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CHAPTER 54 . The Town - Ho’s Story . ( As told at the Golden Inn . ) The Cape of Good Hope , and all the watery region round about there , is much like some noted four corners of a great highway , where you meet more travellers than in any other part . It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another homeward - bound whaleman , the Town - Ho , * was encountered . She was manned almost wholly by Polynesians . In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news of Moby Dick . To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town - Ho’s story , which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain wondrous , inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men . This latter circumstance , with its own particular accompaniments , forming what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated , never reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates . For that secret part of the story was unknown to the captain of the Town - Ho himself . It was the private property of three confederate white seamen of that ship , one of whom , it seems , communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy , but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep , and revealed so much of it in that way , that when he 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 .
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