, 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 whalemen 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 Nantucket 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 circumstances connected with events hereafter to
be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in
terrorem, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of the
paramount forms and usages of the sea.
    Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those
forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally making
use of them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended
to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good
degree remained unmanifested; through those forms that same sultanism became
incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual
superiority what
