480 
MOBY DICK; OR 
mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not 
only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the 
human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peer- 
ingly uprising from the water alongside. In the sea, under certain 
circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men. 
But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most 
plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morn- 
ing. At sunrise this man went from his hammock to his masthead at 
the fore; and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his 
sleep (for sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether 
is was thus with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it 
may, he had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard — 
a cry and a rushing — and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in 
the air; and looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in 
the blue of the sea. 
The lifebuoy — a long slender cask — was dropped from the stem, 
where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose 
to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, 
so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled at its every 
pore ; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, 
as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one. 
And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look 
out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground ; 
that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of 
that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this 
event, at least as a portent ; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing 
of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. 
They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks 
they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said 
nay. 
The lost lifebuoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed 
to see to it ; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as 
in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the 
voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly 
connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be ; therefore, 
they were going to leave the ship’s stem unprovided with a buoy, when 
