CHAPTER 14
Nantucket
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after
a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of
the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than
the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it— a mere hillock, and elbow of sand;
all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would
use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome
wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow
naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond
seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in
Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people
there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer
time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a
prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-
shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed,
surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very
chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering as to the
backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no
Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled
by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped
down upon the New England coast and carried off an infant Indian in his
talons. With loud lament the parents saw their 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 discovered the island, and there they found an
empty ivory casket,— the poor little Indian’s skeleton.
What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quahogs in the sand;
grown bolder, 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
circumnavigations 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, Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of
unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be 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 but a right of way through it.
Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but 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 another
world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the
landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between
billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,
and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses
and whales.
