 secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears of
Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was unknown to the
captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private property of three confederate
white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it seems, communicated it to Tashtego
with Romish injunctions of secrecy, but the following night Tashtego rambled in
his sleep, and revealed so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he
could not well withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this
thing have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it,
and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this
matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never transpired
abaft the Pequod's mainmast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread
with the story as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange
affair I now proceed to put on lasting record.
    For my humour's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it
at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve, smoking
upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the
young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer terms with me; and hence the
interluding questions they occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the
time.
    »Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, sperm whaler of Nantucket, was
cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail westward from the eaves
of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the northward of the Line. One
morning upon handling the pumps, according to daily usage, it was observed that
she made more water in her hold than common. They supposed a sword-fish had
stabbed her, gentlemen. But the captain, having some unusual reason for
believing that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes, and therefore
being very averse to quit them; and the leak not being then considered at all
dangerous, though, indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as
low down as was possible in rather heavy weather; the ship still continued her
cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals; but no
good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered,
but it sensibly increased. So much
