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And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest degree.
I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.
Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming? "Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer. I shan't sleep with him. I'll try the bench here." "Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here" feeling of the knots and notches.
As we were reaching to windward, with all boats ready for lowering, the skipper called me aft and said, "Naow, Mr. Bullen, I cain't lower, because of this condemned leg'n arm of mine; but how'r yew goin' ter manage 'thout a harpooneer?" I suggested that if he would allow me to try Samuela, who was suffering for a chance to distinguish himself, we would "come out on top."
"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway. "Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."
However, I had never been in the South Seas; and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on.
And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of them belonged.
The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him.
Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all there's no telling. But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer. "Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he does he always keep such late hours?"
The boats, thereupon, separated widely, and the men lay on their oars and waited. Presently a great bull rose lazily, spouting in front of the mate's boat, and lay idly wallowing in the tumbling sea. Approaching cautiously, the harpooneer drove in the terrible weapon. In his agony, the great cetacean, instead of sounding, threw himself blindly toward the boat.
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