other ships, other fragments of the land like themselves,
without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless deep 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 not 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.



CHAPTER 15

Chowder


It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly
to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend
to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed.
The landlord of the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin
Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one
of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured