Your most usual point of perch is the head of the t'
gallant-mast, where you stand upon two thin parallel sticks
(almost peculiar to whalemen) called the t' gallant crosstrees.
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 speaking 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 convenience 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 look-outs
of a Greenland 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 for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies
of Old Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers
of mast-heads 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.
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