 - »come along
with ye.« And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.
    Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and surprising
figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with Captain Peleg was one
of the largest owners of the vessel; the other shares, as is sometimes the case
in these ports, being held by a crowd of old annuitants; widows, fatherless
children, and chancery wards; each owning about the value of a timber head, or a
foot of plank, or a nail or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their
money in whaling-vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state
stocks bringing in good interest.
    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.
Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth
or other circumstances, he have what seems a half-wilful over-ruling morbidness
at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a
certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal
