Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it- a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to the very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. 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.

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 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.

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目录(137章)

ETYMOLOGY

Chapter 1 - Loomings

Chapter 2 - The Carpet-Bag

Chapter 3 - The Spouter Inn

Chapter 4 - The Counterpane

Chapter 5 - Breakfast

Chapter 6 - The Street

Chapter 7 - The Chapel

Chapter 8 - The Pulpit

Chapter 9 - The Sermon

Chapter 10 - A Bosom Friend

Chapter 11 - Nightgown

Chapter 12 - Biographical

Chapter 13 - Wheelbarrow

Chapter 14 - Nantucket

Chapter 15 - Chowder

Chapter 16 - The Ship

Chapter 17 - The Ramadan

Chapter 18 - His Mark

Chapter 19 - The Prophet

Chapter 20 - All Astir

Chapter 21 - Going Aboard

Chapter 22 - Merry Christmas

Chapter 23 - The Lee Shore

Chapter 24 - The Advocate

Chapter 25 - Postscript

Chapter 26 - Knights and Squires

Chapter 27 - Knights and Squires

Chapter 28 - Ahab

Chapter 29 - Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb

Chapter 30 - The Pipe

Chapter 31 - Queen Mab

Chapter 32 - Cetology

Chapter 33 - The Specksynder

Chapter 34 - The Cabin-Table

Chapter 35 - The Mast-Head

Chapter 36 - The Quarter-Deck

Chapter 37 - Sunset

Chapter 38 - Dusk

Chapter 39 - First Night-Watch

Chapter 40 - Midnight, Forecastle

Chapter 41 - Moby Dick

Chapter 42 - The Whiteness of The Whale

Chapter 43 - Hark!

Chapter 44 - The Chart

Chapter 45 - The Affidavit

Chapter 46 - Surmises

Chapter 47 - The Mat-Maker

Chapter 48 - The First Lowering

Chapter 49 - The Hyena

Chapter 50 - Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah

Chapter 51 - The Spirit-Spout

Chapter 52 - The Albatross

Chapter 53 - The Gam

Chapter 54 - The Town-Ho's Story

Chapter 55 - Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

Chapter 56 - Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes

Chapter 57 - Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

Chapter 58 - Brit

Chapter 59 - Squid

Chapter 60 - The Line

Chapter 61 - Stubb Kills a Whale

Chapter 62 - The Dart

Chapter 63 - The Crotch

Chapter 64 - Stubb's Supper

Chapter 65 - The Whale as a Dish

Chapter 66 - The Shark Massacre

Chapter 67 - Cutting In

Chapter 68 - The Blanket

Chapter 69 - The Funeral

Chapter 70 - The Sphynx

Chapter 71 - The Jeroboam's Story

Chapter 72 - The Monkey-Rope

Chapter 73 - Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale and Then Have a Talk Over Him

Chapter 74 - The Sperm Whale's Head - Contrasted View

Chapter 75 - The Right Whale's Head - Contrasted View

Chapter 76 - The Battering-Ram

Chapter 77 - The Great Heidelburgh Tun

Chapter 78 - Cistern and Buckets

Chapter 79 - The Prairie

Chapter 80 - The Nut

Chapter 81 - The Pequod Meets The Virgin

Chapter 82 - The Honor and Glory of Whaling

Chapter 83 - Jonah Historically Regarded

Chapter 84 - Pitchpoling

Chapter 85 - The Fountain

Chapter 86 - The Tail

Chapter 87 - The Grand Armada

Chapter 88 - Schools and Schoolmasters

Chapter 89 - Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

Chapter 90 - Heads or Tails

Chapter 91 - The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud

Chapter 92 - Ambergris

Chapter 93 - The Castaway

Chapter 94 - A Squeeze of the Hand

Chapter 95 - The Cassock

Chapter 96 - The Try-Works

Chapter 97 - The Lamp

Chapter 98 - Stowing Down and Clearing Up

Chapter 99 - The Doubloon

Chapter 100 - Leg and Arm. The Pequod of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London

Chapter 101 - The Decanter

Chapter 102 - A Bower in the Arsacides

Chapter 103 - Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton

Chapter 104 - The Fossil Whale

Chapter 105 - Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish? - Will He Perish?

Chapter 106 - Ahab's Leg

Chapter 107 - The Carpenter

Chapter 108 - Ahab and the Carpenter

Chapter 109 - Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin

Chapter 110 - Queequeg in His Coffin

Chapter 111 - The Pacific

Chapter 112 - The Blacksmith

Chapter 113 - The Forge

Chapter 114 - The Gilder

Chapter 115 - The Pequod Meets The Bachelor

Chapter 116 - The Dying Whale

Chapter 117 - The Whale Watch

Chapter 118 - The Quadrant

Chapter 119 - The Candles

Chapter 120 - The Deck Toward the End of the First Night Watch

Chapter 121 - Midnight - The Forecastle Bulwarks

Chapter 122 - Midnight Aloft.- Thunder and Lightning

Chapter 123 - The Musket

Chapter 124 - The Needle

Chapter 125 - The Log and Line

Chapter 126 - The Life-Buoy

Chapter 127 - The Deck

Chapter 128 - The Pequod Meets The Rachel

Chapter 129 - The Cabin

Chapter 130 - The Hat

Chapter 131 - The Pequod Meets The Delight

Chapter 132 - The Symphony

Chapter 133 - The Chase - First Day

Chapter 134 - The Chase - Second Day

Chapter 135 - The Chase - Third Day

Epilogue