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As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew.
But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded all sail stunsail on stunsail after the missing boat; kindling a fire in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out.
"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues, turning to the three men in the rigging 'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots; and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
They trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and the North Sea or bargained thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of Nantucket, in their apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay, Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries.
The ripples of the bay washed in on a beach of black pebbles easily reached by the declivity of the land and on the beach, stewing like witches' cauldrons, queer looking try-pots were sending up their smoke. Near the pots carcases of sea-bulls lay ripped and gory and being cleared of their blubber by small men, strange-looking, stripped to the waist and with arms and chests splashed by blood.
Two comrades stood by the pots, stirring up their contents, and throwing their figures into wild uncouth attitudes, while the fire glared in their greasy faces, and converted the front of their entire persons into deep vermilion. The oil was hissing in the try-pots; the rough weather-beaten faces of the men on the windlass were smeared, and their dirty-white ducks saturated, with oil.
On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.
The great iron try-pots, built up in furnaces of coral lime, were overgrown by the green jungle thirty years ago, and it would be difficult even to find them now.
"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues, turning to the three men in the rigging 'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots; and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.
But the clove in this devil's mixture was the ship moored in the cliff shadows, a small ship like a withered kernel in the shell of the bay, barque-rigged, antiquated, high pooped, almost with the lines of a junk. One might have fancied her designer to have taken for his model some old picture of the ships of Drake. The try-pots, carcases and busy men left Raft unmoved.
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