Moby-Dick: Chapter 14 Summary & Analysis

Ishmael and Queequeg arrive in Nantucket with no further misadventure. Ishmael fills this brief chapter with a rhapsody on the nature of Nantucket, where, as the story goes, a small Native American boy was once carried by a bird, and where his family went after to find him, and settled, thus founding the town. Nantucket is now almost entirely a port for whaling and fishing, and Ishmael remarks that, although the great colonial powers of the earth seek far and wide for land to add to their empires, Nantucket “controls two-thirds of the world” because its denizens control the seas, and make their money in pursuit of “walruses and whales.”