Moby Dick

[Old Thunder]

For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empire; other seamen having but a right of way through it.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

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.

 

[Old Thunder]

CHAPTER XV.
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.

 

[Old Thunder]

The landlord of the Spouter-In 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 us that cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders.

*The hotel is named after the large iron kettles in which oil is rendered from blubber.

 

[Old Thunder]

In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at the Try Pots.