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Updated: May 8, 2025
Whipping out his knife, he quickly cut a long length of "monkey-rope" or creeper, and twisting the tough pliant stem into a grummet round the trunk of the tree, he bade me pass the bight over my shoulders, and then showed me how, with its aid, I might work myself gradually upward.
Then, when he lay quite still, panting and breathless, with his eyes starting from their sockets and the perspiration streaming from every pore, the fetish-man approached him and deftly bending on to his fettered limbs an end of stout monkey-rope, he was dragged along the ground into the fire, and thence triced in an instant up to the shears, whence he hung suspended at the height of about a foot immediately over the glowing embers.
But the monkey-rope, the creepers, the thorns, and the heat were not the worst of our troubles; the whole place was swarming with mosquitoes that hovered about us in clouds and bit us savagely in a hundred places at once. And, as though these were not enough, there were myriads of small black ants that penetrated our clothing and bit us even more savagely than the mosquitoes.
Then Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod. As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair. The Monkey-Rope
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.
Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed a peculiarly ferocious shark he was provided with still another protection.
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.
Presently, however, a brilliant idea occurred to him, and, selecting a dozen men, he gave them certain orders which sent them scurrying off at a gallop. Half an hour later they returned, dragging behind them two long stout bamboos and a considerable quantity of tough pliant "monkey-rope" or creeper.
Upon one occasion I am afraid you will not believe me, but I assure you it is true we found a young deer tangled up in the biggest and toughest spider's web you ever saw; and of course we killed and ate the little creature. That spider's web suggested to us the idea of setting traps, which we made of monkey-rope, and in which we sometimes caught small game of one sort or another.
This improvement upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb, in order to afford 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.
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