Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As the climate continued to warm (and the ocean continued to rise), plant life inevitably began to spring up among these hills, providing the basis for an ever-improving soil. Thirteen thousand years ago, jack pines and spruce trees began to grow; a few thousand years later, oaks appeared. What is now Nantucket Sound was then a valley of ponds, lakes, and forests. It was not until just 5,000 years ago—a drop in the bucket of geological time—that the ever-encroaching ocean flooded this valley and Nantucket became an island. Then the ocean’s waves and currents went to work, sculpting the “glacier’s gift” into the shape we all recognize today, most notably creating Great Point at the northeastern extremity of the island as well as the barrier beach known as Coatue (pronounced “Koe-TOO”) along the outer rim of Nantucket Harbor.

  Whether or not Nantucket was ever thickly forested after it became an island is a debated point. Certainly the newly risen ocean would have had a stunting effect on shore-side tree growth. But this did not keep an exposed area such as Coatue from becoming so heavily wooded that as late as 1711 the town selectmen commented on “the great benefit” of this neck of land “to the succor of our sheep in hard seasons,” while passing a provision against the cutting of “cedars, pines, or any other growths” on Coatue. According to the early historian Obed Macy, oak trees “of an uncommonly hard and firm texture” once flourished throughout the island and provided the timbers for many of the old homes that are still standing today; a particularly “good growth of white oak trees” apparently shaded the area around what is now Cliff Road on the north side of the island.

  Instead of salt spray, it was probably fires—either naturally occurring or man-made—that limited the growth of trees on the island. And, in fact, the forests that are specifically mentioned in seventeenth-century town records were all surrounded (and protected from spreading fires) by either water or swamps: the Longwoods within the embrace of Hummock Pond, the Broadwoods in Coskata (pronounced “Kos-K AY-ta”), and the Beechwoods near the cranberry bogs in Polpis. The remnants of this last area of tree growth are now known as the Hidden Forest. This is yet another sacred place. Standing within the sundappled quietude of these ancient beech trees, it is difficult to believe that you are on an island thirty miles out to sea.

  Nantucket’s original human residents first came to the area approximately 8,000 years ago, long before it was an island. At this time America’s native inhabitants were a hunting culture, pursuing the caribou and other large game that followed in the wake of the glacier. As the climate continued to warm and the caribou moved north, early Nantucketers began to rely increasingly on seeds, fruits, and roots for nourishment. Archeological digs on the eastern end of the island in Quidnet indicate that deer were an important part of the Indians’ diet in the first century A.D., by which time Nantucket had been an island for more than 3,000 years. At some point, however, over-hunting must have led to the animals’ extirpation (the deer that now exist on Nantucket were introduced in the 1920s). Other game animals, such as the raccoon and fox, were also killed off by the Indians. In fact, when the naturalist John James Audubon came to Nantucket, he reported that “the largest quadruped found in a wild state is the Norway rat.” There were cases, however, in which the island seems to have provided a refuge for species that had disappeared elsewhere in the region. Much to the chagrin of some modern-day developers, Nantucket is one of the few places in Massachusetts that still offers a habitat for the short-eared owl. In his day, Audubon found species of jumping mice, shrews, and bats on Nantucket which were so unusual that he preserved them in jars of rum for further study.

  Although Nantucket has developed a reputation as an infertile and unforgiving land (one eighteenth-century observer described it as a “barren sandbank fertilized with whale-oil only”), this is not the way the island’s native population would have perceived it. Indians throughout the Northeast commonly sought out sandy soils (of which Nantucket, of course, has plenty) that could be easily worked with hand tools made from wood, stone, and quahog shells. It is true that archeologists have found no evidence of the mounds and storage pits associated with Indian corn crops on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, but this does not necessarily mean that Nantucket’s Indians failed to cultivate the island. As we shall see, given the extreme abuse any arable plot would ultimately receive at the hands of the English, it is not surprising that few signs remain of the Native Nantucketers’ agricultural activity. In fact, without any game animals on the island, farming must have been especially important to Nantucket’s Indians, who also enjoyed the benefit of a long, frost-free growing season due to the warming influence of the nearby Gulf Stream. Today, autumn and winter temperatures on the island are as much as five degrees above those experienced in the nearby Boston area.

