Chapter 37.00: CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.

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CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.
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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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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!