Moby Dick

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It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus
continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But
the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale,
for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a
velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,
pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a
hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an
unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable
only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it
sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of
overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
soon swayed up to their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having
been previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her
side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it
with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the
Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known,