201 
THE WHITE WHALE 
Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the 
furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a 
circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those 
tiger-yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five 
trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which 
periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst 
boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen 
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and 
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the 
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery 
horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like 
a fencer’s thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance 
any tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering 
oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn 
him. All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then 
remained fixed, while the boat’s five oars were seen simultaneously 
peaked. Boat and crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three 
spread boats in the rear paused on their way. The whales had irregu- 
larly settled bodily down into the blue, thus giving no distantly dis- 
cernible token of the movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab 
had observed it. 
“Every man look out along his oars!” cried Starbuck. “Thou, 
Queequeg, stand up!” 
Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the 
savage stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards 
the spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the ex- 
treme stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level 
with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly bal- 
ancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently 
eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea. 
Not very far distant Flask’s boat was also lying breathlessly still; 
its commander recklessly standing upon 'the top of the loggerhead, a 
stout sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above 
the level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with 
the whale-line. Its stop is not more spacious than the palm of a man’s 
hand, and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched 
at the masthead of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. 
