It was about nine o’clock at night that the Pequod’s try-works were first started on this present voyage.  It belonged to Stubb to oversee the business.

“All ready there?  Off hatch, then, and start her.  You cook, fire the works.”  This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage.  Here be it said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a time with wood.  After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel.  In a word, after being tried out, the crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its unctuous properties.  These fritters feed the flames.  Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.  Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in it for the time.  It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres.  It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation.  We were clear from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean darkness was intense.  But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.  The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.  So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them.  Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship’s stokers.  With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet.  The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps.  To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.  Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass.  This served for a sea-sofa.  Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads.  Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.  As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words