Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew
round the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in
them; while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding
would soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might,
they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at
last—owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of
the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—the
gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three
sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for
some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more
line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have
been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,” as
it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh
from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon
rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak
of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course
is always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the
longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted.
Because, owing to the enormous surface of him—in a full grown sperm
whale something less than 2000 square feet—the pressure of the water
is immense. We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we
ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how
vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two
hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at least equal the weight of fifty
atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty
line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.
As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and
placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
once so triumphantly said—“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him
cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron
as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he? Oh!
that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength
of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fish-spears!
In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
enough to shade half Xerxes’ army. Who can tell how appalling to the
wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!
“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
upwards, as a small ice-field will, when a dense herd of white bears
are scared from it into the sea.
“Haul in! Haul in!” cried Starbuck again; “he’s rising.” The lines, of
which, hardly an instant before, not one hand’s breadth could have been
gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the
boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship’s lengths of the
hunters.
His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land
animals there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their
veins, whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least
instantly shut off in certain directions. Not so with the whale; one
of whose peculiarities it is, to have an entire non-valvular structure
of the blood-vessels, so that when pierced even by so small a point
as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial
system; and when this is heightened by the extraordinary pressure of
water at a great distance below the surface, his life may be said to
pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of
blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that
he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even
as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs
of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled
upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying flukes, and the
lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from
the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural
spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending
its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet
came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life,
as they significantly call it, was untouched.
As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of
his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly
revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were
beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the
noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale’s eyes
had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light
the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate
the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all
to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a
strangely discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low
down on the flank.
“A nice spot,” cried Flask; “just let me prick him there once.”
“Avast!” cried Starbuck, “there’s no need of that!”
But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an
ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more
than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with
swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their
glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat
and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so
spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the
wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his
stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world;
turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It
was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands
the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with
half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to
the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the
body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled.
Immediately, by Starbuck’s orders, lines were secured to it at
different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken
whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords. By
very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was
transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest
fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld, the
body would at once sink to the bottom.
It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his
flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the
stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured
whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence
of any kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have
been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for
the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And
when? It might have been darted by some Nor’ West Indian long before
America was discovered.
What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
discoveries, by the ship’s being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
to the sea, owing to the body’s immensely increasing tendency to sink.
However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to
the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the
ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms
with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear from
it, such was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the
fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast
them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the
other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a
house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her
bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural
dislocation. In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the
immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timber-heads; and
so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be
at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed
added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going
over.
“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in
such a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something
or go for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes,
and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big
chains.”
“Knife? Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy
hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing
at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were
given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific
snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.
Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great
buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the
surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and
broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their
bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so
sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But
it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling
with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May
of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny,
buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.
Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down,
twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt
imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the