Chapter 16.00: CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.

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CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.
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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.