What happened a week after the celebrations in the novel, Moby Dick?

The ship came upon a dead whale floating in the sea.

From the text:

It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, midday sea, that the many noses on the Pequod’s deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea.

Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-foul that circled, and hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fisherman call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an un- appropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an unsavoury odour such a mass must exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed.