was wakened he could not well
withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing
have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of
it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in
this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never
transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the
ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting
record.

*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.

For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,
smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those
fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer
terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally
put, and which are duly answered at the time.

"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward
from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to
daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than
common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the
captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck
awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit
them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though,
indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down
as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals;
but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet
undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking
some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest
harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.

"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
because his pumps were of the best, and be