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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Initially each owner had his own tryworks, commonly located near his house. By the early eighteenth century, however, the town had begun to shift to its present-day location on the harbor, enabling the fishery to evolve from a cottage industry to a more centrally located enterprise, with a group of tryhouses being constructed on the beach to the south of the harbor landing. Acting as a buffer between the docks and these smelly and smoky structures was a group of small warehouses built for the storage of whaling equipment. At this time there were no solid-fill piers along the harbor, only temporary “landing places” that were often destroyed during winter storms. At the close of the season, even the larger sloops and schooners were pulled up on shore, which was thought to be safer than leaving them tied up to the relatively rickety docks.

  The offshore whale fishery at Nantucket grew steadily throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1715 there were six sloops based on the island in the thirty- to forty-ton range that brought in a total of 600 barrels of oil. In 1730 there were twenty-five vessels, some of which were in the fifty-ton range, bringing in a total of 3,700 barrels of oil; by 1748 there were sixty sloops and schooners operating out of Nantucket in the fifty- to seventy-five-ton range that brought in 11,250 barrels. These large vessels were commonly sent to what was known as the “southward” along the edges of the Gulf Stream, where they fished until the end of June before refitting for another cruise to the Grand Banks.

  Although the scope of the enterprise had expanded, this was still very much a local business, with the youth of Nantucket comprising the majority of the crew members. Island Indians also remained a part of the workforce, with each vessel usually containing four to eight Indians among its crew of thirteen. If an anecdote of Obed Macy’s is to be believed, a fairly high level of trust still existed between the two cultures, with at least some Indian crew members allowed access to English firearms. According to Macy, Captain John Coffin was resting in his cabin when he was startled by a sharp report. Once on deck he discovered that an Indian crew member had taken it upon himself to load the captain’s gun and fire it at a nearby whale, killing it instantly. Thanks to the Indian’s ingenuity and quick reflexes, Coffin and crew made forty barrels of oil from the whale, the only success they met with during the entire cruise.

  No matter how good or bad things were between Nantucket’s English and Indian whalemen throughout the eighteenth century, when it came to the conduct of their daily lives they were both, figuratively and literally, in the same boat. Zaccheus Macy tells the story of a whaleboat caught in a vicious winter storm during the days of along-shore whaling. As the crew, composed of two white men and four Native Americans, rowed into the teeth of the gale, an old Indian at the head of the boat encouraged them in his native language: “Momadichchator auqua farfhkee farnkee pinchee eyoo fememoochkee chaquanks wihchee pinchee eyoo,” which means, “Pull ahead with courage; do not be disheartened; we shall not be lost now; there are too many Englishmen to be lost now.” According to Macy, “His speaking in this manner gave the crew new courage. They soon perceived that they made headway; and after rowing, they all got safe on shore.” Clearly, English and Indian Nantucketers shared something more than a common job description.

  As we have seen, long after the Plague of 1763, Nantucket whalemen continued to use Indian phrases, demonstrating that Native American churches were not the only avenue of cultural cross-pollination on Nantucket. At the earliest possible age, young colonial Nantucketers were lisping Wampanoag phrases that would have baffled most other New Englanders. According to one observer in the late eighteenth century, “The boys, as soon as they can talk, will make use of the common [whaling] phrases, [such] as ‘townor,’ which is an Indian word, and signifies that they have seen the whale twice.”

  The legendary personality of the Quaker whaleman—laconic, austere, spiritual, and fearless—probably owed as much to the influence of the island’s Native Americans as it did to the combination of whaling and Quakerism. Although an islander would have been the last to admit it, the similarity between the Nantucket whaleman and the American Indian was obvious to at least one New Yorker writing in 1829: “The whalers of Nantucket may be called the free Indians of the Ocean, for their life partakes of all that enthusiasm and suffering which the latter experience in the wild woods of the west.” Just as the frontiersman of the nineteenth century would assimilate many of the values and customs of the western Indians, so was the Nantucket whaleman of the eighteenth century inevitably influenced by his Native American coworkers.

