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Table of Contents
Chapter 67
CUTTING IN
It was a Saturday night, and
such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all
whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; ..
2 every sailor a
butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to
the sea gods. In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other
ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and
which no single man can possibly lift --this vast bunch of grapes was swayed
up to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest
point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope winding
through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass, and the huge
lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great
blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now
suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with
their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the
hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad,
semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main
body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense
crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her
side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty
weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky.
More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the
windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a
swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and
backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging
after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as
the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it
stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by
spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually
keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one
strip uniformly peels off along the line called the scarf, simultaneously cut
by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus
peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being
hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the
men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment ..
3 or two the prodigious
blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every
one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box
his ears and pitch him headlong overboard. One of the attending harpooneers
now advances with a long, keen weapon called a boarding-sword, and watching
his chance he dexterously slices out a considerable hole in the lower part of
the swaying mass. Into this hole, the end of the second alternating great
tackle is then hooked so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to
prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all
hands to stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a
few sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain; so
that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip, called a
blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering. The heavers
forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is peeling and
hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly slackened away,
and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway right beneath, into an
unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into this twilight apartment
sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long blanket-piece as if it were a
great live mass of plaited serpents. And thus the work proceeds; the two
tackles hoisting and lowering simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving,
the heavers singing, the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing,
the ship straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging
the general friction. ..
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