NP: Vonnegut quotes Lincoln on Polk

[Terrance]

 Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; 
let the English overswarm all India, and
hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of
this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is
his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a
right of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension
bridges; armed ones but floating forts; even pirates and
privateers, though following the sea as highwaymen the
road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the land
like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the
bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides
and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to
it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special
plantation. THERE is his home; THERE lies his business, which a Noah's
flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the
millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the
prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters
climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that
when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more
strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the
landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked
to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer,
out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest,
while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.

http://www.rockysullivans.com/The_San_Patricios.html