CUTTING 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.