Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story
as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair
I now proceed to put on lasting record.
*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,
smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those
fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer
terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally put,
and which are duly answered at the time.
"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward from
the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of
the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps according to daily usage,
it was observed that she made more water in her hold than common.
They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen.
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