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 quahogs
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.
