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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  With mentors and influences such as these, Maria quickly developed into a world-class astronomer. Although astronomy was the passion that dominated her life, it was, by no means, the only thing in her life. After a stint as a schoolteacher, Maria became the librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum, a post she maintained for almost twenty years. It was a job that gave her plenty of time for her astronomy (the Atheneum was open only on weekday afternoons and Saturday evenings) and also placed her in an important position within the island’s cultural life. According to her sister Phebe Kendall, “Her visitors in the afternoon were elderly men of leisure, who enjoyed talking with so bright a girl on their favorite hobbies. When they talked Miss Mitchell closed her book and took up her knitting, for she was never idle. With some of these visitors the friendship was kept up for years.”

  She also formed lasting relationships with the girls and boys who came to the Atheneum. According to her sister, “the young girls made her their confidante and went to her for sympathy and advice.” In her diary she recorded what seems to have been a fairly typical encounter with a local boy just back from the Pacific: “A young sailor boy came to see me today. It pleases me to have these lads seek me on their return from their first voyage, and tell me how much they have learned about navigation. They always say, with pride, ‘I can take a lunar, Miss Mitchell, and work it up!’ ”

  Throughout this period, Maria lived at home, taking an active part in the household chores. Although Quakers, the Mitchells worked against the type. In the front hall of their living quarters was a very un-Quakerly piano. When an elder from the Society suggested that William remove the instrument from his home or risk disownment, Maria’s father mildly reminded the old man that as cashier of the bank he held the mortgage for the Friends meeting house. The piano stayed.

  By the 1830s and ’40s, the religion of Mary Starbuck had become something of a moral and spiritual dinosaur on Nantucket. In 1845, a letter appeared in the Nantucket Inquirer that declared, “It is a well known and lamentable fact that for many years the Society has been too much under the control of those who have but little, except their wealth to recommend them.” In 1849, a visitor to the island attended a Quaker meeting with her friend Mrs. Folger and reported, “After sitting half an hour we were entertained for three-quarters of an hour by two old women and one man who repeated over and over again what Mrs. Folger says they have for twenty years.” By the time she turned twenty-five, Maria had decided that Quakerism was not for her. According to the Society’s “Book of Objections,” “Maria Mitchell daughter of William had neglected the meetings. She told the committee that her mind was not settled on religious subjects and that she had no wish to retain her right in membership. Disowned 8–31–1843.”

  Quakerism was not the only aspect of island life in which Maria chose not to participate. Even though Nantucket was without many of the “amusements” in which young people indulged off island, there was still a very active social life, heightened no doubt by the island’s reputation for producing beautiful women. According to one male observer, “it is almost impossible to avoid falling in love on Nantucket. The girls are so plentiful, and so pretty, that if the hearts of the men did not palpitate at the sight of them, the very grindstones would turn around with ecstasy.” Given the island’s communal lust for “Oil! Oil!” it is perhaps not unsurprising that courting rituals revolved around the whale fishery. Dancing parties on Nantucket were “very select,” with “no youths being admitted except those who have struck a whale.” Harpooners, who decorated their lapels with chock-pins (used on whaleboats to keep the line from tangling), were the most eligible of bachelors—not in the least because they were on the fast track toward officer and eventual captain’s status.

  Traditional Nantucket social circles were clearly not for Maria Mitchell. According to her sister Phebe, “She cared but little for general society, and had always to be coaxed to go into company.” Self-consciously plain, with a dark complexion and deep voice (on an island where the girls were famous for their blond hair and black eyes), Maria dedicated herself to her science with a single-minded intensity rivaling that of the Nantucket whalemen. As a young woman, virtually all her evenings were spent with her astronomy; if the weather was bad, there were always calculations to perform. According to Phebe, “No matter how many guests there might be in the parlor, Miss Mitchell would slip out, don her regimentals as she called them, and, lantern in hand, mount to the roof.”