  As its first human inhabitants, Nantucket’s Native Americans had a major impact on the island’s ecology. Besides ridding the island of game animals, they also may have been responsible for the relative scarcity of trees. Prior to spring planting, they cleared the land through burning, and as we have seen, when the English first arrived on Nantucket, tree growth was limited to a few swampy and water-enclosed sections of the island. The Indians also had no qualms about abandoning their traditional, less invasive methods of working the land when the English arrived in the 1660s. According to one account, they “would with delight, for whole days together, follow the path of the plowshares; and they would earnestly entreat the English to plow their land for them.”

  It was not just a new technology the English introduced to Nantucket; they also applied a whole new set of priorities to their environment. Whereas the Indians had kept on the move, changing their village sites on a seasonal basis, the English appointed a delegation of “lot-layers” who divided up the land into a permanent settlement. Soon the footpaths of the Indians were replaced by cart paths, which in turn evolved into deeply rutted roads as increasing numbers of horses and oxen were brought to the island.

  As farming and sheep-raising developed, the English set out to reduce the number of dogs (not to mention crows and rats) on Nantucket. These small, fox-like creatures had been highly prized by the Indians for their assistance in hunting waterfowl. The English sheepherders, however, had no place for native dogs, which delighted in scattering and occasionally attacking their flocks. As early as 1663 the town determined that a “warning shall be given to all the Indians to kill the dogs among them.” In 1670 a kind of canine Moby Dick seems to have afflicted the island; the record states, “whosoever shall kill the wild dog—a white dog having been seen several times about the town, shall be paid 30 shillings.”

  The English were also less than enamored of Nantucket’s snakes, particularly in the eastern end of the island, where a snake was reportedly sighted “as big round as a gallon keg” and eleven or twelve feet long! Jethro Swain, a third-generation Nantucketer, recalled how one sunny day in the early spring, a huge number of snakes, groggy with cold, were discovered near a natural spring still known today as Snake Spring. According to Swain, the English “mustered a company . . . that dug two holes, and with hay rakes they raked as many of them into the holes as they could—about two cartsfull.” The English then set huge bonfires over the pits and “as the heat caused the snakes to attempt to escape, they were driven back . . . until they were all subdued.” Today snakes are no more common on Nantucket than they are anywhere else in New England.

  The English also took the bull by the horns when it came to managing the island’s many ponds, an approach they seem to have inherited from the Indians. In 1665 the town decided to “dig a trench to drain the Long Pond . . . with regard to a weir for taking fish. . . . The work is to be carried on thus: the one half of the work is to be done by the Indians, the other half by the English inhabitants or owners, the Indians to have half the fish so long as they attend the weir carefully.” To this day the “Madaket Ditch” connects Long Pond to the tidal waters of Hither Creek.

  Just how fragile these ponds were (and are) is demonstr
ated by the history of Lily Pond, which once lapped the base of what is now called Sunset Hill, site of the Oldest House. In the pond’s center was Gull Island, where the first settlers had built a fort in case of Indian attack. One afternoon in the early eighteenth century, an eleven-year-old girl by the name of Love Paddack stopped to play along the water’s edge, not far from where Center and Westchester Streets now intersect. Taking up a handy clam shell, she dug a small trench so that a rivulet of water began to run out of the pond. By the time she had finished playing, the rivulet was a running stream. Thinking nothing of it, Love returned home, ate her supper, and went to bed. The next morning she was awakened by the shouts of her father, who announced that “some evil-minded person has let the Lily Pond out.” Love’s trench had grown into a “great gully” through which the rush of water had washed away the town’s fulling mill—a disastrous occurrence for Love’s father, a weaver. Since there was nothing she could do to bring back the pond, Love quite sensibly decided to keep her secret to herself; it was not until seventy years later, while on her deathbed, that she finally revealed her role in the demise of Lily Pond.

  Due to the porosity of its sandy soil, there are very few streams on Nantucket, a fact that made the loss of Lily Pond all the more painful to an island economy desperately in need of water power to run grist and fulling mills. In fact, the lack of rivers and streams meant that no matter how many sheep might thrive on this island without natural predators, Nantucketers were without adequate means to process the wool, thus severely limiting their ability to turn a significant profit. Indeed, the argument can be made that it was the lack of water power instead of the infertility of Nantucket’s soil that ultimately forced the English to turn to whaling.

