Chapter 35.00: CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.

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CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.
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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!