  If the story of Ichabod Paddock ultimately amounts to little more than a convenient and, from the English perspective, self-serving fiction revolving around a mythic white man, the tale also contains at least one undeniable truth: the whaleman did not exist in some deep-sea vacuum. After the voyage was over, there was always his native island. And it was here, where the English had been molded by more than a half-century of contact with Native Nantucketers, that a relatively new cultural force had begun to assert itself. Whereas the beginning of whaling is very much a man’s story, the beginning of Quakerism belongs to a woman.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mary Starbuck, High Priestess of the Company Store

  WE HAVE SEEN the almost biblical fervor with which the Nantucketers viewed their whaling destiny: the first sighting of their blubbery promised land from a seaside hill, the mystical stilling of the waters with a sperm whale’s blood. But if what the Nantucketers called the “whaling business” was tantamount to a religious quest, the island’s new religion, Quakerism, was the spiritual equivalent of a business. Stripped of all pomp and circumstance, Quakerism offered a low-budget pathway to spiritual fulfillment that only enhanced the islanders’ ability to make a profit on the high seas. For the Quaker Nantucketer, as it was for the Puritan New Englander, being righteous need not interfere with being financially successful; on the contrary, one’s worldly station was looked to as an indication of what would one day be one’s spiritual destiny.

  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Quakerism in the American colonies had come a long way since the days of Thomas Macy’s troubles in Salisbury. As Penn’s Philadelphia blossomed into a major port and Friends in nearby Newport and Cape Cod gained increasing status and respectability, the religion moved from the radical fringe to the comfortable margin of the colonial establishment. Throughout this process, what had once seemed so doctrinally outrageous began to look more and more like Puritanism. Although the Quaker depended on his own experience of God’s presence—the “Inner Light”—for guidance rather than relying on a Puritan minister’s interpretation of Scripture, the fact of the matter was that Quakerism encouraged a sense of community that was as carefully controlled and regimented as that of any seventeenth-century New England society. If there was a difference, it was the way in which Quakerism, in the words of one religious scholar, “promoted an attitude remarkably conducive to success in our competitive business system.”

  On Nantucket, it is a little bit like the chicken and the egg—which came first, the islanders’ determination to make a buck, or Quakerism’s nurturing influence on this resolve? The answer lies not so much in the generalizations of social history as in the personality of a single individual. For it was in Mary Starbuck, Tristram Coffin’s youngest daughter, that the interplay of worldly success and spiritual destiny created the truly prototypical Nantucketer.

  From the beginning, all eyes were on Mary Coffin and Nathaniel Starbuck. In 1662 they were the first English couple married on Nantucket. A year later, at the age of only eighteen, Mary gave birth to the community’s first child. With gifts and inheritances from their parents, Mary and Nathaniel quickly emerged as the most influential couple of their generation, with control over a total of two and a half shares in the proprietary.

  From the start, it was Mary Coffin Starbuck who directed the rise of the Starbuck family to the forefront of the community. Although her husband became a rock-solid member of the community, he never le
arned to read and write (signing documents with “his mark”) and, early on at least, he seems to have fallen into some less than upright ways. On September 26, 1673, he was ordered to pay the court four pounds and “also bound to his good behavior for six months” for an unknown offense. During the turbulence of the Half-Share Revolt, it was Mary who apparently determined the family’s loyalties, with the Starbucks throwing their support to Mary’s father, Tristram Coffin, rather than to Nathaniel’s father Edward, who was one of the few full-share men to back the Gardner group.

  If it was Mary who called the shots in the Starbuck family, she made sure to go through the motions of making it seem like a joint decision. As her stature in the community grew to the point that, according to one source, she was “esteemed as a judge among them, for little of moment was done without her,” she always included the name of her husband in whatever opinions she might express. Tradition has it that whenever she took part in debates during town meetings (which she attended regularly), she was careful to preface her remarks with the claim, “My husband and I, having considered the subject, think. . . .”

