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Updated: June 11, 2025
In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable.
As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any pitchpoling comes into play. Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
"Search the one you just disposed of, Stubb," Hal ordered. The little man obeyed, and a moment later gave an exclamation of triumph. "Here it is," he cried. "Good!" said Hal. "Now we'll lay these fellows where they can't move to give an alarm." This, too, was but the work of a moment. "Lend a hand, McKenzie," said Hal. "We'll move Chester into our own car and then move on.
"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as careful a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere long see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.
I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So. Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time queer sir queer, queer, very queer. And here's his leg!
"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from us; cannot have seen the ship yet." "Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm! brace up! Shiver her! shiver her! So; well that! Boats, boats!" Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails set all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to leeward; and Ahab heading the onset.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of? what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl.
"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made. The Dart A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.
"What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb, looking on from the forecastle. "That Parsee smells fire like a fusee; and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan."
One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied.
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