If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake
sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may
say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape
these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life.
But handle Queequeg's monkey-rope heedfully as I would,
sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard.
Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had
the management of one end of it.*
*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in
the Pequod that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together.
This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less
a man than Stubb, in order to afford to the imperilled harpooneer
the strongest possible guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance
of his monkey-rope holder.
I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between
the whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall,
from the incessant rolling and swaying of both.
But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to.
Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the night,
the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent
blood which began to flow from the carcass--the rabid creatures
swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.
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