Page 379 - moby-dick

your courtesy—may be, you shall soon hear further of all
that. Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-mast-
ed 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 no-
blest 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 terri-
torial 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 Buf-
falo 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

Moby Dick