After Queequeg’s saving of the overboard passenger, nothing of note occurred on the passage to Nantucket.
Ishmael then regales the reader with near a page of folk lore as to the nature of this whaling outpost, closing with:
“…that they are so shut up, belted about, every way enclosed, 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.”
He then goes on to relate the Native American legend of Nantucket:
“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.”
He goes onto describe how much of the world’s surface the Indian canoe hunters navigated, being greater in size than any nation, and that they did so in the pursuit of marvelous prey:
“…That Himalayan, 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!”
Ishmael then goes on to extol, in a prideful spirit, the unique freedom of the whaler:
“…For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empire; 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...”
He concludes as he nears the base of whaling operations, from where his adventure will truly begin:
“…With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between the 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.”
