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; 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

nailheads 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, 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.