In
truth, well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very
prosperous breezes, the Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in
perfect safety at her port without the occurrence of the least
fatality, had it not been for the brutal overbearing of Radney, the
mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked vengeance of Steelkilt,
a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.
"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.
"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your
courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had
yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions
popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing
aggregate, those 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.
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