Moby Dick

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Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they
do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority
in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than
all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless
little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does
not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few
foibles himself.