Moby Dick

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to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most
directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing
in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but,
hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you
would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath
that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all
tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did
in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything
that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally
strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White