141 
THE WHITE WHALE 
with a movable side-screen to keep to windward of yonr head in a hard 
gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through 
a little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the 
stern of the shi-p, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for 
umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which 
to keep your speaking-trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical 
conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his masthead in 
this crow’s nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him 
(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for the 
purpose of popping off the stray narwhals, or vagrant sea unicorns 
infesting those waters ; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from 
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon 
them is a very different thing. How, it was plainly a labour of love 
for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed con- 
veniences of his crow’s-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many 
of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his 
experiments in this crow’s-nest, with a small compass he kept there 
for the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is 
called the “local attraction” of all binnacle magnets; an error as- 
cribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship’s planks (and 
in the Gl'aciers case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken- 
down blacksmiths among her crew;) I say, that though the Captain is 
very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned “binnacle devia- 
tions,” “azimuth compass observations,” and “approximate errors,” he 
knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in 
those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted oc- 
casionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle so nicely 
tucked in on one side of his crow’s-nest, within easy reach of his hand. 
Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, 
the honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that 
he should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful 
friend and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers 
and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that 
bird’s nest within three or four perches of the pole. 
But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as 
Captain Sleet and his Greenland men were; yet that disadvantage is 
greatly counterbalanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those 
