I'm not going to paste the entirety of chapter two here, short as it is, as you can easily read it for yourself by clicking on the hyperlink that I have helpfully provided.
In this chapter, the slow pregnant journey from city to sea arrives at New Bedford in Connecticut, all worldly possessions conveniently stuffed in an old carpet bag. Not one concerned to yield to the impatient reader, Melville makes sure to set the scene well and proper, providing an imaginative thought portrait of this rather hellish place of puritan blubber cutters and adventurers in the wild east.
The legend of the first whalers whose harpoons were cobblestones helps us to start imagining how these killing fields steadily refined their efficiency and effectiveness. Just as the whales themselves were firstly bears who wandered to sea some fifty million years ago*, so the Red Men of Nantucket provided the evolutionary creation story for the scientific carnage of the nineteenth century. Happily HM was unacquainted with the apogee of progress in the explosive harpoons and factory ships of the century between his and ours when old blue almost saw his final end.
Like Saint Paul on the storm-tossed Mediterranean mentioned in Acts 27:14, Melville tells us the Spouter Inn stands a palsied lean-to, its proprietor Peter Coffin providing the perfect resort for Ishmael. Poor Lazarus Osiris has nothing to eat but the aurora borealis and beggars can't be choosers. Leave the rich to drink the tepid tears of orphans! Ishmael is done with blubbering now, we are going a-whaling.H.M. wrote:It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket,
* or perhaps hippos - see How the whale learned to swim - A real Just So Story