"In the first chapter, Ishmael is quietly establishing a pattern of association among the ideas of water, cosmopolitanism, and Zoroastrianism. “Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?” Ishmael asks in “Loomings” (20). In drawing attention to the Persians’ veneration of the sea, Ishmael makes a link between the cosmopolitanism promoted by whaling and the ancient Persian religion. Later in the novel, Ishmael writes, “I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling” (98). Ishmael here aligns himself with the cosmopolite philosopher by providing that philosopher with the salient example that he has been missing: for Ishmael it is not too outlandish to believe that the way to what Immanuel Kant called “perpetual peace” might be pioneered by whaleships."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291210872_Cosmopolitanism_and_Zoroastrianism_in_Moby-Dick