Chapter Chapter 33 · The Specksnyder.

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 Specksnyder. 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 Specksnyder 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!