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MOBY DICK; OR 
and not a single flying-fish vet captured to supply the deficiency ; con- 
cluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is 
technically called a clean one (that is, an empty one), well deserving 
the name of Jungfrau or the Virgin. 
His necessities supplied, Derick departed ; but he had not gained 
his ship’s side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from 
the mastheads of both vessels ; and so eager for the chase was Derick, 
that without pausing to put his oilcan and lamp-feeder aboard, he 
slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders. 
How, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three 
German boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start 
of the Pequod’s keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. 
Aware of their danger, they were going all abreast with great speed 
straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as closely as so many 
spans of horses in harness. They left a great, wide wake, as though con- 
tinually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea. 
Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a 
huge, humped old bull,, which by his comparatively slow progress, as 
well as by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed 
afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale 
belonged to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it .is not 
customary for such venerable leviathans to be at all social, never- 
theless, he stuck to their wake, though indeed their back water must 
have retarded him, because the white-bone or swell at his broad 
muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell formed when two hostile 
currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming 
forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn 
shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which 
seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, * causing the 
waters behind him to upbubble. 
“Who’s got some paregoric?” said Stubb; “he has the stomach- 
ache, I’m afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach- 
ache. Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It’s 
the first foul wind I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did 
ever whale yaw so before ? it must be, he’s lost his tiller.” 
As an overladen Indianman bearing down the Hindostan coast with 
