The weather turned nice, and my turn finally came‑‑I got my first shift standing watch high up on the ship’s mast.
Most American whaling vessels post lookouts in the mast‑heads almost the moment they leave port.
It does not matter that they still have fifteen thousand miles or more to sail before they reach the whale‑hunting grounds.
And if after three, four, even five long years at sea, the ship heads home with anything empty‑‑even just one empty bottle‑‑the mast‑head lookouts stay on duty right until the very end.
They do not stop hoping to spot one more whale until the highest sails are gliding past the church spires of their home harbor.
Keeping watch from a high perch, whether on land or out at sea, is an old, fascinating practice. I want to talk about it for a bit.
I believe the very first people to serve as mast‑head lookouts were the ancient Egyptians. I have never found any older example.
Sure, the men who built the Tower of Babel meant to put up the tallest lookout tower in all of Asia or Africa. But before they could finish it, God’s furious storm tore that huge stone tower apart. So they cannot take the credit for inventing the lookout post.
Archaeologists widely think Egypt’s earliest pyramids were built for astronomy. That idea makes perfect sense when you look at their stepped sides. Ancient astronomers would climb all the way to the very top. Up there they would call out when they spotted new stars, exactly the way a modern sailor shouts when he sees a sail or a whale on the horizon.
Then there is Saint Simeon Stylites, the famous old Christian hermit. He built a tall stone pillar out in the desert and lived the rest of his life on its top. He had ropes and pulleys to haul his food up from the ground.
He was one fearless lookout. Fog, frost, rain, hail, sleet‑‑nothing drove him down. He weathered every hardship and literally died right there at his post.
Today’s famous high‑perched statues are lifeless. Carved from stone, iron, and bronze, they can stand through terrible gales, but they cannot shout out when they spot something strange.
Napoleon stands one hundred fifty feet up, arms folded, on top of the Vendôme Column. Down below, whoever runs the country does not matter to him anymore.
Tall above Baltimore, George Washington’s statue rises like one of Hercules’ boundary pillars. His monument marks a peak of human greatness few people will ever match.
Admiral Nelson stands high in Trafalgar Square. London smoke often blurs his figure, yet everyone knows the hero is still there. Smoke always hints at fire beneath.
But Washington, Napoleon, Nelson‑‑none of them will answer if you call up to them from below. No matter how badly the people down on the decks beg for their wisdom, they stay silent. Even if their spirits see hidden reefs and dangerous rocks in the foggy future, they cannot warn anyone.
You might think comparing land‑based lookouts to sailors in mast‑heads is unfair. Yet old Nantucket historian Obed Macy tells a story that proves otherwise.
Back in the early days of whaling, before real whaling ships regularly set sail, people on Nantucket Island set up tall wooden poles along the coastline. Lookouts climbed them using nailed‑on wooden pegs, almost like chickens climbing the rungs inside a chicken coop. When they spotted whales, they alerted the whaleboats waiting near shore.
A few years ago, New Zealand’s bay whalers copied that exact setup. That custom is outdated now, though. Let us turn to the real lookout‑‑the mast‑head on a whaling ship far out at sea.
All three mast‑heads stay staffed from sunrise to sunset. Sailors take turns, just like men steering the wheel. Every two hours one man climbs down and another takes his place.
In calm tropical weather, being up in the mast‑head can feel wonderful. For someone who likes daydreaming and thinking, it is pure bliss.
You stand a hundred feet above the quiet deck. The ship glides over deep water, and the tall masts feel like giant stilts. Right underneath your feet, huge sea creatures swim past, much like ships once sailed between the legs of the giant Colossus statue in Rhodes.
You are surrounded by endless ocean. Nothing moves except rolling waves. The ship rocks slowly. Warm trade winds drift by. Everything makes you feel heavy‑lidded and drowsy.
Life on a tropical whaler is full of quiet, uneventful hours. You hear no news. You read no newspapers. No shocking stories stir you up. You never get word of family troubles, failing businesses, crashing stock prices. You do not even wonder what you will eat for dinner. All your meals for the next three‑plus years sit packed safely in barrels. Your menu never changes.
Over a three‑ or four‑year whaling voyage, the total hours you spend standing mast‑head watch add up to multiple full months of your life.
It is such a shame that this spot, where you spend so much of your existence, has nothing even close to a cozy little space. There is nothing like a bed, a hammock, a guard booth, a pulpit‑‑any of those small snug spots where humans can shut themselves away for a while.
You usually stand on the topgallant cross‑trees: two thin parallel sticks, special to whaling ships. Tossed around by ocean swells, a new man feels about as comfortable as if he were balancing on the horns of an angry bull.
Sure, when it is cold you can bring your heavy watch coat up with you. But a thick coat is not a house. Your soul lives trapped inside your body and cannot step outside without risking death‑‑just like a foolish traveler crossing snow‑covered mountain passes in winter. In the same way, your watch coat is only extra outer skin. You cannot fit shelves or drawers inside your own body, and you cannot turn your coat into a handy closet.