  While raising a family of ten children, Mary kept the books for the family store—a primitive frontier trading post that evolved into a highly complex business as the island’s economy turned to whaling in the eighteenth century. In the possession of the Nantucket Historical Association is one of Mary’s ledgers. Eight and a half by twelve and a half inches, with a sheepskin cover, cracked and warped with age, its leather clasps long since broken, this 147-page volume begins with the inscription: “Mary Starbucks Account Book with the Indians began in 1662—Nathaniel Junior continued it.”

  Although the entries begin in 1683, the earlier date probably indicates when the Starbucks first went into business. The account book, at times next to impossible to decipher, provides a fascinating glimpse into the economic development and daily life of early Nantucket. In the beginning, the Indians mainly followed traditional pursuits such as fishing and bird-hunting, with the Starbucks providing them with flints, powder, shot, fish hooks, and sinkers in exchange for the delivery of feathers and fish. The entries in the account book make it clear, however, that the Indians became increasingly involved in a wide variety of activities within the English economy—from threshing corn, hewing posts, carting dung, and plowing fields, to mowing hay and washing sheep. And as the whale fishery began to dominate island life, Starbuck provided candles, molasses, kettles, shoes, boards, jackknives, stockings, buttons, and calico in exchange for “oil and bone” from whaling either “alongshore” or “in the Deep.”

  Inevitably, the advancement of credit to island Indians brought with it the potential for them to fall into debt with what was Nantucket’s equivalent of the company store. Whether or not Mary and Nathaniel were guilty of unjustly enriching themselves at the Native Americans’ expense, this was the pathway that would lead many an Indian into a lifetime of servitude. Indeed, while a large number of white Nantucketers would owe their salvation to Mary Starbuck’s efforts, many Native Americans would owe their souls, if not to the Starbuck company store, to another one just like it.

  Whereas Mary had clearly stepped into her father’s shoes when it came to business and civic life, she seems to have followed her father-in-law’s path when it came to her radical religious leanings. Tradition has it that Peter Folger baptized her in the waters of tiny Waqutaquaib Pond (one of the boundary markers in the original Indian deed), and throughout her life she demonstrated an impatience with traditional religious practices. Although there was no organized church on Nantucket, there were often one or more itinerant clergymen attempting to establish ministries on the island. According to the Quaker Thomas Story, who came to Nantucket in 1704, it was Mary Starbuck—“in great reputation throughout the island for her knowledge in matters of religion, and an oracle among them on that account”—who always convinced her fellow Nantucketers to deny the temptations of hiring a permanent minister.

  If this was indeed the case, why then, we must ask, did she wait until she was fifty-eight years old to embrace the anti-clerical cause of Quakerism? Part of the problem may have had to do with a person who is already familiar to us—Stephen Hussey. As one of two practicing Quakers on the island (Richard Swain’s son John was the other one), Hussey seems to have given the religion a bad name on Nantucket. Ever since the days of the Half-Share Revolt, he had developed a reputation for mean-spirited combativeness. Even when fellow Quakers traveled to the island, Hussey could not resist the opportunity for an argument.

  In 1698, Hussey’s willingness to make a public spectacle of himself caused the visiting Quaker Thomas Chalkley to mistake him for the chief magistrate of the island. Hussey, it appears, had been nursing a grudge against Chalkley’s “Friends in Barbados” who had made some reference to the spiritual significance of the body of Christ. An exceedingly literal-minded fellow, Hussey asked, “Is it not a contradiction in nature, that flesh and blood should be spiritual?” When Chalkley pointed out that Christ himself had spoken figuratively when he said, “Except ye eat my flesh and drink my blood ye have no life in you,” Hussey snorted, “I don’t think they were to gnaw it from his arms and shoulders.” Undoubtedly with an ironic smile, Chalkley suggested that Hussey had just answered his own question.

