Chương Chương 6 · The Street.

If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish

an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a

civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first

daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will

frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign

parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners

will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not

unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live

Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water

Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only

sailors; but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street

corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy

flesh. It makes a stranger stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,

and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft

which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still

more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town

scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain

and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames;

fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and

snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence

they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old.

Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat

and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.

Here comes another with a sou’-wester and a bombazine cloak.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a

downright bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his

two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a

country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished

reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the

comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his

sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his

canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those

straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps,

buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals,

and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a

queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would

this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of

Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten

one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to

live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not

like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run

with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs.

Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more

patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New

Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of

a country?

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty

mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave

houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian

oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the

bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their

daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.

You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,

they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly

burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples—long

avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful

and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by

their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is

art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright

terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at

creation’s final day.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But

roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks

is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that

bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young

girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off

shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of

the Puritanic sands.