"For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires..."

Ishmael talks about Nantucket. 

"That common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records."

Ishmael and Queequeg leave the Spouter Inn and exchange stories. They catch the a small boat to Nantucket and after a sailing mishap Queequeg saves a man's life. Like a boss. 

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."

Queequeg tells Ishmael how he came to be a whaler and both promise to stick together and get on the same ship together out of Nantucket.  

"Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."

Ishmael talks about being cozy. Queequeg begins to tell the history of his island. 

"No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world."

Ishmael and Queequeg beome besties. 

"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers."

Ishmael takes in Father Mapple's Sermon about Jonah, sin and salvation. 

"Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom."

Ishmael takes in the church and the minister there and cannot help but see how whaling is incorporated into every aspect of New Bedford life. 

"But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

Ishmael wanders into a chapel and sees the memorials of sailors long dead and gone. Thinking of the living and the dead, he falls into a melancholy and a happiness at his future on a whale boat. 

"Still New Bedford is a queer place."

Ishmael tells of the strange people of New Bedford, a cross roads of the world. A rest stop of the high seas. 

Who am I? Who do I think I am? What's the big idea? 
I can explain.