🎤019 Moby Full Text Ch35

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CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head. Footnotes

CHAPTER 35. 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-poles¹ 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 expatiate² 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 truck³ was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board,⁴ 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,⁵ 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,⁶ 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;⁷ 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,⁸ stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe,⁹ Louis Blanc,¹⁰ or Louis the Devil.¹¹ Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore,¹² and like one of Hercules’ pillars,¹³ 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;¹⁴ 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 shoals¹⁵ 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,¹⁶ 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 Zealand¹⁷, 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.¹⁸ 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; extras¹⁹ 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,²⁰ 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,²¹ 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 tabernacle²², 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,²³ 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;²⁴ 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,²⁵ 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;²⁶ 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,” “azimuth²⁷ 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,²⁸ 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 pole²⁹.

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,³⁰ 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 universe³¹ 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;³² given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phædon³³ instead of Bowditch³⁴ 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,³⁵ and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions³⁶ at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking³⁷ cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. ==Childe Harold³⁸ 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;³⁹ 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’s⁴⁰ 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 vortices⁴¹ 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!⁴²

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
     [Act I, Scene II

• Captain Sleet: One of Melville’s nicknames for William Scoresby, Jr. (1789-1857), son of the highly successful Arctic whaleman William Scoresby, Sr., and author of one of Melville’s principal whaling sources, An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery (1820).William Junior began serving under his father at age ten, and his Account of the Greenland or right whale “fishery” combines scientific detail, industry practice, and personal experience, which sometimes included his father William Senior’s exploits. William Junior’s “fireside narrative,” as Melville facetiously puts it, is thorough in detail and learned perhaps to a fault. Ishmael’s faux title for Scoresby’s book, with its “incidental” rambling on “Lost Icelandic Colonies,” refers to Scoresby’s digression on the same topic in Vol. 1, ch. 4, Sect. 5, p. 263.
• Melville’s comic paraphrase of Scoresby’s description of his father’s crow’s-nest invention (vol. 2, ch. 4, 202-205) is not a parody, satire, or mockery (as Vincent urges, 130-135) but a good-humored, tongue-in-cheek tweaking of Scoresby’s over-attention to what is irrelevant or “charmingly circumstantial.” (See, for instance, “Arctic snow crystals” in Ch. 56.) Melville integrates direct quotes — “summit of the mast” and “resistance of the water” — into his paraphrase, which has Junior claiming his father’s invention as his own. Melville cannot resist adding amenities to the Scoresby invention by turning the top mast shelter for freezing lookouts into a cozy gentleman’s resort, equipped with umbrellas and a hip flask for warming the inner self. Equally amusing is the image of Scoresby “popping off” a few narwhals from his high perch in reference to Scoresby’s more solemn recording of the practice in a footnote. Humor aside, Melville maintains his “love [for] the brave, the honest, and learned Captain.” For Melville’s comic nicknames, see “Fogo Von Slack” (Ch. 92) and “Dr. Snodhead” (Ch. 102). For Scoresby as a source, see the entry for him in “Extracts.” See also additional citations in Chs. 32, 41, 55, 56, and 103. (from Melville Electronic Library.Org Back to Contents

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Skysail-poles are the highest segment of each mast supporting the sky-sails. These sails are only raised during good weather. ↩

2. write about to figure out an issue ↩

3. truck - here a small piece circle of wood placed at the top of a mast with holes for running rigging lines through. ↩

4. gone by the board: Generally in reference to an object (not person) that has fallen overboard, but here it means “collapsed.” ↩

5. While the pyramids were often aligned with astronomical objects, they were all tombs, not observatories. If you want to see a debunking of the latest conspiracy theory about the pyramids (provided F-bombs don’t annoy you), please see MiniMinuteman’s April 13, 2025 video. ↩

6. Saint Stylites: Simeon Stylites (c. 390-459 C.E.) who apparently lived for 37 years atop a pillar near Aleppo, Syria. (Stylites means “pillar”) How high was his pillar? I’m glad you asked! The first wasn’t tall enough at four meters; his final pillar was a meter square and 15 meters tall. ↩

7. tackle - rope and pulley system - “block and tackle” ↩

8. The column of Vendome: a statue of Napoleon stands at the top of a column in the Place Vendôme in Paris. Torn down in 1871 by the Paris Commune, then re-erected in 1874. ↩

9. Louis Philippe: the last king to rule France, ousted in the Revolution of 1848 ↩

10. Louis Blanc: a radical politician in the Revolution of 1848 ↩

11. Louis the Devil: Louis Napoleon a Bonaparte who returned to France from exile after the Revolution of 1848. ↩

12. Main-mast in Baltimore: the Baltimore, Maryland Washington Monument is a statue of George Washington on a pillar. Completed in 1829, it is 178 feet tall. ↩

13. Hercules’ pillars: the rocky cliffs on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Spain from Northern Africa ↩

14. Admiral Nelson sits atop a 169 feet tall column. It was finished in 1843. (interestingly, they thought it was 183 feet tall until they re-measured in 2006). ↩

