midnight
`` 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 . They contain round archipelagoes 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 beech 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 of an audacious mariner as any . And for Radney , though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach , to nurse at his maternal sea ; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific ; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman , fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn handled Bowie-knives . Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits ; and this Lakeman , a mariner , who though a sort of devil indeed , might yet by inflexible firmness , only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave 's right ; thus treated , this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile .