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MOBY DICK; OR 
ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish 
injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in his 
sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was 
wakened he could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent 
an influence did this thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who 
came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call 
it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept the secret among 
themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod’ s mainmast. 
Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story as 
publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now 
proceed to put on lasting record. 
For my humour’s sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once 
narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one 
saint’s eve, smoking upon the thick gilt-tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. 
Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on 
the closer terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they 
occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time. 
“Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am 
about rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho , Sperm Whaler of 
Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days’ 
sail eastward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was some- 
where to the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the 
pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that she made more 
water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had 
stabbed her, gentlemen. But the Captain having some unusual reason 
for believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes, and 
therefore being very averse to quit them, and the leak not being then 
considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after 
searching the hold as low down as was possible in rather heavy weather, 
the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners working at the 
pumps at wide and easy intervals ; but no good luck came ; more days 
went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly 
increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the Captain, mak- 
ing all sail, stood away for the nearest harbour among the islands, there 
to have his hull hove out and repaired. 
“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest 
chance favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by 
