THE WHITE WHALE 57 
Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw the 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 dis- 
covered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket, — the 
poor little Indian’s skeleton. 
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, horn on a beach, should 
take to the sea for a livelihood ! They first caught crabs and quohogs 
in the sands ; grown holder, 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 circumnavigation 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 Masto- 
don, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his 
very panics are more to he 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 hut a right of way through it. Merchant ships are hut exten- 
sion bridges ; armed ones hut 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 
