He was not alone in his feasting. Thousands of sharks swarmed the carcass, tearing at the blubber with a fury that shook the hull and startled the sleepers below. They gouged out perfect hemispheres of flesh—a feat that seemed impossible at such a surface—and the night rang with their thrashing and snapping.
Stubb, irritated by the din, summoned the old cook. Fleece came shuffling from his galley, a grizzled black man with ailing knees, leaning on tongs fashioned from straightened hoops. Stubb ordered him to preach to the sharks, to quiet them with a sermon.
The cook limped to the bulwark and held his lantern over the churning water. He addressed the “fellow-critters” in his cracked voice, telling them to govern their woracious natures and eat civilly. Stubb crept behind to listen, interrupting to correct the old man’s swearing. Fleece tried again: if sharks could master the shark within, they would be angels. But the congregation would not hear—they were too busy gorging, their bellies bottomless. He pronounced a final blessing: let them eat until they burst, then die.
Stubb returned to his steak and called Fleece to stand before him. A mocking catechism followed. How old was the cook? Ninety, came the sullen answer. And after a century of life, he still could not properly cook a whale steak? Where was he born? On a ferry-boat, Fleece muttered. Then he must go home and be born again, Stubb declared, if he wished to learn his craft.
The mate pressed on into theology. Did Fleece belong to the church? The old man had once passed a church in Cape Town. Yet he stood here telling lies about the steak being well-cooked. Where did he expect to go when he died? Fleece pointed his tongs upward: some blessed angel would fetch him. Stubb seized on the gesture—if heaven lay aloft, the cook would have to climb the rigging to get there, and it grew colder the higher one climbed.
He concluded with a string of contradictory orders for future meals: fin-tips pickled, fluke-ends soused, cutlets at the mid-watch, whale-balls for breakfast. Fleece limped away, muttering that Stubb was more shark than the sharks themselves.
Ishmael examines the history and philosophy of consuming whale meat, noting that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was a delicacy in France, and porpoises were highly esteemed in Henry VIII’s court. While the Esquimaux and unprejudiced whalers like Stubb partake of the creature, civilized men often recoil due to the sheer scale and excessive richness of the meat. The spermaceti, though too rich to replace butter, is often used by seamen to fry their ship-biscuit. The brains of a small Sperm Whale are considered a fine dish resembling calves’ head—and Ishmael notes with dark irony that young bucks among the epicures dine on calves’ brains in hopes of acquiring some intelligence of their own, though the calf’s head seems to regard them with a reproachful expression. Ishmael argues that the abhorrence landsmen feel stems from the idea of eating a creature by its own light, yet he exposes the hypocrisy of civilized gourmands who feast on bloated goose livers while condemning cannibals. He points out that these enlightened diners use the bones of the ox they eat to carve their meat and the feathers of the goose to pick their teeth, proving their own complicity in the brutal economy of nature.
After the crew secures the whale, Stubb sets the anchor-watch, assigning Queequeg and a seaman to defend the carcass from a voracious swarm of sharks. Illuminating the turbid water with lanterns, the two mariners engage in a desperate battle, darting long whaling-spades deep into the sharks’ skulls. The creatures display supernatural ferocity, snapping at their own entrails in a foamy, cannibalistic frenzy. Even death offers no safety; when a dead shark is hoisted on deck for its skin, it nearly severs Queequeg’s hand with a snap of its jaw. Nursing his injury, Queequeg reflects on the malevolent vitality lurking in the creature’s joints, concluding that whatever god created such a demoniac being must be a “dam Ingin.”
On a Saturday night, the Pequod transforms into a shamble, every sailor a butcher preparing to offer up the whale to the sea gods. Massive cutting tackles are lashed to the main-top, and a heavy blubber hook is swung over the carcass. Starbuck and Stubb cut a hole near the fin for the hook, and the crew heaves at the windlass in a wild chorus. The ship careens violently under the strain, trembling until the blubber strip snaps free, peeling away in a spiral like an orange rind. The blood-dripping mass is hoisted until it grazes the main-top, swaying perilously as the crew dodges the massive blanket-piece to avoid being struck or pitched overboard. A harpooneer advances with a boarding-sword, slicing a hole for a second tackle, then with desperate lunging strokes severs the strip completely. The work proceeds in a rhythmic frenzy: one tackle hoists a new strip while the other lowers the finished piece into the blubber-room, where hands coil it like serpents amidst the ship’s groaning and the men’s singing.
With the blubber now stripped and secured below deck, Ishmael turns his attention to
Ishmael defends his controversial opinion that the whale’s true skin is the thick, dense blubber, rather than the thin, transparent membrane that can be scraped off like isinglass. He emphasizes the sheer magnitude of the creature by calculating that the blubber of a single large Sperm Whale yields a hundred barrels of oil, making the mere integument a massive, animated substance. Examining the living whale, he describes the intricate markings on its hide, comparing the fine lines to Italian engravings and the deeper scratches to undecipherable hieroglyphics or the rough scars left by icebergs, suggesting they are records of battles with other whales. Ishmael then praises the “blanket” of blubber that wraps the whale like a poncho, insulating its warm blood and allowing it to thrive in the freezing Arctic where unprotected men would freeze solid. He marvels that the Polar whale maintains a blood temperature warmer than a man in the tropics, presenting the creature as a model of self-sufficiency. Ishmael urges humanity to emulate the whale’s strong individual vitality, maintaining an internal warmth and independence regardless of the hostile, freezing environment, remaining in the world without being of it.
The stripped carcass is cast adrift, floating as a colossal marble sepulchre besieged by sharks and screaming fowls. Ishmael condemns this vultureism, noting the hypocrisy of scavengers who feast piously on the whale they ignored in life. The mass becomes a phantom hazard; timid sailors mistake it for land, logging it as a dangerous shoal. Consequently, superstitious ships shun the empty water for years based on this error, illustrating how groundless beliefs persist as orthodoxy. Ishmael concludes that while the whale was a terror in life, his ghost becomes a powerless panic to the world.
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