223 
THE WHITE WHALE 
the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically re- 
lieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship 
free ; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well-nigh 
the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the 
Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port 
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the 
brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly 
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from 
Buffalo. 
“ ‘Lakeman ! — Buffalo ! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is 
Buffalo V said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass. 
“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but — I crave your 
courtesy — may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now, gen- 
tlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as large 
and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla ; 
this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been 
nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly con- 
nected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those 
grand fresh-water seas of ours, — Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and 
Superior, and Michigan, — possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with 
many of the ocean’s noblest traits ; with many of its rimmed varieties 
of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic 
isles, even as the Polynesian waters do ; in large part, are shored by two 
great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is ; they furnish long maritime 
approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted 
all round their banks ; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and 
by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the 
fleet thunderings of naval victories ; at intervals, they yield their beaches 
to wild barbarians, whose red-painted faces flash from out their peltry 
wigwams ; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered 
forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic 
genealogies; those same woods harbouring wild Afric beasts of prey, 
and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; 
they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Win- 
nebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the 
armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beach canoe ; they are 
