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
stairlike 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 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 even 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 seacoast, 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 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 whalesmen, 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 crosstrees. 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 of its fleshy 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 convenience 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 look-outs of a Greenland
whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
the fireside 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 sidescreen 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
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 Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
greatly counter-balanced 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 at such a thought-engendering
altitude—how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all
whaleships' 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 corking care 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 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 Crammer'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 midday, 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!