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- It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is
thus continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now.
But the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the
whale, for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with
a velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these
circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely
prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long
a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing
barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate
means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her,
and were soon swayed up to their cranes—the two parts of the wrecked
boat having been previously secured by her—and then hoisting everything
to her side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways
outstretching it with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an
albatross; the Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At
the well known, methodic intervals, the whale’s glittering spout was
regularly announced from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be
reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing
the deck, binnacle-watch in hand, so soon as the last second of the
allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.—“Whose is the doubloon now?
D’ye see him?” and if the reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded
them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now
aloft and motionless; anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.
As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men
aloft, or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a
still greater breadth—thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat,
at every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped
upon the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered
stern. At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded
sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old
man’s face there now stole some such added gloom as this.
Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in
his Captain’s mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed—“The
thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!”
“What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did
I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could
swear thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a
wreck.”
“Aye, sir,” said Starbuck drawing near, “’tis a solemn sight; an omen,
and an ill one.”
“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
give an old wives’ darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye
two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the
peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold—I shiver!—How
now? Aloft there! D’ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he
spout ten times a second!”
The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.
“Can’t see the spout now, sir;—too dark”—cried a voice from the air.
“How heading when last seen?”
“As before, sir,—straight to leeward.”
“Good! he will travel slower now ’tis night. Down royals and
top-gallant stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before
morning; he’s making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm
there! keep her full before the wind!—Aloft! come down!—Mr. Stubb, send
a fresh hand to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till
morning.”—Then advancing towards the doubloon in the main-mast—“Men,
this gold is mine, for I earned it; but I shall let it abide here till
the White Whale is dead; and then, whosoever of ye first raises him,
upon the day he shall be killed, this gold is that man’s; and if on
that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times its sum shall be
divided among all of ye! Away now!—the deck is thine, sir!”
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
rousing himself to see how the night wore on.
CHAPTER 134. The Chase—Second Day.
At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.
“D’ye see him?” cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light
to spread.
“See nothing, sir.”
“Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought
for;—the top-gallant sails!—aye, they should have been kept on her all
night. But no matter—’tis but resting for the rush.”
Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular
whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is
a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is
the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible
confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket
commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last
descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty
accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue to
swim for a time, while out of sight, as well as his probable rate of
progression during that period. And, in these cases, somewhat as a
pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose general trending he
well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to again, but at
some further point; like as this pilot stands by his compass, and takes
the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the more
certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be
visited: so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for
after being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of
daylight, then, when night obscures the fish, the creature’s future
wake through the darkness is almost as established to the sagacious
mind of the hunter, as the pilot’s coast is to him. So that to this
hunter’s wondrous skill, the proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in
water, a wake, is to all desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the
steadfast land. And as the mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway
is so familiarly known in its every pace, that, with watches in their
hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a baby’s pulse; and lightly
say of it, the up train or the down train will reach such or such a
spot, at such or such an hour; even so, almost, there are occasions
when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
according to the observed humor of his speed; and say to themselves, so
many hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have
about reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to
render this acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the
sea must be the whaleman’s allies; for of what present avail to the
becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that assures him he is
exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his port? Inferable
from these statements, are many collateral subtile matters touching the
chase of whales.
The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
field.
“By salt and hemp!” cried Stubb, “but this swift motion of the deck
creeps up one’s legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two
brave fellows!—Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,
on the sea,—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel. Ha, ha!