that it was impossible to cast them off.  Meantime everything in the Pequod was aslant.  To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house.  The ship groaned and gasped.  Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.  In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.

“Hold on, hold on, won’t ye?” cried Stubb to the body, “don’t be in such a devil of a hurry to sink!  By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it.  No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains.”

“Knife?  Aye, aye,” cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter’s heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing at the largest fluke-chains.  But a few strokes, full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest.  With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it.  Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface.  If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him.  But it is not so.  For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them! even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.

Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species.  Where one of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do.  This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale; his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free.  But there are instances where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises, more buoyant than in life.  But the reason of this is obvious.  Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon.  A line-of-battle ship could hardly keep him under then.  In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.