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 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,
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; 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!
