Moby Dick

yet came, because no vital part of him had thus far been struck.
His life, as they significantly call it, was untouched.

As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his
form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed.
His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld.
As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest
oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had
once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
But pity there was none.  For all his old age, and his one arm,
and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered,
in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men,
and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional
inoffensiveness by all to all.  Still rolling in his blood, at last
he partially disclosed a strangely discolored bunch or protuberance,
the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.

"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late.  At the instant of the dart
an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it
into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting
thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft,
bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with
showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows.
It was his death stroke.  For, by this time, so spent was he by loss
of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made;
lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world;
turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log,
and died.  It was most piteous, that last expiring spout.
As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off
from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy
gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground--
so the last long dying spout of the whale.

Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship,
the body showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled.
Immediately, by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at
different points, so that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken
whale being suspended a few inches beneath them by the cords.
By very heedful management, when the ship drew nigh, the whale was
transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there by the stiffest
fluke-chains, for it was plain that unless artificially upheld,
the body would at once sink to the bottom.

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded
in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch before described.
But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the dead
bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed
around them, and no prominence of any kind to denote their place;
therefore, there must needs have been some other unknown reason
in the present case fully to account for the ulceration alluded to.
But still more curious was the fact of a lance-head of stone being
found in him, not far from the buried iron, the flesh perfectly
firm about it.  Who had darted that stone lance?  And when?
It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before
America was discovered.

What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous cabinet
there is no telling.  But a sudden stop was put to further discoveries,
by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the sea,
owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink.
However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it
to the last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length
the ship would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking
arms with the body; then, when the command was given to break clear
from it, such was the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which
the fluke-chains and cables were fastened, that it was impossible
to cast them off.  Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant.
To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up
the steep gabled roof of a house.  The ship groaned and gasped.
Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started
from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.  In vain handspikes
and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry
them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled
that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every
moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk,
and the ship seemed on the point of going over.

"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body,
"don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!
By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it.
No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes,
and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut
the big chains."

"Knife?  Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's
heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron,
began slashing at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes,
full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest.
With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted,
the carcase sank.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed
Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet
adequately accounted for it.  Usually the dead Sperm Whale