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 archæologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
astronomical purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar
stair-like 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 ever 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 sea-coast, 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 whalemen, 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 cross-trees. 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 fleshly 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 convenient 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 lookouts 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 side-screen 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 Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is
greatly counterbalanced 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
whale-ships’ 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 Phædon 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 carking cares 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 Cranmer’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 mid-day, 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!