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 buckhorn 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.
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