Moby Dick

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at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb
the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings
with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming
round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few
sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping
of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers'
hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you
heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on
their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all
but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they
contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the
universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale,
may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking
for a screw.

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks