If I had been surprised when I first saw someone as strange-looking as Queequeg walking around a respectable American town, that surprise disappeared as soon as I took my first daytime walk through the streets of New Bedford.
In any large seaport, especially near the docks, you can expect to see all kinds of unusual people from distant countries.
In New York, foreign sailors sometimes bump into well-dressed ladies on Broadway. In London, you might see Indian or Malay sailors walking along Regent Street. In Bombay, American sailors could be just as strange and frightening to the local people.
But New Bedford was something else entirely.
In places like Water Street or Wapping, you mostly see sailors. In New Bedford, you could actually see men who looked like cannibals standing on street corners, talking casually with one another.
Some of them were genuine islanders and warriors from faraway lands. Some still carried the marks of customs that would seem shocking to civilized Americans.
For a newcomer, it was certainly a sight worth staring at.
You could see people from Fiji, Tonga, Erromango, Pannang, and many other islands. Wild-looking whalemen wandered through the streets without anyone paying much attention to them.
But the strangest people in town weren’t always the foreign sailors.
There were also dozens of young men arriving every week from Vermont and New Hampshire. They came looking for money, adventure, and a chance to make their fortunes in the whale fishery.
Most were strong young men who had spent their lives cutting down forests. Now they were ready to put down their axes and pick up whale lances.
Many of them were as inexperienced as the mountains they came from were wild.
Some seemed to know almost nothing about life at sea.
Just look at that fellow turning the corner.
He’s wearing a fancy beaver hat and a long-tailed coat, but he’s also wearing a sailor’s belt with a knife hanging from it.
And here comes another one wearing a sailor’s waterproof hat with a fancy black cloak.
You won’t find anything quite as funny as a country boy who decides to become a fashionable gentleman.
Imagine a young farmer who spends the hottest days of summer mowing his fields while wearing buckskin gloves because he’s afraid of getting his hands tanned.
Now imagine that same fellow deciding to make a name for himself by joining the whale fishery.
When he arrives at the port to buy his sea clothes, he wants everything to look fashionable.
He orders fancy buttons for his vest and straps on his heavy canvas trousers.
Poor country boy.
Just wait until the first terrible storm hits.
When the wind starts howling and the ship is being thrown around by the ocean, those fancy straps and buttons will probably tear apart, and he’ll be wishing he’d never cared so much about looking stylish.
But don’t think New Bedford is nothing more than a town full of harpooneers, foreign sailors, and inexperienced country boys.
Far from it.
New Bedford is a strange place, but it is also an extremely wealthy one.
Without the whaling industry, this land might still be almost empty and wild, like some lonely part of the coast of Labrador.
Even now, some areas outside the town look so rocky and barren that they can almost frighten you.
Yet the town itself is probably one of the most expensive places to live in all of New England.
New Bedford is certainly a land of oil, although not in the biblical sense. It doesn’t flow with milk, and the streets aren’t paved with food.
Still, you can find magnificent mansions, beautiful gardens, and wealthy estates here—far more impressive than you might expect in such a rough piece of land.
Where did all that wealth come from?
How did such beautiful homes and gardens appear in a place that once seemed almost worthless?
The answer is easy.
Look at the great iron harpoons displayed outside that enormous mansion.
There is your answer.
The money that built these houses came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.
The whalemen went out to sea, hunted whales, and dragged the wealth of the oceans back to New Bedford.
That’s how this once-barren land became rich.
Can some magician perform a trick like that?
People in New Bedford even joked that fathers gave their daughters whales as wedding dowries, while wealthy uncles gave their nieces a few porpoises to start them off.
If you want to see a truly extravagant wedding, they said, go to New Bedford.
Every house supposedly had its own supply of whale oil, and people burned enormous numbers of expensive spermaceti candles every night as though the oil would never run out.
In summer, New Bedford was beautiful.
The streets were lined with maple trees, forming long avenues that seemed to glow with green and gold.
By August, the horse-chestnut trees were covered with beautiful clusters of flowers. Their blossoms rose above the streets like rows of candles on enormous natural chandeliers.
It was almost unbelievable.
Human beings had taken a harsh, rocky landscape and turned it into terraces filled with flowers and gardens.
They had transformed the useless rocks and barren ground into something beautiful.
And the women of New Bedford were just as lovely.
Their cheeks were as bright as the red roses growing in their gardens.
But unlike roses, which only bloom during the summer, the healthy color of their faces seemed permanent, as warm and lasting as sunlight itself.
If you wanted to find women with the same kind of beauty, you would have to go to Salem.
At least, that’s what sailors claimed.
They said the young women of Salem smelled so sweet that their sailor sweethearts could supposedly detect them from miles out at sea, as if they were approaching the fragrant Spice Islands rather than the quiet shores of New England.