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1Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
2Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away
3off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without
4a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
5gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada
6thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket
7are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get
8under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that
9they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way
10inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
11sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no
12Illinois. Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the
13legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons.
14With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the
15same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found
16an empty ivory casket,--the poor little Indian's skeleton. What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach,
17should take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out
18with nets for mackerel; more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last, launching a navy of
19great ships on the sea, explored this watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in at
20Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has
21survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such
22portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious
23assaults! And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and
24conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans,
25as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English
26overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
27Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of way through
28it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though
29following the sea as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves,
30without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the
31sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There
32is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions
33in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois
34hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another
35world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is
36rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him
37to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
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