Chapter 72 67．split the prize

Its daybreak. The Pequod is going to slaughter the sperm whale it just caught today. It happened to be a Sunday, which is the Sabbath in Christianity. But every sailor on the Pequod became a butcher. The "slaughter" mentioned here actually means to cut off the useful things on the whale, that is, the whale oil. This is an extremely cumbersome and highly technical job, and it will dazzle the layman. Starbuck and Stubb stood on the little hanging ladder at the side of the boat, each holding a long shovel in his hand. They first shoveled two holes in the whale's body near the top of the two fins.

After that, use a shovel to shovel out a semicircular small ditch around the two holes, and then hook the hook that came down from the boat on the hole. Once the hook was secured, they greeted the ship, and the sailors on board began to work hard. The sailors huddled close together beside the winch, shouting and starting to work hard. The winch was attached by an impossibly strong rope through a great series of blocks on the lower masthead, and connected to the whale hook. The sailors wrung hard. With every effort, the hull trembled violently. After a while, the hull leaned heavily towards the whale.

This shows that the pulling force given to the whale by the rope and the hook is strong enough. Finally, with a loud hissing sound, the boat tore off the first piece of blubber from the whale. At the same time the boat threw back violently, nearly turned over, and separated from the whale. The way the boat divides the blubber in this way is somewhat similar to the way sharks eat the meat of large whales. In this way, the whole crew cooperated closely and repeated the process over and over again, just like peeling an orange, cutting off large pieces of blubber from the big whale. When the whole whale was almost stripped naked, the whale's body had been hoisted so that the top was almost touching the mainmast.

The stripped big whale was dripping with blood, dangling above people's heads, everyone carefully dodged it, for fear that the big white guy would bump into it and fall into the sea. The cut blubber is continuously sent to the refinery. The oil refining room also started to become lively. Except for occasional shouts and curses, everyone is busy.