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"Then we may still hope to find the captain and mate," observed Desmond. "If that whale did not smash up one of the boats with her flukes. If he did, twelve people would prove a heavy cargo in a sea like this, and she is likely enough to have been swamped." "I am afraid that some such accident must have occurred," observed Tom. "I guess you may not be far wrong," was the unsatisfactory remark.
But during the night, the tide being out, the vessel was driven against one of the flukes of her own anchor; and as each wave lifted her up and dropped her heavily on the sharp iron, a hole was stove in her bottom, sinking her so quickly that the crew took to the boats, saving nothing.
"Over to the fish," next shouted out the officer, an order at first equally inexplicable to me, till I saw the flukes of the anchor hauled up close to the bows fished, as it is called. The sails were let fall and sheeted home, braces hauled taut, and the Doris, with a rattling breeze, under all sail, stood through the Needles Passage and down Channel. Those were stirring times.
But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time to make long ones.
Then comes the unsuspecting sheep to take his frugal meal, and, cropping the grass, swallows it, cercariae and all. But the latter, when they find themselves in the sheep's stomach, make their way straight to the bile-ducts, up which they travel to the liver. Here, in a few weeks, they grow up into full-blown flukes and begin the important business of producing eggs.
The mighty twisting thrusts of her tail, with its flukes twenty feet wide, set the whole surface boiling for hundreds of yards about. "At last, grown suddenly frantic with rage, with terror for her little one, and with the pain of her wounds, the tormented mother broke into a deep booming bellow, as of a hundred bulls.
Both the whales struck out incessantly with their mammoth flukes; their great tails, crashing upon the sea-surface, lashed it to mountains of foam. Our boats tossed as in a gale. Carried away by the pity and terror of the scene, we shouted threats and curses at the monsters, calling down on them in Marquesan the wrath of the sea-gods.
The honest, rough piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more parts than the human body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, the palms, the shank. All this, according to the journalist, is "cast" when a ship arriving at an anchorage is brought up.
This is accounted for by the play of the body, which naturally lies head to wind; and the wash of the flukes, which, acting somewhat like the "sculling" of an oar at the stern of a boat, propel the carcass in the direction it is pointing, Consequently we had a cruel amount of towing to do before we got the three cows alongside.
Lashing the water, so as to drive his relentless assailants to a distance, he once more lifted his flukes and sounded; but they were prepared to let the lines run. Down he went again. "He'll be lost he'll be lost!" I exclaimed, as did others not accustomed to the work. "Not a bit of it on that account," said old Knowles. "He can't remain long under water after what he's gone through.
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