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 to pass 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 sea 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 scarcely 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.--_Herman Melville's
The Whale_.