  Certainly Maria would not have been the astronomer she was if she had fit more comfortably into Nantucket social and spiritual circles. Indeed, despite its world-wide reach, Nantucket was a remarkably static place, where ancient customs and outworn creeds must have felt stultifying to a woman whose ambitions did not involve winning a whaleman for a husband. (In 1840 Audubon observed that most islanders “know little more than the value of dollars.”) Inevitably, she yearned to see the world beyond the island, just as had generation after generation of Nantucket men. In 1844, she wrote a whimsical poem concerning the legend of Maushop’s moccasin that ended with this rather plaintive stanza:Ill-judging Sachem! would that you

  Had never shaken here that shoe;

  Or, having done so, would again,

  And join Nantucket to the main!

  In 1852, a year after publishing Moby-Dick, Herman Melville came to Nantucket for the first time and spent an evening at the Mitchells’ residence above the bank. Many years later he would publish a poem in which a female astronomer, after years of dedicating herself to the stars, seeks the affections of a man who remains oblivious to her. Entitled “After the Pleasure Party,” the poem probably is as much about Melville’s relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne (whom both Melville and Maria knew) as it is about Maria Mitchell. Nonetheless, if Melville’s portrait of “Urania” is any indication, Maria’s life on Nantucket was not without its frustrations. In 1853, a year after meeting Melville, she complained in her diary about the limitations placed on a woman by society, declaring that “the needle is the chain of woman, and has fettered her more than the laws of the country.” After mentioning the importance of education, she indignantly wrote, “I would as soon put a girl alone into a closet to meditate as give her only the society of her needle. . . . A woman is expected to know all kinds of woman’s work, and the consequence is that life is passed in learning these only, while the universe of truth beyond remains unentered.”

  By this time forces were already in motion that would forever change not only Maria but also the island of her birth. Although the whaling business was booming in the rival ports of New Bedford and Sag Harbor throughout the 1840s, Nantucket found itself in the midst of a disturbing decline. On July 1, 1846, under the headline “Emigration from Nantucket,” the Nantucket Inquirer reported on the large number of families being forced to leave the island in search of new opportunities. Unlike the emigrations of the Revolution and the War of 1812, this one was not of the rich, but of the lower and middle classes. The increased length of the voyages meant that there were fewer ships to fit out each year, providing fewer jobs to the “mechanics” living on the island. Also, improvements in manufacturing the “casks, pails, ironwork, etc.” required for a whaling voyage had increased the profit margin for the shipowner while reducing job opportunities for the mechanics. According to the Inquirer, “Times may be good, capitalists may grow rich, but the mechanics cannot get employment.” The writer went so far as to blame these “capitalists” for not investing in other on-island endeavors that might employ the dispossessed workers: “But our capitalists have been appealed to, and they will do nothing,—so that the only remedy which remains for the present over-population, is emigration.” On an island gradually running out of economic steam, those who retained power only held it more closely to themselves.

  And then, less than two weeks after the Inquirer made these comments concerning “capitalists” and “mechanics,” came the “point from which all events are reckoned”: the Great Fire of 1846. At this time the t
own was without a municipal fire department. Instead, privately organized “fire companies” were relied upon to respond to the alarm, connecting their hoses to giant cisterns underneath the surface of Main Street, then directing hand-pumped streams of water at the blaze. When smoke was spotted at William Geary’s hat store and the alarm went out at around eleven o’clock at night, two fire companies arrived on the scene simultaneously. Although, according to one eyewitness, “a good smart stream of water at this juncture would have quenched the flames,” the two companies began to argue among themselves about who should have the honor of putting out the fire.

  Unfortunately, the island had been without rain for weeks, and the tinder dry structure was soon engulfed in flames. As other companies arrived, the fire spread from roof to roof, the crackling sound of burning wood gradually building to a deafening roar. The immense upward flow of heat created its own wind currents that circulated along the narrow, densely packed streets, spreading the fire in all directions. The center of a huge, swirling fire storm, Main Street became impassable as windborne fire brands flew through the air only to land on faraway roofs and burn down houses that had been assumed safe. The intense heat generated by the holocaust reduced iron safes to puddles of melted slag.

