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 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!