  Lily Pond was not the only thing to vanish from the Nantucket landscape in the eighteenth century. As the growing population ravaged the existing forests for timber and firewood, lumber was soon in short supply all across Nantucket, forcing many islanders to dig peat for fuel during the Revolutionary War. Even after the war had ended, peat remained popular as a wood substitute. Burrowing down as much as six to eight feet, the peat-diggers created what the local paper described in 1822 as a network of “vast subterranean vaults” throughout the swamps of the island. Many of Nantucket’s present-day wetlands may have been artificially created by the peat-diggers. According to a Nantucketer writing in 1922, “The old [peat] beds are now low, wet swamps.”

  This peat-digging, when combined with the absence of trees and the overuse of farmland (not to mention the effects of grazing animals), had a disastrous impact on the island’s topsoil. By 1773 an acre of Nantucket farmland that fifty years earlier had reportedly produced 250 bushels of corn (husks included), now produced only 20 bushels. At this time, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman then living the life of an American farmer, visited the island and observed an interesting fertilizing technique. After gathering their sheep in a field where they wanted to grow crops, the Nantucketers waited until dark: “Three times during a night it is permissible to terrify their sheep with burning coals; each time terror forces them to depose their manure; during one night a flock of these animals fertilize and enrich to a great extent the field in which they are enclosed.”

  When they were not being subjected to these nocturnal torture sessions, Nantucket’s sheep (which numbered in the thousands) roamed freely throughout the island, keeping its landscape almost altogether treeless. After the annual “Shearing Festival” in June, during which all the island’s flocks were collected in the vicinity of Miacomet Pond, the sheep would immediately disperse, rushing as fast as they could to their “accustomed haunts.” Given the remarkable sameness of the Nantucket landscape, one wonders how they were able to find their way. According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing to his daughter in 1847:As soon as you have walked out of the town or village of Nantucket (in which there are a few little gardens and a few trees) you come on a wide bare common stretching as far as you can see on every side, with nothing upon it but here & there a few nibbling sheep. And if you walk on till you have lost sight of the town, and a fog rises, which is very common here, you will have no guide to show you the way, no houses, no trees, no hills, no stones, so that it has many times happened here that people have been lost, & when they did not come back, the whole town came out & hunted for them.

  Emerson’s naturalist friend Henry David Thoreau visited Nantucket in December of 1854 and described it in much the same terms: “This island must look exactly like a prairie, except that the view in clear weather is bounded by the sea.” Thoreau traveled to Siasconset (referred to as “Sconset” by Nantucketers) on the eastern end of the island with a Captain Gardner, whose experimentation with tree-growing would ultimately have a profound impact on the island. Gardner showed Thoreau several tracts of land where he had grown fields of Norway and pitch pines—both of which were then new to Nantucket. Thoreau prophetically commented, “These plantations must very soon change the aspect of the island.”

  The real point of interest on Nantucket Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not, however, its outlying areas; instead, it was the town, which had grown to become the third largest port in New England. Located at a place the Indians called Wesco (meaning “white rock ”—a feature that was buried beneath Straight Wharf in 1723), the town did not spring up overnight. In a process that would continue for more than a century, the shoreline’s naturally occurring marshes were buried beneath successive layers of fill as the town’s waterfront crept gradually out into the harbor from its original high-water mark along what is now South Water Street. In 1730 a major portion of “Quanaty Hill” (along which runs Orange Street) was dug out to create the low, flat area that now exists between Union and Washington Streets. In 1743 sand dunes in the vicinity of the Nantucket Atheneum were leveled to create the “Bocochico” Lots. By the late eighteenth century, the town seemed an organic part of the surrounding landscape: “pleasantly situated upon a gentle slope, . . . surmounted by a row of windmills, and flanked to the right and left, by extensive ropewalks; . . . the stores and houses being mostly painted red, or white, and crowned by the steeples, or rather towers, of two Presbyterian [actually Congregational] meeting houses.”

