The First Lowering — Moby-Dick

Before the ship's company can take them in, Fedallah and his tiger-yellow crew cast loose the spare boat that has always hung as the captain's. Ahab gets a ready, orders the boats down, and a fourth keel comes round the stern with those five strangers rowing him. He tells the mates to spread. They stare instead. Archy tells Flask the yellow men are the stowaways he heard under the hatches. Stubb turns the fright into a rowing sermon, fun spiced with fury, and even has them pull with knives in their teeth. Starbuck, face like flint, calls the strangers a sad piece of smuggling and tells his crew to pull for sperm oil, duty and profit together. Stubb decides the White Whale is behind the hiding and is not the fish today. Ishmael thinks of the shadows that crept aboard in the Nantucket dawn, and of Elijah.

Ahab's crew pulls like hammers and peaks the oars together when the whales sink. Flask, too short to see, stands on Daggoo's shoulders. Stubb's pipe never lights. Tashtego spots a patch of white-green water a landsman would miss, and all four boats chase. The oarsmen are not allowed to look. Starbuck's boat sets a sail, loses the others in mist, and he whispers that there is time to kill a fish before the squall. Queequeg darts. Squall, whale, and iron hit together. The whale is only grazed and is gone. The swamped boat is lashed with its own oars. Queequeg holds a lit lantern on a pole in the middle of the storm. At dawn the Pequod looms out of the mist and runs the abandoned boat under. The crew is taken up. The other boats had already cut loose and got back. The ship had given Starbuck's men up, and was still cruising for an oar or a lance pole.