- char_end
- 972974
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- 965121
- chunk_index
- 136
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- estimated_tokens
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- source_file_key
- moby-dick
- text
- this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all
afoam into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!
“Aye, I see!—wanted to part it; free the fast-fish—an old trick—I know
him.”
“How it was exactly,” continued the one-armed commander, “I do not
know; but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there
somehow; but we didn’t know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled
on the line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other
whale’s; that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters
stood, and what a noble great whale it was—the noblest and biggest I
ever saw, sir, in my life—I resolved to capture him, spite of the
boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would
get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a
devil of a boat’s crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I
say, I jumped into my first mate’s boat—Mr. Mounttop’s here (by the
way, Captain—Mounttop; Mounttop—the captain);—as I was saying, I jumped
into Mounttop’s boat, which, d’ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with
mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir—hearts and souls
alive, man—the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat—both eyes
out—all befogged and bedeadened with black foam—the whale’s tail
looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday,
with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after
the second iron, to toss it overboard—down comes the tail like a Lima
tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,
flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I
seized hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung
to that like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at
the same instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down
like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near
me caught me here” (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); “yes,
caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell’s flames, I was
thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb
ript its way along the flesh—clear along the whole length of my
arm—came out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;—and that gentleman there
will tell you the rest (by the way, captain—Dr. Bunger, ship’s surgeon:
Bunger, my lad,—the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the
yarn.”
The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all
the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote
his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but
sober one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and
patched trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between
a marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
crippled captains. But, at his superior’s introduction of him to Ahab,
he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain’s bidding.
“It was a shocking bad wound,” began the whale-surgeon; “and, taking my
advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy—”
“Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship,” interrupted the one-armed
captain, addressing Ahab; “go on, boy.”
“Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing
hot weather there on the Line. But it was no use—I did all I could; sat
up with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet—”
“Oh, very severe!” chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly
altering his voice, “Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till
he couldn’t see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half
seas over, about three o’clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up
with me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher,
and very dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh
out! why don’t ye? You know you’re a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave
ahead, boy, I’d rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other
man.”
“My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir”—said the
imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab—“is apt to
be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But
I may as well say—en passant, as the French remark—that I myself—that
is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy—am a strict total
abstinence man; I never drink—”
“Water!” cried the captain; “he never drinks it; it’s a sort of fits to
him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on—go on with
the arm story.”
“Yes, I may as well,” said the surgeon, coolly. “I was about observing,
sir, before Captain Boomer’s facetious interruption, that spite of my
best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse;
the truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw;
more than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead
line. In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it
came. But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
against all rule”—pointing at it with the marlingspike—“that is the
captain’s work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had
that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one’s brains out
with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir”—removing his hat, and
brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,
but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever
having been a wound—“Well, the captain there will tell you how that
came here; he knows.”
“No, I don’t,” said the captain, “but his mother did; he was born with
it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you—you Bunger! was there ever such another
Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.”
“What became of the White Whale?” now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.
“Oh!” cried the one-armed captain, “oh, yes! Well; after he sounded, we
didn’t see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I
didn’t then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick,
till some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about
Moby Dick—as some call him—and then I knew it was he.”
“Did’st thou cross his wake again?”
“Twice.”
“But could not fasten?”
“Didn’t want to try to: ain’t one limb enough? What should I do without
this other arm? And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he
swallows.”
“Well, then,” interrupted Bunger, “give him your left arm for bait to
get the right. Do you know, gentlemen”—very gravely and mathematically
bowing to each Captain in succession—“Do you know, gentlemen, that the
digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest
even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the
White Whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to
swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But
sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of
mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a
time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a
twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in
small tacks, d’ye see.