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Table of Contents
Chapter 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, Tongatabooarrs, 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.
..
2 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 ..
3 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.
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