Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American tubline, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great wedding-cake to present to the whales. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.
All men live enveloped in whale-lines.
And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.