The Street — Moby-Dick

Queequeg once looked outlandish in polite company, Ishmael admits, but a single daylight stroll through New Bedford cures that astonishment. Every great port throws up foreign faces near the docks, yet this town beats London's Water Street and Wapping: islanders with unholy flesh still on their bones chat at corners like neighbours, harpooneers reel unheeded past shop windows, and the stranger's stare lasts about one block before scale resets the normal.

Then come the greenhorns, funnier still. Weekly scores of Vermont and New Hampshire farm boys arrive athirst for fishery gain, strong as oxen and about as seasoned. One struts in beaver hat and swallow-tail coat girdled with a sailor belt and sheath-knife; another wears sou'-wester and bombazine cloak as if costume could stand in for a voyage. When they bespeak sea-outfits they order bell-buttons and canvas straps that will burst, poor hay-seeds, in the first howling gale that drives them down the tempest's throat.

But New Bedford is not only comedy on the pavement. It is dear to live in, patrician in its houses, opulent in parks and gardens planted on scraggy land that would else look like Labrador. Ishmael asks whence the bloom came and answers at the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion: brave houses and flowery terraces were harpooned and dragged up from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Fathers give whales for dowries; families burn spermaceti as if reservoirs sat in every cellar; maples line the summer streets and women's cheeks stay carnation-bright year-round. Beauty and brutality share one ledger on the same Sabbath morning, and Ishmael has not yet climbed the hill to the chapel where lost whalemen keep their names in marble. What does a town look like when its prettiest room is built to remember the men the harpoons did not bring home?