Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea.
Instantly the three spread boats in the rear paused on their way.
The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the blue,
thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement,
though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.
"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg,
stand up!"
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow,
the savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed
off towards the spot where the chase had last been descried.
Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also
triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself
was seen coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking
tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently eyeing the vast
blue eye of the sea.
Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still;
its commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead,
a stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet
above the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns
with the whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a
man's hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched
at the mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks.
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