  In a desperate attempt to stop the fire in its tracks, buildings were dynamited, the explosions adding to the terrifying confusion of the night. At one point, the fire wardens determined that the Methodist church (beside the Pacific Bank on Center Street) must also be blasted. In a tradition that may be too good to be true, Maria Mitchell was supposedly the person who rushed to the building’s defense. The argument was that the swirling convection currents created by the fire at the head of Main Street would blow the flames away from the church. What is perhaps one of the town’s most magnificent buildings still stands today as proof that the argument—whoever presented it—was a good one.

  Although Maria may or may not have saved the Methodist church, her roof-top observatory was almost completely destroyed before she and her father could put out the flames. Soon the same hot winds that saved the church proved to be the Atheneum’s undoing. The Episcopal church that used to stand beside the present-day Jared Coffin House also succumbed to the flames. And then, after most of the commercial district of town had been lost to fire, it was the waterfront’s turn. Warehouses packed to the rafters with casks of whale oil burned so hot that not even cinders remained the next morning. As the casks burst and the burning oil poured across the wharves and into the water, the harbor became a scalding sheet of flame. It made more than a few observers think of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Much has been written about how the islanders courageously banded together and rebuilt their town in a matter of months. A new Atheneum would be standing by February, even though the trustees’ president, William Mitchell himself, had neglected to renew the building’s fire insurance policy. But there was another side to the conflagration that would make it difficult for some Nantucketers to look each other in the eye after the smoke had, quite literally, cleared. A committee headed by Samuel Jenks reported that although many of the women in town “rendered more efficient service than could be obtained from the usually stronger sex,” most town residents were guilty of an “appalling” lack of civic responsibility. Instead of pulling together to put out the fire, it had been a case of, in Jenks’s words, “Save himself who can.” After enumerating how “these facts reflect a measure of dishonor upon us,” he reserved his strongest criticisms for the island’s upper classes, bestowing “a sentence of censure upon those individuals, who possessed of wealth and influence, pressed into their private service large bodies of dependent laboring men—in effect hiring them to surrender the residue of the town to its fate—who, otherwise, without reward or incentive, could have wrought successfully against the desolating elements. . . .”

  Even after the flames had died out, leaving the town a charred wasteland, it was still every man for himself. One townsperson told Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited the island in May to help dedicate the new Atheneum, “At the fire they pilfered freely as if after a man was burnt out his things belonged to the fire & everybody might have them.” Only a few days after the fire, another alarm was sounded, and Maria, perhaps fearful that her private papers might be subjected to the looting, destroyed all her diaries and letters. (According to her biographer, Helen Wright, “In those few tragic moments the early record of a remarkable life was lost forever.”) In any event, it was now shockingly clear that the familial, virtually classless Utopia of “Old Nantucket” had vanished (if it had ever truly existed) long before it could be swallowed up in flames.

  And yet the Great Fire of 1846 was not without its positive effects. Chastened by the events of that terrible summer night, the selectmen adopted measures to insure that it would never happen again, including a revamped system of fighting fires. The new town had wider, more sensibly laid-out streets. The most important changes to the town, however, were not in its physical structure and organization. The social fabric of the place was changing, as well as its cultural and commercial life. Although most accounts of Nantucket in the aftermath of the Fire make it sound as if the island plummeted headlong into ruin, such was not the case. Even amid the devastation of the Fire and the decline in whaling, the boom times of less than a decade before had a certain momentum; otherwise the town would have never been able to rebuild itself so quickly. Although three years later the California Gold Rush virtually evacuated the island of able-bodied men, many of the older and wealthier shipowners and merchants stayed on (according to Emerson, only “50 persons owned 5/7 of all the property in the island”), insuring that at least the upper stratum of the community remained relatively intact well into the 1850s.

