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Table of Contents
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 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
..
2 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 ..
3 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 ..
4 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 ..
5 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 ..
6 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 ..
7 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! ..
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