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Consider , now , how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging one unusually strong , active , and knowing whale ; when owing to these qualities in him , as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of such an audacious enterprise , eight or ten loose second irons may be simultaneously dangling about him . For , of course , each boat is supplied with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be ineffectually darted without recovery . All these particulars are faithfully narrated here , as they will not fail to elucidate several most important , however intricate passages , in scenes hereafter to be painted . CHAPTER 64 . Stubb’s Supper . Stubb’s whale had been killed some distance from the ship . It was a calm ; so , forming a tandem of three boats , we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod . And now , as we eighteen men with our thirty - six arms , and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers , slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert , sluggish corpse in the sea ; and it seemed hardly to budge at all , except at long intervals ; good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we moved . For , upon the great canal of Hang - Ho , or whatever they call it , in China , four or five laborers on the foot - path will draw a bulky freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour ; but this grand argosy we towed heavily forged along , as if laden with pig - lead in bulk . Darkness came on ; but three lights up and down in the Pequod’s main - rigging dimly guided our way ; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks . Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment , he issued the usual orders for securing it for the night , and then handing his lantern to a seaman , went his way into the cabin , and did not come forward again until morning . Though , in overseeing the pursuit of this whale , Captain Ahab had evinced his customary activity , to call it so ; yet now that the creature was dead , some vague dissatisfaction , or impatience , or despair , seemed working in him ; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain ; and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship , all that would not one jot advance his grand , monomaniac object . Very soon you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod’s decks , that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in the deep ; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck , and thrust rattling out of the port - holes . But by those clanking links , the vast corpse itself , not the ship , is to be moored .
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