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 will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like
hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to
bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while
the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving
each other's live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled,
the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely
carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you
to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much
the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough
for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders
of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting
alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or
a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like
instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and
occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most
hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when
you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more
jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a
whaleship at sea.
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