CHAPTER 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 the 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.