  In 1852 the trustees of the Coffin School built a new and dramatic brick structure on Winter Street; meanwhile, a long line of distinguished speakers—including Emerson, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Horace Mann, and many others—came to the new Atheneum, where Maria added steadily to the library’s collections. Although not as prosperous and commercially alive as it had been in the “Great Days of Whaling,” the island became a much more interesting place in which to live as the self-imposed blinders of the whale fishery were gradually removed. Nantucket’s schools, by almost all accounts, had become first rate. And according to Theodore Parker, who lectured on the island, it was Nantucket’s women who were the most deserving of praise: “I think there is no town in New England where the whole body of women is so well educated.” Agriculture on the island experienced a resurgence as more than a few husbands returned from whaling voyages to discover that their wives had made more money on the family farm than they had made at sea. Inspired by this phenomenon, the ardent feminist Anna Gardner included these lines in her poem, “Nantucket Agricultural Song”:And the Goddess, fair Ceres benignant,

  When all undisputed her reign,

  Will scatter rare blessings abundant,

  O’er hill-top, and valley, and plain!

  Exotics may blossom in beauty,

  Where fallow-lands stretch to the shore,

  And each son of toil may make duty

  A pleasure he ne’er felt before.

  Just as the island entered into this post-Fire, post-boomtown mentality, Maria Mitchell made a discovery that was not without a certain irony, given the fact that a comet is traditionally regarded as the harbinger of, not the follow-up to, a natural disaster. In 1831 the King of Denmark had offered a gold medal to “the first discoverer of a telescopic comet,” and in 1847, just over a year after the Great Fire, Maria made the sighting that qualified her for this coveted award. Her sister Phebe has left us with this account:On the evening of Oct. 1, 1847, there was a party of invited guests at the Mitchell home. As usual, Maria slipped out, ran up to the telescope, and soon returned to the parlor and told her father that she thought she saw a comet. Mr. Mitchell hurried upstairs, stationed himself at the telescope, and as soon as he looked at the object pointed out by his daughter declared it t
o be a comet.

  The discovery soon gave her world-wide attention, and in 1848 she became the first female member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year she was asked to become a paid “computer” for the American Nautical Almanac, as well as for the United States Coastal Survey. In 1855, after attending an annual convention of the Academy in Boston, she recorded in her diary, “It is really amusing to find one’s self lionized in a city where one has visited quietly for years; to see the doors of fashionable mansions open wide to receive you, which never opened before. I suspect that the whole corps of science laughs in its sleeves at the farce.”

  Maria’s commitments had reached the point that by 1854 she had “determined not to spend so much time at the Atheneum another season, but to put some one in my place who shall see the strange faces and hear the strange talk.” She also wanted to travel, and in 1857 a wealthy Midwestern banker asked her to chaperone his daughter on a tour of the Southern states and Europe. While in Liverpool, England, Maria and her charge received word that the girl’s father had lost his fortune in a nation-wide financial panic, requiring that the girl return home immediately. Maria, however, decided to stay on, ultimately traveling with the family of Nathaniel Hawthorne through France and Italy. Of the noted author, she wrote, “His hair stands out on each side, so much so that one’s thoughts naturally turn to combs and hair-brushes. . . .”

  Hawthorne’s young son Julian was, according to Maria, “in love with me,” and later in life he would record his impressions of the Nantucket astronomer and traveling companion: “There was a simplicity and a dry humor about this lady; . . . as if a bit of shrewd, primitive, kindly New England were walking and talking in the midst of the gray antiquity of Europe.” Although now a world renowned astronomer, Maria was first and foremost a Nantucketer: witty, intelligent, and extremely down-to-earth. In fact, if anything, the European tour increased her appreciation for her native island. In 1859 she wrote to a friend on Nantucket:Even in Rome, and after eight months in Europe, I think our Nantucket people are bright. . . . If I think well of the Nantucketers intellectually after “seeing the world,” I must think well of them morally. I really believe there are few communities in the world to compare with it in this respect, and out of New England, I am afraid there are none. So you see, I shall not come back despising the sea-girt isle, if I have looked upon sunnier ones.