270 
MOBY DICK; OR 
the capstan-head, as if the capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb 
the only banqueter on whale’s flesh that night. Mingling their mum- 
blings with his own mastications, thousands and thousands of sharks, 
swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. 
The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp 
slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the 
sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as 
before you heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and 
turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces 
of the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat 
of the shark seems all but miraculous. How, at such an apparently 
unassailable surface, they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical 
mouthfuls, remains a part of the universal problem of all things. The 
mark they thus leave on the whale may best be likened to the hollow 
made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw. 
Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a. sea-fight, 
sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like 
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to 
bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them ; and though, while 
the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving 
each other’s life meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the 
sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving 
away under the table at the dead meat ; and though, were you to turn 
the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same 
thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties ; 
and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships 
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in 
case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently 
buried ; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, 
touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most 
socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no con- 
ceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless 
numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead 
Sperm whale, moored by night to a whale ship at sea. If you have 
never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety 
of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. 
