Chapter LXVII: 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; 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
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.