Sentence:  Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding eyes— ... all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the <WSD>main</WSD>. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  The mainland. (from 16th c.)