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Updated: June 9, 2025
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse. While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between them.
Thus commenced a population likely to be of great service to shipping, particularly as they make excellent sailors, and excel as headsmen in whalers, where the keenness of their half-savage eyes, and their dexterity in throwing the spear, render them most formidable harpooners. The young half-castes I saw were very interesting, having a ruddy dark complexion, with fine eyes and teeth.
"When the headsmen offered to assist her," went on the low voice, "the queen smiled at the gentlemen and said that she had never had such grooms before; and then they let the ladies come up. When they began to help her with her dress I covered my face I could not help it. There was such a stillness now that I could hear her beads chink at her girdle.
A second knife, and a third of finer steel, were brought and tried by headsmen who were accustomed to sever heads clean off at one stroke. Having spoiled their best blades without marring his neck, they took him back to prison and informed the judge that the sentence could not be executed. The judge then decreed that he should be dropped into the sea which covered his victims.
The captain was once more hauling in the slack the other boats were getting up the headsmen standing, harpoon in hand, ready to give the whale fresh and still more deadly wounds. They ranged up alongside, and harpoons and lances flew from the boats.
He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth. Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilisation of our age has refined the arts of despotism, which seemed however to have been sufficiently perfected before.
Now the name of this King was Karazdan, King of Persia and of the Seven Countries, and under his sway were an hundred sovereign princes sitting on chairs of red gold, and ten thousand valiant captains, under each one's hand an hundred deputies and as many headsmen armed with sword and axe. They found the King lying on his bed with his face swathed in a napkin, and groaning for excess of pain.
The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side; all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; all this was thrilling.
She thought it was an amulet against witchcraft; but Michal told her that it was only a talisman against the plague, nothing more. Then Pirka laughed. "You don't need that here. The plague never penetrates into this house. At the time of the great Egyptian sickness the headsmen were the gravediggers. Not one of them died." "How was that?" "Why, don't you know? They've made a compact with Death."
Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their various weapons and boat furniture.
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