The Specksynder
Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems
as good a place as any to set down a little domestic
peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence
of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown
of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.
The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s
vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in
the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago,
the command of a whale-ship was not wholly lodged
in the person now called the captain, but was divided
between him and an officer called the Specksynder.
Literally this word means Fat-Cutter; usage, however,
in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer.
In those days, the captain’s authority was
restricted to the navigation and general management
of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting department
and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer
reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery,
under the corrupted title of Specksioneer, this old
Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity
is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply
as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the
captain’s more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless,
as upon the good conduct of the harpooneers the success
of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since in
the American Fishery he is not only an important officer
in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night
watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s
deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim
of the sea demands, that he should nominally live
apart from the men before the mast, and be in some
way distinguished as their professional superior;
though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their
social equal.
Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and
man at sea, is this—the first lives aft,
the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and merchantmen
alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain;
and so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers
are lodged in the after part of the ship. That
is to say, they take their meals in the captain’s
cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating
with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage
(by far the longest of all voyages now or ever made
by man), the peculiar perils of it, and the community
of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom,
high or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed
wages, but upon their common luck, together with their
common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work; though
all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less
rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally;
yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian
family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances,
live together; for all that, the punctilious externals,
at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially
relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed,
many are the Nantucket ships in which you will see
the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated
grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay,
extorting almost as much outward homage as if he wore
the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of pilot-cloth.
