Chapter 69.00: CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.

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CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.
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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.