What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on
a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood!
They first caught crabs and quahogs in the sand;
grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel;
more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured
cod; and at last, launching a navy of great ships
on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant
belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at Behring’s
Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared
everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that
has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!
That Himmalehan, salt-sea, Mastodon, clothed with such
portentousness of unconscious power, that his very
panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless
and malicious assaults!
And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea
hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun
and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders;
parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland.
Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon
Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang
out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of
this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s.
For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires;
other seamen having but a right of way through it.
Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones
but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though
following the sea as highwaymen the road. they but
plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like
themselves, without seeking to draw their living from
the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer,
he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in
Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro
ploughing it as his own special plantation. There
is his home; there lies his business which a Noah’s
flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all
the millions in China. He lives on the sea,
as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the
waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the
Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that
when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman.
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her
wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at
nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land,
furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under
his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
