Midnight, Forecastle — Moby-Dick

Midnight on the forecastle, the watch sings farewell to the Spanish ladies until a Nantucket sailor calls sentiment bad for the digestion and swings them into a whale song. Eight bells cut it short. Pip is ordered to strike the bell and hail the sleepers up. One sailor says the old Mogul's wine deadens some men and stirs others, so this watch sings while the other lies like casks. A jig starts. Pip cannot find the tambourine and is told to beat his own belly. Half the men dance. Tashtego smokes and saves his sweat. An old Manx sailor asks whether they know what they are dancing over, then tells them to go on. They are young, and he was once.

The wind rises. Ahab, someone says, ordered the mate to kill a squall by firing the ship into it, the way a pistol bursts a waterspout. The crew cheers the captain and his whale. The Manx sailor finds a lurid mark in the black sky to match Ahab's birthmark. Daggoo says anyone afraid of black is afraid of him. A Spanish sailor calls that a bully and an old grudge, and they go for knives while the others form a ring. The mate's hail ends it: in top-gallant sails, stand by to reef. The dancers jump for the squall.

Pip stays under the windlass. He has heard all their chat, and the white whale only once, though an old man swore them in to hunt it this very evening. He asks the God in that darkness to keep a small boy from men who cannot feel fear.