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.

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quahogs
in the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel;
more experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod;
and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this
watery world; put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it;
peeped in at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans
declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that
has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous!
That Himmalehan, 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!

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits,
issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered
the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among
them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three
pirate powers did Poland. 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
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