Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/BOOKS/Novels/H.Melville/moby.35

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.. < chapter xxxv 2  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 archaeologists, 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
.. <p 152 >
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
.. <p 153 >
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
whalemen, 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
.. <p 154 >
of its fleshly 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
lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of
the frozen seas.  In the fire-side 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
.. <p 155 >
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
Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced 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
.. <p 156 >
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.  And let me in this place movingly admonish
you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket!  Beware of enlisting in your vigilant
fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable
meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the phaedon instead of Bowditch
in his head.  Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before
they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten
wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.  Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded.  For nowadays, the whale-fishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young
men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar
and blubber.  Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the
mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase
ejaculates: -- Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!  Ten thousand
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.  Very often do the captains of such
ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them
with not feeling sufficient interest in the voyage; half-hinting that they
are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret
souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise.  But all in vain; those
young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve?  They have left
their opera-glasses at home.  Why, thou monkey, said a harpooneer to one of
these lads, we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not
raised a whale yet.  Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up
here.  Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant,
unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of
waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic
.. <p 157 >
ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul,
pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding,
beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some
undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that
only people the soul by continually flitting through it.  In this enchanted
mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time
and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a
part of every shore the round globe over.  There is no life in thee, now,
except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed
from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God.  But while this
sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold
at all; and your identity comes back in horror.  Over Descartian vortices you
hover.  And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one
half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer
sea, no more to rise for ever.  Heed it well, ye Pantheists!
.. <p 157 >