Pursuing the Whale from Quarantine, part 2

Before moving on to the actual reading assignment (I know, I know), there's one more chapter I have to talk about. It's one of my favorite chapters in Moby Dick: Chapter 35, "The Mast-Head."

But first we have two two short and funny chapters on how the men of the Pequod eat. In short, the officers (Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask) eat in dead silence under the grim and awful Ahab, then the table is cleared and reset for the pagan harpooners, who smack noisily and lustily through their meals, teasing poor "trembling Dough-Boy" (the steward) that they might eat him next. "How could he forget that in his Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some murderous, convivial indiscretions." (Chapter 34). We also learn the charming little detail that Queequeg has filed teeth. Three guesses why.

Queequeg. Note the teeth.
Illustration by Chris Goodwin, eselkunst on Flikr

Then comes the beauty and power of...

Chapter 35: The Mast-Head

As he will often do, Ishmael describes some common aspect of whaling, but sees a deeper meaning in it. This chapter it's watching for whales from the mast-head. In a whaling ship, he tells us, they do not have crow's nests, but just "two thin parallel sticks ... called the t'gallant cross-trees" (Chapter 35). Whalemen on watch duty stand up there for two hours at a time and are supposed to "sing out" when they spot a whale.

Ishmael beautifully describes the experience of standing watch on a calm tropical day:

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. (Chapter 35)

You are, quite literally, above it all. Must be nice.

But more than just a chance to get away from all the cares of the world for two hours, mast-head watching represents something larger for Ishmael. We human beings are a mast-head watching species, he says. From the beginning of human history, we have sent people to high places to try to see what's coming. The builders of pyramids and the builders of Babel were "old astronomers ... wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars" as a way to foresee the future. The desert father who lived an ascetic life atop his stone pillar, he too was a "dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not 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" in his attempt to understand the divine will.

Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder and Younger, two of several early Christian ascetics lived on top of small stone columns as a way to mortify the flesh.

Before you laugh at an ancient practice that probably looks absurd to us now, Ishmael reminds us that modern society too sends men up stone pillars, but dead men themselves made of stone (that is, statues), even though "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." We too look up in piety and admiration, but our saints do not answer.

The Washington Monument in Baltmore.
Ahoy up there, George, tell us what you see!

We want to see what's coming. We want to perceive the divine plan. We want to understand how it all fits together. That desire is just part of being human. We all feel it, but some feel it more strongly than others. Ishmael puts himself in that category, and frankly admits he is one of those "dreamy meditative" young men who are too distracted by their musings. ("Straight facts." --E. Brophy). I love the power and beauty of Melville's prose here, so I'll just quote it at length:

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 [a work of Plato's philosophy] instead of Bowditch [author of The New American Practical Navigator] 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.

...“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!

There, my friends, is the beauty and the danger of philosophy!

(And if you're feeling especially philosophical yourself, you might notice how that passage comments on Transcendentalism. Ishmael loves and feels that sense of being spiritually connected with the soul of the world as he ponders truths that always seem just outside his grasp, but ends with a reminder that we are in fact individual beings, and we forget that at our very individual peril.)