About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two
lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti
supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard.
Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night.
Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications, thousands on thousands
of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted
on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often
startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull,
within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you
could just see them (as before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen,
black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out
huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head.
This particular feat of the shark seems all but miraculous.
How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge
out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal
problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale,
may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking
for a screw.
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight,
sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks,
like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved,
ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though,
while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally
carving each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded
and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths,
are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat;
and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down,
it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say,
a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though
sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be
handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave
to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances
might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions,
when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast;
yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them
in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits,
than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea.
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