Chapter 40 35．Prospector

It was a pleasing fine day, in which I took up the lookout's errand with the other sailors. When I climbed to the high masthead and looked around, I was in a good mood. The sky is high and the sea is wide, and the blue is as clear as washing, which is simply refreshing. Speaking of lookouts, it's actually a very special thing on whaling ships. Whether there is a lookout on the masthead is an important sign to distinguish whether a ship is a whaling ship. For the vast majority of American whaling ships, from the time they leave the port of departure to the time they are about to sail back to the port, during the three to five years, there are no watchmen on the masthead all the time.

Even when we first leave port, we are still more than 15,000 nautical miles away from our real destination, which is the fishing ground for whaling; although when we return to port, it is absolutely impossible to find large whales on the coast. This is the belief of the whalers. Being a lookout is an extremely ancient profession, and it is also a great profession. As for the earliest lookouts, I am afraid that they have existed since ancient Egypt, but they were closer to mythology at that time. According to historians, the earliest lookouts were on land rather than in the sea. In Nantucket in ancient times, people always set up a high watchtower on the shore, and some people watched the sea from above. Once whales were found, they would send a signal to the equipped whale boats on the seashore. The whaling ship will quickly rush to the target.

Later, when the whaling ship had to travel across the ocean to catch whales, this idea was adopted by the people who designed the whaling ship, so our current watchman on the masthead came into being. I was now at the top of the mainmast, and my companions were at the tops of the two masts, fore and aft, and we were equally happy. Our shift changes every two hours, and there are people on the masthead day and night. We stood on the top of the mast, a hundred feet above the deck, as if on giant stilts. Between our feet, the sea water is constantly rushing, and various sea animals are also constantly swimming. Standing here, I am attracted by a continuous wave.

Our whaler sailed quietly, somewhat idly, in the silence. The breeze was blowing, making people lazy, as if they were about to fall asleep, but they dared not really fall asleep. You may feel a little boring, but if you can't even overcome the boredom of this little time, you simply can't get through this long journey of three or four years. In these three or four years, almost everything is fixed, when to do what, how to do it, even if a big whale is found, the procedure is also fixed, and no one can go beyond the threshold. All your food is piled in the bilge, and even the recipes don't change, so you don't have to worry about it.

All your positions are also fixed, the place to work, the place to eat and the place to sleep, these places are simply your shelter, only the size of a bomb, without the slightest sense of comfort. To say the most comfortable place, it should be said to be the top of the mast, where all the hustle and bustle is avoided, and the eyes and ears are full of peace. However, if you think about it carefully, in the three or four years of the trip, you will spend a total of several months on the masthead. What does so much time mean to you? I stood on the lookout of the masthead and let the waves toss the boat to and fro, and the boat toss me to and fro as if I were on the horns of a bull.

But it will not be so comfortable when it is cold, you will feel that the taste is simply fatal, and you wish that you can immediately build a house at the lookout to resist the sea wind like a knife. However, a whaler with such a range of motion as ours has no more effective equipment than a temporary clothing to keep out the wind. Therefore, we can't help but envy those whaling ships that haunt Greenland. Their mastheads have a small tent or a large wooden barrel-like facility, in which the watchman hides to resist the severe cold. Even, there are seats and some auxiliary equipment in this watch station, such as microphones, binoculars, compass and even smoking pipes and so on.

Of course, you can also bring a rifle up there and shoot the targets when you spot them. However, we are not Greenland's whaling ships after all, and there is no need to work so hard on the issue of lookouts. Although we envy them when we feel cold, for us, that is only a short moment. Most of the time, we drive in clear, warm and hot seas, and our surroundings feel as clear as the sky. This kind of good feeling completely offsets the psychological loss caused by envying others. On the contrary, we feel more at ease compared with the icy world of shyness. We could climb the rigging at leisure, looking around as we went, and stop at a higher place to chat with Queequeg or someone next to us, and then go on up.

In the process of climbing to the top of the mast, I often stop several times to look at the sea or talk. In good conscience, I am not a good watcher, and I can even be said to be unqualified.The reason for this is that when I was performing my lookout mission, I was always thinking about various problems in my mind, which made it impossible for me to concentrate on what I should do. I can't stop thinking and thinking, and as for my mission of "discovering the big whale and speaking up", I have never completed it once. Therefore, for a utilitarian ship owner, it is a loss to employ such a person, although he may have other contributions to the whaling cause.

However, there are often such people on the whaling ship. They are tired of being on land, or they are stimulated, or they come to sea for excitement. Or romantic reasons. They leaned against the side, watching the sea water rolling away, and sighed melancholy: the blue sea you run away i can't see the bottom of your heart I saw countless ships driving around in your arms they slit your chest but only for a moment you regain your calm self Real sailors are often bored by such nervous people.They feel that whaling is a business that depends on real skills, not deep thoughts and strong emotions.

Now, a sailor said to the young man who just expressed his feelings: "You monkey who thinks you're smart, do you think you can attract whales with your poems? Tell you, it's just a dream." "We have been cruising here for almost three years, and you shouted at the sea every day, and we haven't seen you call out a whale." "It's also strange, as long as you come here and look into the sea, all the whales will disappear." What the sailor said was true. Originally, there might have been a large group of whales not far away, but this young man had been dizzy by the choppy waves and thousands of thoughts, and he had no ability to recognize them at all.

He seemed to be smoking opium, groggy all day long, and he didn't know where he was, and he regarded the ocean under his feet as a changing picture. There are countless souls in this picture, these souls are of various kinds, some are strange, some are vague, some are beautiful, all of them are like whales, which confuses his thinking. At this time, the young man had actually lost his consciousness, and he was just relying on this boat that kept going forward to give himself a little anger. And what does the ship rely on to make itself angry? ocean. What does the ocean rely on? God. Now it seems that the source of all this vitality is still God.