In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors; in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare.
But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames; fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath-knife. Here comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.
No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one- I mean a downright bumpkin dandy- a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest.
But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?
Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?
In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.
In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples- long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art; which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final day.
And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.
This chapter of Moby-Dick is crowded with aliens. The streets of New Bedford are bustling with all sorts of nondescripts from foreign parts, presumably arriving on the whaling vessels that harbor there. The place abounds with Queequegs and Ishmaels. Yet, there are no ICE agents dragging people off for questioning. No prisons filled with hardworking immigrants, dreaming the American dream.
On my way home this evening, I heard a story on the radio about a 19-year-old Irish man whose parents legally brought him to the United States when he was twelve. He grew up here. Went to school here. He works for his uncle's roofing company. Now, he's married and has a child. Pretty much, he was doing everything right. If his last name was Trump, he'd be sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom right now.
However, four months ago, this Irish nondescript was arrested by ICE agents. He's been sitting in jail ever since, with no court hearing. This week, the United States government is going to put him on an airplane and send him back to Ireland, a place he hasn't even visited in close to a decade, even though he's married to a United States citizen and has an American child.
And this is what we have come to. Instead of having streets bustling with Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and Brighggians, we have become a nation ruled by fear and hate. Listening to that story on the radio tonight made me so angry that I was literally yelling in my car. In elementary school, I was taught that the United States was a melting pot, filled with the wretched refuse of the world. The people in Washington, D. C., seem hell-bent on turning this country into a gallon of homogenized white milk, instead.
We used to be a beacon of hope and freedom for the world. I remember the first time I saw the Statue of Liberty. I was flying into New York, and I looked out the airplane window and saw her. She was huge and took my breath away. Filled me with pride.
Saint Marty is thankful tongith for all the people who have come to this country for a better life. They are what make America great.
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