210 
MOBY DICK; OR 
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering 
that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger ; 
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and ex- 
traordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then 
comprises a peril ; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed 
man to enter a whaleboat in the hunt? As a general thing, the joint- 
owners of th e-Pequod must have plainly thought not. 
Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little 
of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes 
of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving 
his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat, actually 
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt — above all for 
Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat’s 
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads 
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat’s 
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head. 
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all 
that matter. Until Cabaco’s published discovery, the sailors had little 
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of 
port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the 
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and 
then found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with 
his own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and 
even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line 
is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this 
was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra 
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better 
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety 
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is 
sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat’s bow for bracing the 
knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale ; when it was observed 
how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the 
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter’s chisel 
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these 
things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. 
But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heed- 
fulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby 
