Nothing else happened during our trip that seemed worth mentioning. The journey was smooth, and before long we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket.
Take a map and look for it.
You will find it far out in the ocean, isolated from the mainland, standing alone like a tiny island lighthouse.
It is little more than a low mound of sand, sticking out into the sea. There are beaches everywhere and almost no land behind them.
There is so much sand on Nantucket that you could probably use it as blotting paper for twenty years and still have plenty left.
People like to exaggerate about the place.
They say that even weeds refuse to grow there unless someone plants them. They joke that the people have to import Canadian thistles because nothing grows naturally.
They say that when an oil barrel springs a leak, Nantucket has to send overseas for a piece of wood to plug it.
Wood is supposedly so rare that a small piece is treated almost like a sacred relic.
Some even claim that people plant mushrooms outside their houses just to have something tall enough to provide shade in summer.
One blade of grass is said to be an oasis.
Three blades of grass, if you find them within a day’s walk, supposedly qualify as a prairie.
People joke that Nantucketers need special shoes for walking across quicksand, just as people in the far north wear snowshoes.
They say the island is so completely surrounded by ocean that even small clams sometimes cling to the legs of chairs and tables, just as they cling to the backs of sea turtles.
Of course, these stories are ridiculous.
But they do make one thing clear:
Nantucket is certainly no Illinois.
There is also an old legend about how the island was first settled by Native Americans.
The story says that, long ago, an eagle swooped down over the coast of New England and carried away an Indian baby in its claws.
The child’s parents watched helplessly as the eagle disappeared over the ocean with their little one.
Heartbroken, they decided to follow.
They climbed into their canoes and paddled in the same direction.
After a dangerous journey across the water, they finally discovered the island.
There they found only an empty ivory container holding the child’s tiny skeleton.
No wonder the people who grew up on such a place eventually turned to the sea for their living.
At first, the people of Nantucket simply searched the beaches for crabs and shellfish.
Then they became more adventurous.
They began wading into the water with nets to catch mackerel.
As they gained experience, they pushed farther from shore in small boats and started catching cod.
Eventually, they built great ships and sailed far into the open ocean.
They explored the world’s waters, crossed oceans again and again, and traveled as far as the remote waters near the Bering Strait.
They went out in every season and sailed across every ocean.
And they declared war on the greatest living creature left on Earth after the ancient floods—the whale.
A creature as enormous as a mountain and as powerful as a giant of the sea.
Even when such a creature panicked and tried to escape, its terror could be more dangerous than its most deliberate attack.
And so these people of Nantucket, born on a tiny patch of sand in the ocean, became masters of the sea.
They spread across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans like conquerors dividing up a conquered empire.
Imagine America adding Mexico to Texas and Cuba to Canada.
Imagine England taking control of all India and planting its flag as though it owned the entire sky.
Even that would not match the territory controlled by the Nantucketers.
Two-thirds of the world’s surface belongs to the sea.
And the sea belongs to them.
Other sailors merely have the right to travel across it.
Merchant ships are like bridges floating over the water.
Warships are like forts that happen to float.
Even pirates and privateers are only robbers using the ocean as a highway. They attack other ships—pieces of land carried across the water—but they do not truly live from the sea itself.
The Nantucketer is different.
He actually lives on the ocean.
He works there.
He depends on it.
He goes out in ships, crosses it again and again, and treats it almost like his own private farm.
The sea is his home.
The sea is his workplace.
A great flood could cover the entire world, and the Nantucketer would still have his livelihood as long as his ship remained afloat.
He lives on the ocean the way prairie birds live on the endless grasslands.
He disappears among the waves and climbs them like a mountain hunter climbing the Alps.
Sometimes he spends years barely seeing land.
And when he finally returns to shore, the land itself can seem strange to him, almost like another world.
A person who has lived his whole life on the ocean might find the smell of land more unfamiliar than the moon would seem to someone from Earth.
Like a lonely gull that folds its wings at sunset and lets the waves carry it through the night, the Nantucketer also settles down when darkness comes.
Far from land, he lowers his sails and rests.
And beneath his sleeping place, enormous herds of whales and walruses continue moving through the dark water.