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 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 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!