Moby Dick; Or, The Whale

by Herman Melville

  Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning;so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

  Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real cornerof the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore,more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as asubstitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell youthat they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally;that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyondseas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of woodin Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome;that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get underthe shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis,three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes,something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter islandof by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clamswill sometimes be found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles.But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

  Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how thisisland was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend.In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New Englandcoast and carried off an infant Indian in his talons.With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight overthe wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction.Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage theydiscovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian's skeleton.

  What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should taketo the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quahogsin 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 thiswatery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it;peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceansdeclared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass thathas survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!That Himmalehan, salt-sea, Mastodon, clothed with such portentousnessof unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreadedthan 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 conqueredthe watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out amongthem the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the threepirate 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 thisterraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his;he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a rightof 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 plunderother 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 floodwould not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millionsin China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie;he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois huntersclimb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so thatwhen he comes to it at last, it smells like another world,more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With thelandless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rockedto 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.