In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long,
is inserted for a handle.
"Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage,
agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or
Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."
CHAPTER 67
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.
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