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- down as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued
her cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy
intervals; but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was
the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that
now taking some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the
nearest harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and
repaired.
“Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the
way, because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically
relieved at them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the
ship free; never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well
nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous
breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at
her port without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been
for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the
bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from
Buffalo.
“‘Lakeman!—Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?’
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
“On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but—I crave your
courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet
been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,
those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many
of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic
isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by
two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by
batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they
have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they
yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash
from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by
ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried
lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild
Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give
robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks
are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full
many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen,
though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean
nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney,
though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket
beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long
followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was
he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods
seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet
was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this
Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by
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