The Street — Moby-Dick

After breakfast Ishmael walks through New Bedford in daylight. Queequeg once seemed shockingly strange in polite company. Now the whole town cures that feeling. Every big port has foreign sailors, but New Bedford tops London's dock districts. Here people labeled cannibals chat at street corners. Pacific islanders and rough whalemen wander past without anyone blinking.

The funniest sights are the new recruits. Every week farm boys from Vermont and New Hampshire arrive, hungry for money and adventure on a whaler. They are strong but green. Ishmael watches one strut in a fancy city hat and long coat, with a sailor's belt and knife around his waist. Another wears a rain hat and a heavy cloak. When these country boys order their sea clothes, they add useless buttons and straps that will rip apart in the first storm.

But the town is not only sailors and jokes. New Bedford is expensive and grand. Fine houses and big gardens sit on land that would otherwise look bare and poor. Ishmael asks where the money came from and answers himself: iron harpoons bolted to mansion gates. The city's wealth was hauled up from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. Local fathers joke that they give whales as wedding gifts. Families burn whale-oil candles like they cost nothing.

In summer the streets turn green and gold with maple trees. The women look healthy year-round, flushed like roses that never stop blooming. Ishmael ends his walk seeing a port where beauty, weirdness, and whale money all mix together on the same streets.