Guarding the Whale Overnight
Chapter 66 of Moby-Dick opens with 's narrator, Ishmael, explaining the standard procedure when a captured Sperm Whale is brought alongside the ship late at night. Because the labor-intensive process of cutting-in requires all hands and cannot be completed quickly, it is customary to lash the helm, take in all sail, and send the crew below to their hammocks until daylight. An anchor-watch of rotating pairs keeps vigil on deck to ensure nothing goes wrong during the night.
A Sea of Sharks
Ishmael warns that this plan often fails in the Pacific, particularly on the Line, where incalculable hosts of sharks gather around the moored carcass. Left unchecked for six hours, the sharks would reduce the whale to little more than a skeleton by morning. In most other waters, their voracity can be somewhat diminished by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, though this procedure sometimes only seems to tickle the sharks into greater activity. The scene around the Pequod is so extreme that Ishmael compares the round sea to one huge cheese, with the sharks serving as the maggots in it.
Queequeg and the Forecastle Seaman Fight Back
After Stubb's supper concludes, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman take the anchor-watch. They immediately suspend cutting stages over the side and lower three lanterns, casting long gleams of light over the turbid sea. The two mariners dart their long whaling-spades into the sharks' skulls—seemingly the only vital part of these creatures. The scene devolves into brutal chaos: in the foamy confusion, the marksmen cannot always hit their mark, and the wounded sharks viciously snap at each other's disembowelments. Some bend like flexible bows and bite their own entrails, swallowing them over and over through the same mouth only to void them through the gaping wound.
Vitality Beyond Death
The chapter's most unsettling revelation is that even dead sharks remain dangerous. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seems to lurk in their very joints and bones after the individual life has departed. When one shark is killed and hoisted on deck for its skin, its supposedly dead jaw nearly takes Queequeg's hand off. The chapter closes with Queequeg's memorable declaration about the god who made sharks: "Queequeg no care what god made him shark—wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin." This darkly comic remark blends Queequeg's animistic worldview with the chapter's broader meditation on nature's indifferent, relentless ferocity.