Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a placeas 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 isevinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery,two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale-ship was notwholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was dividedbetween him and an officer called the Specksynder. Literally thisword means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalentto Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain's authority wasrestricted 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 titleof Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained,but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simplyas senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain'smore inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conductof the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends,and since in the American Fishery he is not only an importantofficer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watcheson 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 manat sea, is this--the first lives aft, the last forward.Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the mates have theirquarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the Americanwhalers 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 interestprevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low, depend fortheir 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 lessrigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mindhow 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-deckare seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away.Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will seethe skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeurnot surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almostas 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 Pequodwas 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 removethe shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarter-deck;and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstancesconnected with events hereafter to be detailed, he addressedthem in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem,or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservantof the paramount forms and usages of the sea.

  Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behindthose forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself;incidentally making use of them for other and more privateends than they were legitimately intended to subserve.That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in agood degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that samesultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it cannever 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 Empirefrom the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that thisair can give, to those men who become famous more through theirinfinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert,than through their undoubted superiority over the dead levelof the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things whenextreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royalinstances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crownof geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeianherds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization.Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitablenessin 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 Nantucketgrimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperorsand Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor oldwhale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappingsand 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!