odged in
the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
officer called the Specksnyder. 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 Specksnyder 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