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.
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