the whip; while the other
end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three
alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian,
to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this
pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun,
till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the
whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail
of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted
vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large
tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until
the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to
ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun,
until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.

Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a
queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,
was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the
place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil
One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular
reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden,
as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor
Tashtego--like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with
a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and putting one foot
into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip
itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost
before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,
there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea,
as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only
the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
depth to which he had sunk.

At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing
the whip--which had somehow got foul of the