Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/BOOKS/Novels/H.Melville/moby.33

Text File | 1994-05-27 | 5.8 KB | 87 lines

.. < 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 >