Chapter 71 66．nasty freeloader shark

For whaling ships, each whaling process is actually composed of two stages, namely the capture stage and the processing stage. After the capture stage is over, generally speaking, the processing stage will not be entered immediately, because everyone is exhausted and has no energy to move on to the next thing. And processing requires all people to work together, and it also takes a lot of effort. Usually everyone drags the dead whale back to the boat from the place of capture first, and is firmly tied with the boat. Otherwise, the dead whale is likely to be blown away by wind and waves or dragged away by some other animal.

After that, all the people, except those on duty, went back to their respective cabins to sleep, because there was more heavy work to be done tomorrow. Before dawn, there are always people on the stern on watch for the night. Usually, there are four people in a shift, each shift lasts an hour, and everyone takes turns to be on duty. The most common thing I encountered during the night watch was probably sharks coming to eat dead whales in groups. Hardly when there are no sharks swarming a dead whale. But under normal circumstances, the number of sharks is not very large, and you can let them eat. At most, you can find a whaling shovel and stick it into the water, stir it up fiercely, and scare most of them away.

But sometimes this approach doesn't work at all. For example, on the equator near the Pacific Ocean, if a dead whale is left for six hours, then at dawn, the dead whale will only have a huge skeleton at best. As for all other things, they have already entered the belly of countless large sharks. In the process of sharks eating dead whales, no matter how intimidating you are, it will have no effect. This time, Stubb and the others encountered a similar thing. When Stubb had finished his platoon, and was content to go on deck for the night, Queequeg and another sailor were there. Their arrival alarmed the sharks below and surprised Stubb and the others.

"Why the hell are there so many?" Cursing, Queequeg lowered the two ladders, found two lanterns, and lowered them down the ladders to light up the water. Then Queequeg began to poke at one shark after another with his shovel. To the sharks, the attack of Queequeg and his partner with the shovel was undoubtedly fatal. Because their target is the skulls of these sharks. However, as the sharks began to rampage after being attacked, Queequeg and the others also began to attack without thinking. In this way, the shark group is even more chaotic. The ones that were hit in the head floated on the water, and the ones that had their stomachs scooped up threw the whale meat they had just eaten and their own intestines everywhere.

The sharks were shoveled like crazy by Queequeg and the others. They began to fight among themselves, biting each other, and even biting themselves, until the sea surface was littered with corpses, and the cups and plates were messed up. So Queequeg and the others dragged some of them up, and tried to skin them. Just as Queequeg was about to close the mouth of a dead shark, the dead shark's mouth gave a mysterious bite, which almost killed Queequeg's hand. Queequeg was even annoyed. He skinned the shark furiously, and kept cursing: "I don't care where you come from, from the gods of the sky or from the gods of the earth, I just want to kill you and show you to the demon who created you!"