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But Fedal­lah, put­ting a fin­ger on his lip, slid over the bul­warks to take the boat’s stee­ring oar, and Ahab, swin­ging the cut­ting-tack­le towards him, com­man­ded the ship’s sail­ors to stand by to lower.
In a moment he was stan­ding in the boat’s stern, and the Manil­la men were sprin­ging to their oars. In vain the Eng­lish Cap­tain hai­led him. With back to the stran­ger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till along­side of the Pequod.
Ere the Eng­lish ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that she hai­led from Lon­don, and was named after the late Samu­el Enderby, mer­chant of that city, the ori­gi­nal of the famous wha­ling house of Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman’s opi­ni­on, comes not far behind the united roy­al hou­ses of the Tudors and Bour­bons, in point of real his­to­ri­cal inte­rest. How long, pri­or to the year of our Lord 1775, this gre­at wha­ling house was in exis­tence, my num­e­rous fish-docu­ments do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fit­ted out the first Eng­lish ships that ever regu­lar­ly hun­ted the Sperm Wha­le; though for some score of years pre­vious (ever sin­ce 1726) our vali­ant Coff­ins and Maceys of Nan­tu­cket and the Viney­ard had in lar­ge fleets pur­sued that Levia­than, but only in the North and South Atlan­tic: not else­whe­re. Be it distinct­ly recor­ded here, that the Nan­tu­cket­ers were the first among man­kind to har­poon with civi­li­zed steel the gre­at Sperm Wha­le; and that for half a cen­tu­ry they were the only peo­p­le of the who­le glo­be who so har­poo­ned him.