Tashtego Harvests the Spermaceti
Chapter 78 of Moby-Dick by opens with Tashtego, the Gay-Header harpooner, climbing nimbly aloft and running along the mainyard-arm until he stands directly above the hoisted sperm whale's head. Using a light tackle called a whip, he lowers himself onto the summit of the great "Tun" and begins searching for the right place to break into the case, proceeding "very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in." Once the opening is made, a stout iron-bound bucket is lowered into the head on a rope, and Tashtego uses a long pole to guide it deep inside. Each time the bucket surfaces, it comes up "all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail of new milk," brimming with fragrant spermaceti that is emptied into large tubs on deck.
The Fall into the Whale's Head
After eighty or ninety buckets have been drawn up, disaster strikes. Whether from carelessness, treacherous footing, or some darker agency, Tashtego suddenly plunges headfirst into the whale's case and vanishes with "a horrible oily gurgling." Daggoo immediately mounts the head to attempt a rescue, but while he is clearing a fouled line, one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tears free. The entire mass swings violently, making the ship reel "as if smitten by an iceberg." The remaining hook threatens to give way at any moment, and the crew shouts for Daggoo to come down. Instead, the brave harpooner rams the bucket into the collapsed well, hoping Tashtego can seize it from below.
Queequeg's Daring Rescue
Before Daggoo's plan can succeed, the last hook fails and the enormous head crashes into the sea "like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool." While Daggoo clings to the swinging tackles overhead, Tashtego sinks with the head toward the ocean floor. Without hesitation, Queequeg appears at the bulwarks with a boarding-sword in hand and dives in after his shipmate. Agonizing moments pass with no sign of either man, until Daggoo spots an arm thrust upright from the waves, followed by a shout: "Both! both!" Queequeg surfaces, boldly striking out with one hand while clutching Tashtego's long hair with the other. Both men are pulled into a waiting boat and brought back aboard.
A Delivery and a Meditation on Death
Ishmael reveals how Queequeg accomplished this "noble rescue": diving after the slowly sinking head, he used his sword to cut a hole near its bottom, then thrust his arm inside and hauled Tashtego out by the head, performing what Ishmael calls "a running delivery." When Queequeg first reached in, he grasped a leg but, "well knowing that that was not as it ought to be," turned Tashtego around for a proper headfirst extraction. Ishmael wryly declares that "midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing." The chapter closes with a meditation on what Tashtego's death would have meant had Queequeg not intervened: to perish "smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale." Ishmael compares this to the "delicious death" of an Ohio honey-hunter who fell into a hollow tree full of honey and died embalmed, then asks how many have "likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there."