Not too long ago, I was giggling about folks who are surprised about the expanse and wildness of the Great Lakes; lakes, mind you, that hold about 22% of the world's surface freshwater--enough water to cover the 48 contiguous U.S. states with a uniform depth of about 9.5 feet. So as I was reading along with Herman Melville in Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale, I was pleased to see that ol' Ishmael gets it. In fact, speaking from the vantage point of the book's 1851 publication, he knew these waters to be especially haunted.
In this scene, Ishmael lounging about in Lima, drinking with two Peruvians, and telling them about strapping young sailor from Buffalo that he knew. This fellow's name is Steelkilt, nicknamed "Lakeman" because his experience comes from freshwater ships:
"... this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly associated with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, these grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagos of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born and wild-ocean nurtured, as much an audacious mariner as any ..."
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