Rather than narrate a stroll down the streets of New Bedford, Ishmael uses his stepping outside after breakfast as a point of departure for the discussion of the great variety of persons that might be encountered in port towns around the world.

He then returns in his mind’s eye to New Bedford and considers the character of the locals as well as newly-arrived young men from the up country intent on making a go at the whaling profession:

“No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one—I mean a downright bumpkin dandy—a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands.”

Ishmael then goes on to discuss the affluence of New Bedford, wondering at its source:

“Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

Ishmael discusses the beauty of New Bedford in summer and the means of the fathers who give their daughters away with ‘whales for dowers’, and closes with a sentiment that must strike a sailor when he set out to make his fortune, contemplating his return:

“And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweet-hearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.”