But even granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered
slippery decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable
carrion of those battle-fields from which so many soldiers return
to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril
so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession;
let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up
to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm
whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head.
For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with
the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!
But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles
that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines,
to our glory!
But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of scales;
see what we whalemen are, and have been.
Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their
whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own
personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely
invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island
of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788
pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of 1,000,000 pounds?
And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber
all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of
upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men;
yearly consuming 00824,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
at the time of sailing, 20,000,000 dollars; and every year importing
into our harbors a well reaped harvest of 00847,000,000 dollars.
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