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Table of Contents
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 ..
2 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 snowshoes; 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 ..
3 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. ..
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