Nothing more happened on the Moss passage worth mentioning; after a fine run Ishmael and Queequeg safely arrive in Nantucket, and Melville bids you take out your map and see what corner of the world this elbow of sand occupies, away off shore more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse, all beach without a background, where gamesome wights swear they import Canada thistles, carry wood like bits of the true cross, and find clams adhering to chairs as to sea turtles' backs. These extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois: scarcity on land is the joke that explains everything coming next.
Look now at the wondrous legend of settlement: an eagle carries an infant Indian from the coast; the parents follow in canoes across wide waters and find the island, and there an empty ivory casket holding the poor child's skeleton. What wonder, then, that Nantucketers born on that beach should take the sea for a livelihood, first crabs and quohogs in the sand, then mackerel nets, then cod boats, until at last a navy of great ships circles the globe and declares everlasting war on the mightiest animated mass that survived the flood, that Himmalehan salt-sea Mastodon whose panics are more dreadful than his assaults.
Thus these sea hermits issuing from their ant-hill in the sea overrun the watery world like Alexanders, parceling Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans as pirate powers did Poland; two thirds of the terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's, for the sea is his and he alone resides and riots on it while merchant ships are but extension bridges and pirates plunder only other fragments of land. He ploughs the deep as his own plantation; a Noah's flood would not interrupt his business though it drowned China; for years he knows not the land until it smells like another world, and at nightfall, out of sight of shore, he furls his sails like the landless gull while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
Ishmael has stepped ashore hungry for supper and a bed in the town this portrait built, but first we must see what kind of people sand and leviathan breed. When the Try Pots sign swings into view, will chowder taste like comfort or like another extravagance invented because the island offers so little else?
Coming Up in Chapter 15
The Moss anchors late; Ishmael and Queequeg go ashore hungry for supper and a bed. Peter Coffin sent them to Hosea Hussey's Try Pots, famous for chowder, but finding the place means navigating yellow warehouse, white church, and a gallows-shaped sign with two black pots.
