Moby-Dick

utting 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.