Bab Bab 131 · The Pequod Meets The Delight.

The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the

life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably

misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were

fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some

whaling-ships, cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine

feet; serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.

Upon the stranger’s shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and

some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you

now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,

half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.

“Hast seen the White Whale?”

“Look!” replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with

his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.

“Hast killed him?”

“The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that,” answered the

other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose

gathered sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.

“Not forged!” and snatching Perth’s levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab

held it out, exclaiming—“Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold

his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these

barbs; and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the

fin, where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!”

“Then God keep thee, old man—see’st thou that”—pointing to the

hammock—“I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only

yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only _that_ one I bury; the rest

were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb.” Then turning

to his crew—“Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and

lift the body; so, then—Oh! God”—advancing towards the hammock with

uplifted hands—“may the resurrection and the life——”

“Brace forward! Up helm!” cried Ahab like lightning to his men.

But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the

sound of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not

so quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have

sprinkled her hull with their ghostly baptism.

As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy

hanging at the Pequod’s stern came into conspicuous relief.

“Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!” cried a foreboding voice in her wake.

“In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your

taffrail to show us your coffin!”