Call me Ishmael. Years ago, finding myself poor and aimless on land, I decided to sail and view the watery world. This is my method for curing melancholy and regulating my blood. Whenever my mouth grows grim, or my soul feels like a damp, drizzly November, I know it is time to leave. The urge becomes undeniable when I pause before coffin before warehouses, trail behind funerals, or feel a manic impulse to knock hats off in the street. Going to sea is my alternative to suicide. While Cato died on his sword with a flourish, I quietly board a ship. This impulse is not unique; almost all men feel a magnetic pull toward the ocean.
When the officers withdraw, the harpooneers claim their places. What a transformation! The mates ate in muffled dread; these men feast with clamorous appetite. Queequeg and Tashtego devour great slabs of beef with a report like gunfire. They sharpen their knives on whetstones carried for their lances, the grating sound filling the cabin. Daggoo, seated on the floor, shakes the framework with every motion. The harried steward must scramble to satisfy them. Hesitation earns a fork hurled at his back; one night Daggoo hoists him aloft while Tashtego threatens his scalp. Dough-Boy, that timid son of a ruined baker, retreats to his pantry to tremble until the meal ends and the warriors depart, their bones jingling like scimitars.
Yet cabin life offers little to anyone. The mates and harpooneers live chiefly in the open air, for Ahab grants no companionship. He remains a creature apart, nominally counted among Christians but still an alien. His soul withdraws into the hollow trunk of his body like some ancient bear in winter quarters, sucking the sullen paws of its own gloom.
From the enclosed darkness of the captain’s table, where Ahab sat apart in terrible sovereignty, we move now to the highest point of the ship, where common sailors kept their solitary vigil. If the cabin table revealed the vertical hierarchy of command in its most intimate form—the captain elevated above all others even in the act of eating—then the mast-head represents the vertical dimension of labor and watchfulness that defined the daily existence of the crew. Below, Ahab brood; aloft, the sailor dreams. The Pequod’s social order arranged men in their stations, but the mast-head offered a strange democracy of solitude, where the lowliest hand might sit as a kind of king above the world, though this elevation carried its own dangers—the philosophical vertigo that could loosen a man’s soul from its earthly moorings and send him plummeting into the sea.
The mast-head watch stands as one of the oldest posts in human history. Ishmael traces its lineage to Egyptian astronomers who climbed pyramidal stairs to scan for new stars, and to Saint Simeon Stylites, that dauntless hermit who spent his final decades atop a desert pillar, hoisting his food by rope until death claimed him at his station. Modern land-based standers cut a poorer figure—Napoleon frozen in bronze atop the Vendôme column, Washington towering on his Baltimore monument, Nelson astride his gun-metal capstan in Trafalgar Square. These stone and metal men endure the elements but cannot answer a single hail from below, however desperately their counsel might be invoked.
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