Southern Seas Solitude
While southern whale-fishers lack the crow’s-nest comfort of Arctic whalers, the narrator suggests this disadvantage is offset by the serenity of tropical seas. He describes his leisurely ascent up the rigging, pausing in the top to chat with Queequeg, then climbing further to rest his leg over the topsail yard for a preliminary survey before reaching his ultimate destination at the mast-head.
The Dreamy Lookout
The narrator makes a frank admission: he kept “but sorry guard” at the mast-head. With “the problem of the universe revolving” in his mind at such a thought-engendering altitude, he could not take seriously the standing orders to watch for whales. He reflects on how the dreamy young philosophers often found aboard whaling ships become lost in reverie, merging with the infinite sea. They begin to see the ocean as “the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature.” Strange fins and gliding forms become “the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.” In this enchanted state, one’s spirit “ebbs away to whence it came” and becomes “diffused through time and space,” like Cranmer’s “sprinkled Pantheistic ashes.”
Warning to Ship-Owners
The narrator admonishes Nantucket ship-owners to beware of enlisting “any lad with lean brow and hollow eye” given to unseasonable meditativeness—those who carry Plato’s philosophy rather than practical navigation (Bowditch’s manual) in their heads. These “sunken-eyed young Platonists” will tow the ship “ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer.” The narrator observes that the whale-fishery has become “an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men” seeking sentiment “in tar and blubber.” These Childe Harold-like figures perch upon mast-heads and ejaculate romantic poetry about the ocean, yet captains’ reprimands about their lack of interest go unheeded. The dreamy look-outs explain their failure to spot whales through a philosophical short-sightedness—“what use, then, to strain the visual nerve?”—having left their opera-glasses at home.
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