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MOBY DICK; OR 
swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the 
salted wave ; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, 
however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all 
its shrieking crew. 
“Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean 
born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as 
any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him 
down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though 
in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your con- 
templative Pacific; still was he quite as vengeful and full of social 
quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck- 
horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with 
some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner who, though a 
sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered 
by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest 
slave’s right ; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harm- 
less and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far ; but Radney 
was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt — but gentlemen, you shall 
hear. 
“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing 
her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again 
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps 
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilised ocean like 
our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their 
whole way across it ; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer 
of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability 
would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, 
on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom*. Nor in the 
solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it 
altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles' 
in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it 
lie along tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat 
is offered them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out-of- 
the-way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her 
captain begins to feel a little anxious. 
“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak 
was found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern 
