How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?
But this is not the half; look again.
I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot,
for his life, point out one single peaceful influence,
which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially
upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate,
than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves,
and so continuously momentous in their sequential issues,
that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother,
who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb.
It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things.
Let a handful suffice. For many years past the whale-ship has
been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known
parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cooke or Vancouver had ever sailed.
If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride
in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor
and glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them
the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages.
They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions,
your Cookes, Your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous
Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great,
and greater, than your Cooke and your Krusenstern.
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