15. Shoals: sandbars ↩

16. Obed Macy was a real guy who really did write a history of Nantucket. However, the title might be longer than the Island is longitudinally: The History of Nantucket: Being a Compendious Account of the First Settlement of the Island by the English, Together with the Rise and Progress of the Whale Fishery, and Other Historical Facts Relative to Said Island and Its Inhabitants (1835). The following anecdote concerning the sighting of whales from shore is a paraphrase of Macy’s description: “To enable them to discover whales at a considerable distance from the land, a large spar was erected, and cleats fixed to them, by which the whalemen could climb to the top, and there keep a good look out for their game” (Macy, 31, our emphasis). ↩

17. Bay whalemen of New Zealand: New Zealand had several bay-whaling stations, where whales killed close to shore were processed. ↩

18. The Colossus at Rhodes was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, build in the early 3rd century B.C.E, then destroyed by earthquake in 226 B.C.E.. About 100 feet high it straddled the harbor according to medieval interpretation of ancient texts. It did not. The earthquake would have caused the debris to shut down the harbor yet remnants of the statue were visible ON LAND for another 800 after the earthquake (thus, Ozymandias). Shakespeare, too, believed the old story (see Julius Caesar quote below) ↩

19. gazettes, extras: Melville’s equivaalent of push-news notifications ↩

20. Inhabitiveness: a love of home and country. This is a term from the discredited science of phrenology, which thought to determine psychological traits based on the shape of the patient’s skull. ↩

21. Top-Gallant mast - here’s a video of an expert talking you through watching a t’gallant mast being set in place). ↩

22. fleshly tabernacle: For this sense of tabernacle, see 2 Peter 1.13–14. As 1 Corinthians 6.19 explains, “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you.” ↩

23. Captain Sleet: this is believed to be a humorous pseudonym for the explorer Scoresby. In fact, Scoresby attributed the invention of the crow’s nest to his father, not himself. (See extensive note below.) ↩

24. Tierce or pipe: 40- and 120-gallon wine casks, respectively. The crow’s nest is the small “basket” at the top of the mast into which a lookout is posted—not dissimilar to a wine cask. ↩

25. megaphone ↩

26. Local attraction: the effect of the iron in the ship itself upon its compass; Binnacle magnets: magnets affixed to the ship’s main compass to counteract the magnetic effect of iron in the ship. THIS IS A JOKE! It’s ridiculous b/c every ship at the time used a Binnacle, they were well-aware of where iron was in the ship-building process, and the joke becomes clear when he says:  that on Sleet’s ship’s, the deviations may be due “to there having been so many broken-down blacksmiths among her crew.” ↩

27. Azimuth: the horizontal direction of a compass bearing ↩

28. Case-bottle: a bottle that is four-sided, for storing in a carrying case ↩

29. perches of the pole: a perch (also called a pole) is 5.5 yards, but perches are also birds’ resting places; hence a triple pun. ↩

30. Yard: a long, tapering pole used to spread the top of a square sail ↩

31. The problem of the universe: the depressed mood that caused Ishmael to take to the sea in the first place ↩

32. lean brow and hollow eye: this parody of a romantic and melancholy youth is reminiscent of satirical responses to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of himself as a “transparent eyeball” in Nature, including Christopher Pearse Cranch’s depiction of an eyeball wearing trousers. ↩

33. Phædon (or “Phædo”) is a dialogue of Plato’s on the immortality of the soul. ↩

34. Bowditch: the contents of The New American Practical Navigator by Nathaniel Bowditch, first published in 1802 and (apparently) still used today as a main guide for ocean navigation on U.S. ships ↩

35. Ten Wakes around the world = 10 circumnavigations. The wake is the ship’s trail in the water. ↩

36. Monitions: warnings ↩

37. Carking: distressing, worrying ↩

38. Childe Harold: the wandering, melancholy hero of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a long (autobiographical-ish) poem written by George Gordon, Lord Byron, and published between 1812 and 1818. Childe Harold was a world-weary traveler looking for adventure in exotic lands. But while Byron did write, “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand FLEETS sweep over thee in vain,” it was from “The Dark, Blue Sea”, AND “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. But the line “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!” presages a line of Moby Dick in Chapter 135 ↩

39. Their vision is imperfect: in Plato’s allegory of the cave teaches that we see only part of the truth, but cannot perceive that we only see part. This lines up with Ishmael who later talks about how it is impossible to portray a whale accurately, because so much cannot be perceived from above the water’s surface. And no matter how much Ishmael sees and describes whales, they remain unintelligible to him. Plato was also a lover of “archetypes” which jibes with Melville ↩

40. Cranmer is INCORRECT. It was English religious reformer John Wycliffe (mid-1320s-1384), a critic of the Catholic Church. After he died of stroke, the pope had his body exhumed and burned, and the ashes thrown into a river all because he preached that God’s omniscience and omnipotent implied that He was also present in everything, i.e., pantheism. Cranmer was one of the “Oxford Martyrs” burned by Queen Mary I in 1556. ↩

41. Descartian vortices: masses of whirling liquid or air, which the philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650), theorized the universe was made of ↩

42. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!: Pantheism, a view held by thinkers including Plato, Spinoza, and Emerson, is the belief that a universal spirit (or God) suffuses all existence. But here Ishmael warns that integration with the whole can also mean loss of The Self. ↩