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MOBY DICK; OR 
dignity is sadly abridged. At present be ranks simply as senior Har- 
pooneer ; and as such, is 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 circum- 
stances (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 whale- 
men 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 Nan- 
tucket 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. 
And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the 
least given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only 
homage he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience, though he 
required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon 
the quarter-deck ; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar 
