.. < chapter xxxiii 24  THE SPECKSYNDER >


     Concerning the officers of the

whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic

peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class

of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the

whale-fleet.  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

.. <p 143 >

not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided

between him and an officer called the Specksynder.  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 Specksynder 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,

.. <p 144 >

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;

.. <p 145 >

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!

.. <p 145 >

