“Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he.  Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck.  But ashore, all this effeminacy is dashed.  The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.  A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.  Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful; but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one.  In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains.  Nor does it at all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric seas.

“‘I see!  I see!’ impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha upon his silvery ruffles.  ’No need to travel!  The world’s one Lima.  I had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and holy as the hills.—­ But the story.’

“I had left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay.  Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck.  But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle.  Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued; while standing out of harm’s way, the valiant captain danced up and down with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck.  At intervals, he ran close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment.  But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass, these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.

“‘Come out of that, ye pirates!’ roared the captain, now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward.  ‘Come out of that, ye cut-throats!’