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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,

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would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it.

It might be that a long interval would elapse ere the White Whale

was seen.  During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to fall

into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership,

unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought

to bear upon him.  Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab

respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly manifested than in his

superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present,

the hunt should in some way be stripped of that strange imaginative

impiousness which naturally invested it; that the full terror of the

voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background (for few men's

courage is proof against protracted meditation unrelieved by action);

that when they stood their long night watches, his officers and men must

have some nearer things to think of than Moby Dick.  For however eagerly

and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the announcement of his quest;

yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable--

they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness--

and when retained for any object remote and blank in the pursuit,

however promissory of life and passion in the end, it is above all things

requisite that temporary interests and employments should intervene

and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.

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an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a sworn

affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.



In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two

other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes

himself "H. Durand."  One of them, though not precisely adapted to our

present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts.

It is a quiet noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French

whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board;

the loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms

in the background, both drooping together in the breezeless air.

The effect is very fine, when considered with reference to its

presenting the hardy fishermen under one of their few aspects of

oriental repose.  The other engraving is quite a different affair:

the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the very heart of

the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the vessel

(in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a quay;

and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity,

is about giving chase to whales in the distance.  The harpoons

and lances lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting

the mast in its hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little