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- 3495
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-23T15:41:01.913Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 3455
- text
- 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 timber head, or a foot of plank, or a
nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in
whaling vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state
stocks bringing in good interest.
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 altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same
Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.
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 subsequent lives, strangely blend with these
unoutgrown peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not
unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. 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
untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature’s sweet or
savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes
one in a whole nation’s census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for
noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically
regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems
a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For
all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be
sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
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.
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