But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.  This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale.  When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night.  On one side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen.  They generally go in pairs,—­a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man.  The whaling-pike is similar to a frigate’s boarding-weapon of the same name.  The gaff is something like a boat-hook.  With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches and lurches about.  Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces.  This spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan’s feet are shoeless; the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge.  If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants’, would you be very much astonished?  Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men.

CHAPTER 95

The Cassock

Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers.  Not the wondrous cistern in the whale’s huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,—­longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.  And an idol, indeed, it is; or rather, in old times, its likeness was.  Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which, King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th chapter of the First Book of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying a dead comrade from the field.  Extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the pelt of a boa.  This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging, to dry.  Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it.  The mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.  Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.