What is the purpose of the second full paragraph (beginning "I was the attendant or page") of Chapter 47 of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick?

The second full paragraph of Chapter 47 of Herman
Melville’s novel Moby-Dick has a number of purposes and effects,
including the following:

• It emphasizes once more
  the friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg – a major theme of the
  novel.


• It emphasizes the idea of cooperation, equality,
  and mutuality between these two men, who serve on a ship dominated by a captain who is
  monomaniacal and who isolates himself from and above his
  men.


• There may perhaps be some humorous sexual
  connotations in the language of the second sentence. (Melville loves this kind of
  humor.)


• The calm, placid atmosphere here contrasts with,
  and thus helps highlight, all the action that will come later in the
  novel.


• This paragraph emphasizes Ishmael’s
  thoughtfulness, his tendency to meditate on things and engage in philosophical
  speculation.


• The paragraph explicitly emphasizes such
  major themes of the novel as Time and Fate (especially the
  latter).


• The theme of Fate, in particular, may be
  relevant to the role of Captain Ahab and especially of his relationship with his crew. 
  It is easy to think of the determined, relentless Ahab as
  an

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unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely
enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its
own.

• Ishmael,
  however, himself interprets the weaving as
  follows:

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This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I,
with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable
threads.

This whole long
paragraph, then, can be seen as part of the novel’s larger meditations on the crucial
issue of fate and free will. It suggests that even as we make our own choices we find
ourselves caught up in and by larger forces over which we have no
control.

• The paragraph also offers thoughts on
  the role in life of mere chance (in addition to fate and free will), thus suggesting
  that the fabrics of our lives are affected by at least three different forces whose
  final results no one can really predict.


• This paragraph,
  then, helps contribute to the thought-provoking philosophical richness which is one of
  the great features of Melville’s stirring
  book.