from the lead-lined chocks of the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue—­the gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air.  And the whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish.  But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this “holding on,” as it is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes.  Yet not to speak of the peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted.  Because, owing to the enormous surface of him—­ in a full grown sperm whale something less than 2000 square feet—­ the pressure of the water is immense.  We all know what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean!  It must at least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres.  One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on board.

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!  Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.  Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock.  Suspended? and to what?  To three bits of board.  Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—­“Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears?  The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon:  he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!” This the creature? this he?  Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets.  For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod’s fishspears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes’ army.  Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

“Stand by, men; he stirs,” cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman felt them in his seat.  The next moment, relieved in a great part from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it into the sea.