The Shark Massacre — Moby-Dick

After a sperm whale is lashed alongside at night, most crews refuse to cut in until daylight: the work needs every hand awake, so sails come in, the helm is lashed, hammocks fill, and two sailors at a time rotate an anchor-watch through the dark. On the Pacific Line that courtesy becomes suicide. Sharks gather in incalculable hosts around the moored carcase, and six idle hours would leave little more than a skeleton for the flensing knives.

Stubb still posts watch after supper. Queequeg and a forecastle hand take the deck while the ship sleeps. They swing cutting stages over the side, lower three lanterns until the turbid water glows, and begin a steady slaughter with long whaling-spades driven at the skull, the only place that seems to kill. The Pequod's sharks are so dense that an unaccustomed eye might take the whole round sea for one huge cheese and the fins for maggots writhing in it.

The foam hides the marksmen as often as it helps them. Wounded sharks snap at each other's entrails, bend like bows, and bite their own guts until the same meat seems swallowed and voided again through the gaping wounds. Even hoisted corpses fight back: when Queequeg tries to shut a dead jaw on deck, the shark nearly takes his hand, as if pantheistic life lingered in the joints after the individual was gone.

Queequeg pumps his bruised fist and curses the maker, Fiji or Nantucket, as one dam Ingin. Rest was promised; instead the watch keeps the prize from being eaten before the butchers arrive.