Moby Dick

First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes.
It is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains
some oil.  After being severed from the whale, the white-horse
is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer.
They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble.

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of
the whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber,
and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness.
It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold.
As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a
bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest
crimson and purple.  It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron.
Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it.
I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it.
It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from
the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him
to have been killed the first day after the venison season,
and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually
fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns
up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be
very puzzling adequately to describe.  It is called slobgollion;
an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is
the nature of the substance.  It is an ineffably oozy,
stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm,
after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.
I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes
of the case, coalescing.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen,
but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen.
It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off
the back of the Greenland or right whale, and much of which covers
the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.

Nippers.  Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary.
But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so.  A whaleman's nipper
is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering
part of Leviathan's tail:  it averages an inch in thickness,
and for the rest, is about the size of the iron part of a hoe.
Edgewise moved along the oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee;
and by nameless blandishments, as of magic, allures along with
it all impurities.

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.
This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle
for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale.
When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment
is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night.  On one side,
lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen.
They generally go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The
whaling-pike is similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name.
The gaff is something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman
hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping,
as the ship pitches and lurches about.  Meanwhile, the spade-man stands
on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable
horse-pieces. This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's
feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly
slide away from him, like a sledge.  If he cuts off one of his own toes,
or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished?
Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.



CHAPTER 95

The Cassock


Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh
the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no
small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would
have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers.
Not the wondrous cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy
of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail;
none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of
that unaccountable cone,--longer than a Kentuckian is tall,
nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo,
the ebony idol of Queequeg.  And an idol, indeed, it is;
or rather, in old times, its likeness was.  Such an idol
as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea;
and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her,
and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination
at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter
of the First Book of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along,
and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus,
as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it
as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field.
Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically
to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa.
This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg;
gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter;