CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF
'CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S
EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c.
| No. 418. NEW
SERIES. |
SATURDAY, JANUARY 3, 1852. |
PRICE 1½d. |
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.
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Edinburgh. Also sold by W.S. ORR, Amen Corner, London; D.N.
CHAMBERS, 55 West Nile Street, Glasgow; and J. M'GLASHAN, 50
Upper Sackville Street, Dublin.—Advertisements for
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respecting their insertion must be made.
