended by means of nailed cleats,something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house.A few years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who,upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh the beach.But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the one proper mast-head,that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set;the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours.In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay,to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand,a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep,as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were,swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves.The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow;everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life,a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes;extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements;you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks;are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years’ voyage, as often happens,the sum of the various hours you spend at the mast-head would amount to several entire months.And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life,should be so sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness,or adapted to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach,or any other of those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves.Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t’ gallant-mast,where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t’ gallant cross-trees.Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull’s horns.To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat;but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body;for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it,nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter);so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope,or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body,and no more can you make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits,called _crow’s-nests_, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas.In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled “A Voyage among the Icebergs,in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;” in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented _crow’s-nest_ of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good craft. He called it the _Sleet’s crow’s-nest_, in honor of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet’s crow’s-nest is something like a large tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this crow’s-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him (also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks, and in the Glacier’s case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle deviations,” “azimuth compass observations,” and “approximate errors,” he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of his crow’s nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird’s nest within three or four perches of the pole.
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were;yet that disadvantage is greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float.For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely,resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard,take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at last mount to my ultimate destination.
Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard.With the problem of the universe revolving in me,how could I—being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all whale-ships’ standing orders, “Keep your weather eye open, and sing out every time.”