(Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead,
Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!)
Sperm, sperm's the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit
hand in hand."
"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the
boats diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so.
Aye, and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often,
as Dough-Boy long suspected. They were hidden down there.
The White Whale's at the bottom of it. Well, well, so be it!
Can't be helped! All right! Give way men! It ain't the White Whale
to-day! Give way!"
Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical
instant as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not
unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of
the ship's company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time
previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then,
this had in some small measure prepared them for the event.
It took off the extreme edge of their wonder; and so what with all
this and Stubb's confident way of accounting for their appearance,
they were for the time freed from superstitious surmisings; though the
affair still left abundant room for all manner of wild conjectures
as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from the beginning.
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