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- 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
inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human
recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this
Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he
had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and
Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.
“It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing her
prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho’s leak seemed again
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our
Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their
whole way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the
officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again
remember it, on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom.
Nor in the solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward,
gentlemen, is it altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their
pump-handles in full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length;
that is, if it lie along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other
reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is
in some very out of the way part of those waters, some really landless
latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little anxious.
“Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded the
upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way
expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a
coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or
on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he
betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the
seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner
in her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was
on this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they
stood with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear
water; clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen—that bubbling from the
pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at
the lee scupper-holes.
“Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command
over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a
chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make
a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled
housings of your last viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a
heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt
Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne’s father. But Radney,
the mate, was ugly as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious.
He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.
“Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with
his gay banterings.
“‘Aye, aye, my merry lads, it’s a lively leak this; hold a cannikin,
one of ye, and let’s have a taste. By the Lord, it’s worth bottling! I
tell ye what, men, old Rad’s investment must go for it! he had best cut
away his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that
sword-fish only began the job; he’s come back again with a gang of
ship-carpenters, saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole
posse of ’em are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom;
making improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I’d tell him
to jump overboard and scatter ’em. They’re playing the devil with his
estate, I can tell him. But he’s a simple old soul,—Rad, and a beauty
too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is invested in
looking-glasses. I wonder if he’d give a poor devil like me the model
of his nose.’
“‘Damn your eyes! what’s that pump stopping for?’ roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors’ talk. ‘Thunder away at it!’
“‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. ‘Lively, boys,
lively, now!’ And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines;
the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life’s
utmost energies.
“Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his
brow.