Southern‑ocean whaling ships do not have those nice little sheltered lookout huts called crow’s‑nests. Whalers sailing the icy Greenland seas use them to shield their lookouts from brutal cold storms.
Captain Sleet wrote a book called A Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re‑discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland. Inside, he describes the brand‑new crow’s‑nest built for his ship, the Glacier.
He named it Sleet’s Crow’s‑Nest after himself. He was its inventor and held the patent. He saw no reason for false modesty. If fathers name their children after themselves, he argued, why not name your own inventions after you too?
His crow’s‑nest was shaped like a large wooden barrel. It was open at the top, but had a movable side screen to block sharp wind during storms. You climbed inside through a small hatch in its floor.
Toward the ship’s stern there was a proper seat, with storage underneath for umbrellas, blankets, and heavy coats. A leather rack up front held his speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other sailing gear.
When Captain Sleet stood watch inside his own crow’s‑nest, he kept a rifle locked in that rack, along with gunpowder and shot. He used it to shoot narwhals, those strange sea unicorns common in those northern waters. Shooting them from the deck rarely worked because the water stopped bullets. Shooting straight down from high above gave you a real chance.
Captain Sleet happily wrote about every small convenient feature of his creation. He went into detailed scientific notes about a small compass he kept inside, to correct magnetic errors caused by iron built into the ship’s hull. He joked that so many broken blacksmiths sailed aboard the Glacier that extra iron messed with the compass readings.
For all his talk about compass drift and careful navigation observations, I am convinced Captain Sleet was not always buried in magnetic calculations. Within easy arm’s reach, tucked neatly to one side of his crow’s‑nest, sat a full bottle of liquor.
He never mentions that bottle in his book. That strikes me as unfair. On freezing days, with mittens on his hands and his hood pulled tight, stuck high up near the pole, that bottle must have been his most loyal comfort. I respect this brave, smart captain, yet I cannot forgive him for leaving that bottle out of his story.
We southern‑sea whalers do not get that nice shelter up high. Still, that disadvantage gets balanced out by the peaceful, beautiful ocean waters we mostly sail through.
For my part, I used to climb the rigging very slowly. I would stop in the mast top to chat with Queequeg or any other off‑duty sailor I found there. I would climb a little higher, sling one lazy leg over the topsail yard, and scan the wide ocean. Only then would I climb the rest of the way to my lookout post.
I will be honest. I was a terrible lookout.
Standing high up there, alone with all the big questions of the universe spinning through my head, how could I pay strict attention to the whaler’s number‑one rule: keep your sharp weather eye open, and shout out the second you spot anything.
I want to send a warning to all the ship‑owners back in Nantucket.
Do not hire young men with sunken eyes and furrowed brows‑‑guys who spend all their time lost in deep thought. Men who carry philosophy books in their heads instead of navigation manuals.
Beware of them. You have to see whales before you can kill them. That dreamy young philosopher can sail you around the whole world and never bring in a single drop of sperm‑oil profit.
This warning is not unnecessary. The whaling trade becomes an escape for many romantic, gloomy, absent‑minded young men. They run away from the worries of land life, hoping to find poetry amid tar and whale blubber.
Sometimes you feel like Lord Byron’s sad hero Childe Harold is perched right on your mast‑head, muttering moody lines:
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber‑hunters sweep over thee in vain.”
Captains often scold these distracted young thinkers. They tell them they lack real passion for the voyage. They hint these men secretly hope never to lay eyes on a whale at all.
It does no good. These young Platonists decide their eyesight is bad. Why strain hard to see far away? They left their binoculars back on shore.
“Hey, you fool,” one harpooner said to one of these dreamers. “We have been cruising nearly three years, and you have never spotted a whale. Whenever you are up in that mast‑head, whales are rarer than hen’s teeth.”
Maybe that was true. Or maybe whole pods of whales drifted far off on the horizon.
Rocked by the rhythm of waves and tangled in their own thoughts, these young men sink into a dreamy trance. They lose sense of who they are. The ocean stretching below becomes a symbol of that huge, endless soul they believe fills every living thing.
Every faint, fleeting shape sliding through the water, every half‑seen fin rising and vanishing‑‑to them all of it stands for those slippery ideas that drift constantly through the human mind.
Lost in this enchanted mood, their spirit melts away, spreading out across time and space. Like the scattered ashes of old Cranmer, they feel themselves becoming part of every shore across the globe.
The only life you feel is the gentle rocking of the ship. That motion comes from the sea, and the sea moves by God’s unknowable tides.
But while you are wrapped in this waking dream‑‑shift your hand or foot even one inch. Lose your grip for a split second. Your sense of self slams back, filled with terror. You hover over swirling empty space.
On a perfectly bright mid‑day, you might let out a half‑choked scream and fall through clear air down into the warm ocean. You will never come back up.
You dreamy pantheists‑‑take heed.