ad barrels of beef and bread been given away to
make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental
casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were
stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and officers' state-rooms.
Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the
cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the
floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually
caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously
added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and
filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled
it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and
filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands
into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.

As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of
the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured
aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy at
the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been
removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed
Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and
mortar were being hurled into the sea.

Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the
ship's elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was
full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual
diversion.

And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,
with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's
wakes--one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings
as to things to come--their two captains in themselves impe