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“ Tell me about it , ” said Ahab . “ Where did you see him ? How long ago ? ” The Englishman told his story . On his last voyage he met Moby Dick near the Equator . He harpooned the whale , but its great tail came down and broke his boat in two . In the water , the point of another harpoon caught his arm . The wound became very bad , and the ship’s doctor had to cut the arm off . Later he saw the white whale again , but this time he did not go near him . “ Once was enough for me , ” he said . “ Moby Dick is welcome to the arm he has . I don’t want him to have the other one . He’s best left alone , sir . ” “ Which way was he going ? ” asked Ahab . “ Towards the east , I think , ” said the captain . Then he looked at Ahab carefully . “ Is your captain mad ? ” he whispered to Fedallah . Ahab did not wait . He jumped into his boat so fast that his ivory leg cracked badly . Back on the Pequod , he ordered the ship to turn at once . Then he called the ship’s carpenter to make him a new leg . Some time before this meeting , something sad happened to a boy on our ship called Pip . He was very young and small , and he came from Connecticut . He was usually happy , and he played the tambourine and danced when the men were resting . One day there were not enough men for Stubb’s boat , so Pip had to go . When a whale hit the boat , Pip jumped out in fear . The boat was racing after the whale , and nobody went back for him . For hours he floated alone in the middle of the wide , empty ocean . At last , by pure luck , the ship came past and picked him up . But after that day he was not the same . His mind seemed to live somewhere else , far away . He walked around the deck and said strange , sad things . The sailors called him mad . But Ahab , who was so hard with everybody , was kind to Pip . Later he took Pip into his own cabin , and he held his little hand . XI . Queequeg’s Coffin We were sailing north through the seas of Asia when my friend Queequeg became ill . He was working deep down in the ship , among the oil barrels , where it was cold and wet . There he caught a terrible fever . For many days he lay in his hammock , the hanging bed where sailors sleep . He grew thinner and thinner , but his eyes grew brighter every day . One morning Queequeg called the others to him . He asked them to do something strange . In Nantucket he had seen small canoes of dark wood , and he had heard that dead whalemen were buried in them there . In his own country , too , dead warriors were laid in canoes and sent out to sea . He wanted the same for himself . He did not want to be sewn into his hammock and thrown into the sea , like other dead sailors . He wanted a coffin that was like a canoe .
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