- Ahab comes on deck and discovers the carpenter turning Queequeg’s coffin into a life-buoy.
- Ahab is disturbed by the extreme irony of this activity and by the way that the carpenter has made both life and death—he’s made a new leg for Ahab, but also a coffin for Queequeg.
- Ahab muses that "in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality preserver" and goes back into his cabin to discuss this idea with Pip (127.21).