- end_line
- 16949
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-23T15:41:06.393Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 16887
- text
- him in festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket
streamed behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar’s surcoat.
“Hast seen the White Whale?”
“See you this?” and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden
head like a mallet.
“Man my boat!” cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him—“Stand by to lower!”
In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the
stranger. But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the
excitement of the moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his
leg he had never once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his
own, and then it was always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical
contrivance peculiar to the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and
shipped in any other vessel at a moment’s warning. Now, it is no very
easy matter for anybody—except those who are almost hourly used to it,
like whalemen—to clamber up a ship’s side from a boat on the open sea;
for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks,
and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So,
deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether
unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly
reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain
changeful height he could hardly hope to attain.
It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem
to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
cried out, “I see, I see!—avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
over the cutting-tackle.”
As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive
curved blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end.
This was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all,
slid his solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting
in the fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then
giving the word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to
hoist his own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running
parts of the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high
bulwarks, and gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm
frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab,
putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two
sword-fish blades) cried out in his walrus way, “Aye, aye, hearty! let
us shake bones together!—an arm and a leg!—an arm that never can
shrink, d’ye see; and a leg that never can run. Where did’st thou see
the White Whale?—how long ago?”
“The White Whale,” said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope; “there I saw him, on the Line, last season.”
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