gh to be sure when, after being a little while out
of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the
knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed
how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness
in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick;
for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster
in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest
suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained
a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like
this,