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Table of Contents
Chapter 33
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 ..
2 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, ..
3 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;
..
4 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!
..
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