  With a man such as Hussey as the religion’s leading advocate on the island, Quakerism undoubtedly had at least one strike against it on Nantucket. And yet, despite such disadvantages, Chalkley’s message apparently appealed to a surprising number of Nantucketers, with an estimated 200 people gathering for one of his meetings. Chalkley reported, “Some of the people said that it was never known that so many people were together on the island at once.”

  Three years later, in 1701, the breakthrough came with the arrival of the English Quaker John Richardson, who after spending a sleepless night on nearby Muskeget Island arrived on Nantucket to find a crowd of people assembled on the hillside overlooking the harbor. As he climbed what he called “an Ascent,” he realized that the islanders were in “great fear,” thinking that his ship was a French privateer. Holding out his arms as a sign of peace, he reassured them that he was a man of God and asked the way to the home of Nathaniel Starbuck, “who we understood was in some degree convinced of the Truth.” Richardson soon realized, however, that it was Mary Starbuck who was the true spiritual leader of the community: “At the first sight of her it sprang in my heart, to this woman is the everlasting love of God.”

  Already on island was a “nonconformist minister” who was about to conduct a meeting; Mary invited Richardson to attend it with her but he declined, proposing instead that he have his own meeting later in the day, for which Mary volunteered the use of her own house. Richardson described the scene: “the large and bright rubbed room was set with suitable seats or chairs, the glass windows taken out of the frames, and many chairs placed without very conveniently, so that I did not see anything a wanting . . . but something to stand on.” When he reached for a chair to use as a speaking platform, Mary—who, no matter how spiritual she might have been, appreciated the value of her worldly possessions—made it clear that “I was not free to set my feet upon the fine cane chair, lest I should break it.”

  The lack of a platform did not seem to detract from Richardson’s performance. Speaking of the need to “be born again” if one was to be “raised into a spiritual and new life,” he directed most of his attention not to the overflowing crowd but to the “great woman” seated before him. The depth and sincerity of her spiritual life are evident in Richardson’s description of her reaction: [She] fought and strove against the testimony, sometimes looking up in my face with a pale, and then with a more ruddy complexion, but the strength of the truth increased, and the Lord’s mighty power began to shake the people within and without doors; but she who was looked upon as a Deborah by these people was loth to lose her outside religion, or the appearance thereof; when she could no longer contain, she submitted to the power of truth and the doctrines
thereof and lifted up her voice and wept: Oh! then the universal cry and brokenness of heart and tears was wonderful!

  After an hour of speaking, Richardson, who had not slept in more than a day, began to grow faint and requested that the meeting be ended. But the crowd was too overcome to disperse. Finally, Mary Starbuck gained enough composure to address the multitude. “[She] stood up, and held out her hand, and spoke tremblingly and said, ‘All that ever we have been building, and all that ever we have done is all pulled down this day, and this is the overwhelming truth. . . .’” Added Richardson, “I observed that she, and as many as could well be seen, were wet with tears from their faces to the foreskirts of their garments, and the floor was as though there had been a shower of rain upon it.”

  Contrary to what some have maintained, Mary Starbuck’s conversion did not mark the instantaneous adoption of Quakerism on the island. When another Friend, Thomas Story, came to Nantucket three years later, in 1704, he found an island still “inhabited by a mixed people of various notions” with no organized meeting. One person standing in the way of the Quaker cause was Captain John Gardner, now “an ancient man,” according to Story, “who had much sway in the affairs of the government of the island.” Despite his age, Gardner had lost none of the feistiness that had characterized his conduct in the Half-Share Revolt. When Story came to visit him in his own house, Gardner proved to be in no mood to be proselytized, claiming that thirty to forty years earlier in his hometown of Salem, a Quaker had asserted that Jesus Christ never rose from the dead. Although Story insisted that this was not a tenet of Quakerism, Gardner persisted in his vehement denunciations of the faith to the point that “his wife (an ancient person) was much grieved at the ill-nature and behavior of her husband toward us . . . and she wept much whilst we talked together.”