  At this time, the commercial center of Nantucket was not the quaint tourist mecca it is today. For one thing, the whaling business had an unfortunate side-effect. According to Crèvecoeur, “At my first landing, I was much surprised at the disagreeable smell which struck me in many parts of the town; it was caused by the whale oil and is unavoidable.” Instead of the tinkertoy docks of a modern-day pleasure-boat marina, huge solid-fill wharves reached out into the harbor to receive whaleships and their malodorous cargo. Crèvecoeur has left us an excellent description of the waterfront:They have three docks, each 300 feet long and extremely convenient, at the head of which there are ten feet of water. . . . Between these docks and the town there is room sufficient for the landing of goods and for the passage of their numerous carts; for almost every man here has one. When their fleets have been successful, the bustle and hurry of business on this spot for some days after their arrival would make you imagine that this is the capital of a very opulent and large province.

  The carts referred to by Crèvecoeur were known locally as “calashes”: springless, two-wheeled, horse-drawn contraptions that moved relatively easily through the heaping sand of the town’s unpaved streets (the cobblestones on Main Street were not laid until the 1830s). As late as 1840, Audubon wrote, “You would be surprised to see the people riding through the streets in carts standing up like draymen, the females seated in chairs and trotting along merrily.”

  Whereas the hectic commercial activity of the waterfront focused on the Rotch “Counting House” at the foot of Straight Wharf, the Town Hall only a half mile up Main Street (just across from today’s Civil War monument) presided over a very different scene: a quiet, almost rural community of Quakers on a hill. According to a visitor in the early nineteenth century, “The t
ranquility of a convent pervades the streets, except when the bell rings for dinner, and droves of cows go out and come in [through the town gate] under a herdsman grotesquely accoutered.” Sheep were also a regular part of town life. Although some homeowners complained about the animals’ habit of leaping over fences (even as high as four feet) and plundering gardens, other townspeople praised them for keeping the grass trimmed and eating “the vegetable matter that is thrown into the street.”

  In 1797 the twenty-six-year-old Phebe Folger painted an extremely detailed watercolor of the view from her house on Pleasant Street. Looking to the north toward Main Street, we see a barn, a manure pile, and a bed of lettuce, while a network of board and rail fences divides up a field of green grass running from east to west. Instead of gray, almost every house is a dark red, casting doubt on the authenticity of today’s weathered-shingle look. Even though their ships now ventured to the other side of the globe, many eighteenth-century Nantucketers never strayed beyond the boundaries of this quiet and intimate world. In 1793 a resident wrote to an acquaintance in Virginia: “As small as [the island] is, I was never at the extreme east or west and for some years I dare say have not been one mile from town.” In September of 1827 two four-year-old boys remained lost for more than forty-eight hours even though they lay languishing on a road just outside the town gate. Although a thorough search of town and the waterfront was made, it apparently never occurred to the children’s parents (or anyone else) that they might have strayed beyond the fences of town.

  By the 1830s and ’40s, Nantucket had entered into its most heady days of commercial activity, becoming what the lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster (who came to the island several times on business) described as that “Unknown City in the Ocean.” By 1832 Nantucket possessed a shipyard on Brant Point, five boat shops, seventeen oil factories, nineteen candle factories, ten ropewalks, twenty-two cooperages (barrel-making shops), one brass foundry, three tanneries, ten blacksmith shops, four spar shops, two bakeries, two block factories, four sail lofts, three rigging lofts, two candle-box factories, clothing stores, food provisioners, ship chandleries, brickyards, a rum distillery, four banks, and several insurance companies. Besides whaling-associated enterprises, there were bookstores, clock and jewelry shops, and ice cream stores. In a single afternoon in the 1840s you could buy a fur coat, get your hair cut, or hang out at a local bowling alley (even the little fishing village of Siasconset had one). At this time the town of Nantucket had several well-defined sections: “Chicken Hill,” centered around Milk and Prospect (then known as Copper) Streets; “North Shore” and “Egypt” to the north of Main Street; “New Town,” to the south of Main Street; “New Guinea,” the black section centered around the African Meeting House at Five Corners; “Downtown,” around Main Square; and “Upper Town,” west of the head of Main Street.