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1Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity
2on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other
3marine than the whale-fleet. The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced by the fact, that
4originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in
5the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this
6word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In those days, the captain's
7authority was restricted to the navigation and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting department
8and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the
9corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly abridged. At
10present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's more inferior subalterns.
11Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in
12the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on
13a whaling ground) the command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands,
14that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional
15superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal. Now, the grand distinction drawn between
16officer and man at sea, is this--the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen alike, the
17mates have their quarters with the captain; and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
18the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the captain's cabin, and sleep in a place
19indirectly communicating with it. Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest of all voyages
20now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of
21whom, high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck, together with their
22common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous
23discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may,
24in some primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are
25seldom materially relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see the
26skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost as
27much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth. And though of all men the
28moody captain of the Pequod was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage he
29ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere
30stepping upon the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with events
31hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise; yet
32even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea. Nor, perhaps, will it fail
33to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
34making use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to subserve. That certain
35sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same
36sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can
37never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and
38entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes
39of the Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become
40famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their
41undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme
42political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency.
43But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain;
44then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would
45depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in
46his art, as the one now alluded to. But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and
47shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
48whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall
49be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied
50air!
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