140 MOBY DICK; OR 
to be deplored that the place to wliich you devote so considerable a 
portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly 
destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted 
to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, 
a hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of 
those small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate 
themselves. Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t’-gal- 
lanhmast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost pecul- 
iar to whalemen) call the t’-gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about 
by the sea, the beginner feels about as cosy as he would standing on 
a bull’s horns. To be sure, in cold weather you may carry your 
house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat ; but properly speak- 
ing the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body ; 
for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot 
freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great 
risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps 
in winter) ; so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere 
envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a shelf or 
chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a con- 
venient closet of your watch-coat. 
Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads 
of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little 
tents or pulpits, called crow's-nests , in which the lookouts of a Green- 
land whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen 
seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A Voyage 
among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally 
far the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland / 
in this admirable volume, all standers of mastheads are furnished with 
a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented 
crow's-nest of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet’s good 
craft. He called it the Sleet's crow's-nest, in honour of himself; he 
being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous 
false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our 
own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), 
so likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus 
we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a 
large tierce or pipe ; it is open above, however, where it is furnished 
