98 
MOBY DICK; OR 
4,000,000 of dollars ; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, 
$20,000,000 ; and every year importing into our harbours a well reaped 
harvest of $7,000,000 ? How comes all this, if there be not something 
puissant in whaling ? 
But this is not the half ; look again. 
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his 
life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last 
sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, 
taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. 
One way and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in them- 
selves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that 
whaling may well he regarded as that Egyptian mother who bore off- 
spring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, 
endless task to catalogue all those things. Let a handful suffice. For 
many years past the whale ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out 
the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas 
and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver 
had ever sailed. If American and European, men-of-war now peace- 
fully ride in once savage harbours, let them fire salutes to the honour 
and the glory of the whale ship, which originally showed them the way, 
and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may cele- 
brate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, 
your Krusensterns ; hut I say that scores of anonymous Captains have 
sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your 
Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succourless empty-handed- 
ness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of 
unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors 
that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have 
dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea 
Voyages, those things were hut the lifetime commonplaces of our heroic 
Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three 
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the 
ship’s common log. Ah, the world ! Oh, the world ! 
Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but 
colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between 
Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the 
Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous 
