137 
THE WHITE WHALE 
rights the ship’s cabin belongs to them ; and that it is- by courtesy alone 
that anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real 
truth, the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly he 
said to have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did 
enter it, it was something as a street-door enters a house; turning in- 
wards for a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a per- 
manent thing, residing in the open air. Mor did they lose much 
hereby; in the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was in- 
accessible. Though nominally included in th'e census of Christen- 
dom, he was still an alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last 
of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring 
and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying 
himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his 
own paws ; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up 
in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its 
CHAPTER XXXIY 
THE MASTHEAD 
It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with 
the other seamen my first masthead came round. 
In most American whalemen the mastheads are manned almost 
simultaneously with the vessel’s leaving her port ; even though she may 
have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper 
cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years’ voyage 
she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her — say, an empty 
vial even — then, her mastheads are kept manned to the last; and not 
till her skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she al- 
together relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more. 
Mow, as the business of standing mastheads, ashore or afloat, is a 
very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate 
here* I take it, that the earliest standers of mastheads were the old 
Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. 
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, 
