 Therefore he had not
solicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on
that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measure of his own touching all
that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little foreseen
it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out of port, all hands
had concluded the customary business of fitting the whale-boats for service;
when some time after this Ahab was now and then found bestirring himself in the
matter of making thole-pins with his own hands for what was thought to be one of
the spare boats, and even solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which
when the line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow; when all
this was observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand
the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety he evinced in
exactly shaping the thigh-board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called, the
horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in darting or
stabbing at the whale; when it was observed how often he stood up in that boat
with his solitary knee fixed in the semicircular depression in the cleat, and
with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and straightened it a
little there; all these things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity
at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative
heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby-Dick;
for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster in person.
But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest suspicion as to any
boat's crew being assigned to that boat.
    Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away;
for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds
and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the
earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often
pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on
planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and
what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the
cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle.
    But be all this as it may, certain
