Kabanata Kabanata 14 · Nantucket.

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 corner of

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 a substitute for blotting paper. Some

gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they

don’t grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have

to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that

pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true

cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,

to get under the 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 island

of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will

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 this island was

settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle

swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant

Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child

borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the

same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage

they discovered 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

take to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs

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.