THE WHITE WHALE 259 
attached to the short-warp — the rope which is immediately connected 
with the harpoon ; hut previous to that connection, the short-warp 
goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail. 
Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, 
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the 
oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid 
eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest 
snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Kor can any son of mortal 
woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, 
and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any 
unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible 
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus 
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in 
his hones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit — strange 
thing ! what cannot habit accomplish ? — Gayer sallies, more merry 
mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your 
mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of 
the whale boat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses ; and, like 
the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men com- 
posing the crew pull into jaws of death, with a halter around every 
neck, as you may say. 
Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for 
those repeated whaling disasters — some few of which are casually 
chronicled — of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by 
the line, and lost. Eor, when the line is darting out, to be seated 
then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold 
whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, 
and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse ; for you cannot sit 
motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking 
like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without 
the slightest warning, and only by certain self-adjusting buoyancy 
and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made 
a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself 
could never pierce you out. 
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and 
prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; 
