الفصل الفصل 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 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.