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They viciously snapped , not only at each other’s disembowelments , but like flexible bows , bent round , and bit their own ; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth , to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound . Nor was this all . It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures . A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones , after what might be called the individual life had departed . Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin , one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off , when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw . * The whaling - spade used for cutting - in is made of the very best steel ; is about the bigness of a man’s spread hand ; and in general shape , corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named ; only its sides are perfectly flat , and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower . This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible ; and when being used is occasionally honed , just like a razor . In its socket , a stiff pole , from twenty to thirty feet long , is inserted for a handle . “ Queequeg no care what god made him shark , ” said the savage , agonizingly lifting his hand up and down ; “ wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god ; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin . ” CHAPTER 67 . Cutting In . It was a Saturday night , and such a Sabbath as followed ! Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen . The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble ; every sailor a butcher . You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods . In the first place , the enormous cutting tackles , among other ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green , and which no single man can possibly lift — this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up to the main - top and firmly lashed to the lower mast - head , the strongest point anywhere above a ship’s deck . The end of the hawser - like rope winding through these intricacies , was then conducted to the windlass , and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale ; to this block the great blubber hook , weighing some one hundred pounds , was attached . And now suspended in stages over the side , Starbuck and Stubb , the mates , armed with their long spades , began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side - fins . This done , a broad , semicircular line is cut round the hole , the hook is inserted , and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus , now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass . When instantly , the entire ship careens over on her side ; every bolt in her starts like the nail - heads of an old house in frosty weather ; she trembles , quivers , and nods her frighted mast - heads to the sky .
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