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Updated: June 2, 2025
The pilot-fish were wildly excited; they stopped to see what was going to happen. The shark played with the body, then slowly opened its mouth under it, touched it with its teeth, and the sail-cloth was ripped open from head to foot; one of the bars fell out, frightening the pilot-fish and striking the shark on its side, and sank to the bottom.
With a long-handled harpoon, which Snowball had succeeded in securing, he was enabled to strike several of these creatures; so that by the evening of the sixth day, his larder was considerably increased, comprising, in the way of fish, an albacore, a brace of bonitos, with three satellites of the sharks, a pilot-fish and two sucking-fish.
Whatever special orders were necessary, their delivery was delegated to his body-servant, who in turn transferred them to their ultimate destination, through runners, alert Spanish boys or slave boys, like pages or pilot-fish within easy call continually hovering round Don Benito.
Sterne smiled to himself and gradually the ideas evoked by the sound, by the imagined shape of the word pilot-fish; the ideas of aid, of guidance needed and received, came uppermost in his mind: the word pilot awakened the idea of trust, of dependence, the idea of welcome, clear-eyed help brought to the seaman groping for the land in the dark: groping blindly in fogs: feeling their way in the thick weather of the gales that, filling the air with a salt mist blown up from the sea, contract the range of sight on all sides to a shrunken horizon that seems within reach of the hand.
As it was, the shark saw itself vis-a-vis to an adversary nearly as large as itself and quite as courageous; and it is possible also that its pilot-fish, a brace of which had advanced close to Snowball's snout, and after submitting his dusky carcass to a brief examination returned to their master, it is just possible that these emissaries had reported to their patron, that the game he was in pursuit of must be approached with caution.
Alighting at the ferry, they started up Front street, Rose in lead, he being pilot-fish. From Front they turned into Broad, and up Broad to No. 22, where there were a number of offices. Rose mounted the staircase, it now being five minutes to 10, Bullard coming close behind.
The little pilot-fish, after coming within twenty fathoms of the raft, had turned suddenly in the water, and gone back to the sharks; and now it was seen swimming a few feet in advance of them, as if in the act of leading them on!
Thomas may have his own personal opinions on this subject, probably hints them in his manner of smoothing his sleek head from the nape of his neck to his temples, but he forbears to express them further and retires to the servants' hall to regale on cold meat-pie and ale. This groom is the pilot-fish before the nobler shark.
But it was commonly supposed that I accompanied him as a guide in order to show him the best feeding places, and tell him what dangers to avoid, and that was how I got my name of the Pilot-Fish. But the real reason was that I got better food when in company with the White Shark than any other way.
"Oh," said I, laughing, alluding to my professional visit, "I am not the lawyer, but the lawyer's avant courier the pilot-fish, not the shark." He laughed heartily, and kept bantering me on the sharking propensities of my tribe in such an amusing manner that I could not restrain my mirth. At last, the dinner-bell rang. "Ah! there's pipe to dinner at last!
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