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Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooner in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly retiring from...

This world pays dividends.

How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this...

Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.

Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad.

But unlike Captain Peleg -- who cared not a rush for what are called serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the veriest of all trifles -- Captain Bildad had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent...

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.

But, as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.

Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature.

And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think...

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture names -- a singularly common fashion on the island -- and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure of their...

They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

For some of these same Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters.

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things...

People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.

It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a...

Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising figure.

And so saying, he led the way down below deck into the cabin.