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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  John Greenleaf Whittier’s reference to Nantucket as a “refuge of the free” comes from his poem “The Exiles,” referred to in the Notes for Chapter 3. Certainly some individual members of Nantucket’s Quaker community had done more than talk about their commitment to anti-slavery. In the 1820s, two runaway slaves from Virginia, Arthur and Mary Cooper, were successfully hidden from the authorities by several leading Quaker citizens. And in 1841 Anna Gardner, who taught at the African School, helped organize the first anti-slavery meeting in which Douglass spoke. For excellent accounts of the abolitionist scene on Nantucket in the 1840s as well as the fight to integrate the island’s school system, see Barbara White’s “The Integration of Nantucket Public Schools” and Susan Beegel’s “The Brotherhood of Thieves Riot of 1842” (from which the reference to David Joy’s letter comes), both in HN (Fall, 1992).

  Adding an eerie sense of cultural finality to Quary’s death was the miraculous return of bluefish to island waters. The fish had virtually disappeared after the Plague of 1763 and, according to an Indian prophecy, would not return until the death of the island’s last Native American. Although Quary was Nantucket’s last “practicing” Indian, there were, of course, many people still living on the island (particularly in New Guinea) with Native American blood in their veins. Soon after Quary’s death, Dorcas Honorable, an Indian domestic described by Eliza Mitchell as “6 feet tall and a noble woman of her tribe,” also died.

  Although some island historians have attempted to discount the Nantucketers’ involvement in the degradation of the South Pacific, the evidence is to the contrary. For example, according to the First Lieutenant of the U.S. Naval ship Vincennes, “Your Nantucket whalemen have caused us more trouble than all other causes combined” (quoted in Delano). In an article in the Boston Advertiser (in “Memorial to Frederick Coleman Sanford, 1809–1890,” NA), Sanford claims that “it is unjust to class the Sandwich Islanders with the Polynesians and New Zealanders as cannibals.” In Islands and Empires, Ernest S. Dodge paints an extremely sordid picture of life in the Bay of Islands. In a fascinating study in contrasts, NI (October 29, 1822) contains a story on the Coopers’s rescue from slave catchers as well as this description of a shrunken head from the Bay of Islands: “It appears to have been that of a person about 30 years of age. The skin resembles parchment, and is very curiously tattooed.—The inside of the skull is perfectly clean and smooth—the teeth in a fine state of preservation, as are the eyelids, ears, lip, nose, etc. The whole structure of the mouth and even the cartilages of the nose are plainly discoverable through the aperture at the neck. The sockets of the eyes are filled with a substance resembling sealing wax. The hair about two feet long and very black.”

  The reference to the effects of “civilization” on the Pacific islands is in NI (May 2, 1825). Melville’s lecture on the South Seas (delivered in 1858–9) is reprinted in the Piazza Tales volume. For an account of how the Pacific was overrun by America and Europe, see Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact, An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840 (London, 1966). Melville’s reference to “pirates of the sphere” is in his long poem Clarel, published in 1876 (Evanston and Chicago, 1991).

  17. Maria Mitchell, the Provincial Cosmopolitan

  Besides the papers in the collection of the Maria Mitchell Science Library on Nantucket, the best published sources of information concerning Maria Mitchell are Phebe Mitchell Kendall’s Maria Mitchell, Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston, 1896) and Helen Wright’s Sweeper in the Sky (New York, 1949). Kendall, who was Maria’s sister, seems to have been guilty of “editing” or expunging the more personal (and probably more interesting) portions of Maria’s papers. At one point in her biography she complains that her sister “had no secretiveness, and in looking over her letters it has been almost impossible to find one which did not contain too much that was personal, either about herself or others, to make it proper.” Because of Kendall’s efforts, there is much about Maria Mitchell we may never know.

  Jenks’s article about astronomy is in NI (October 18, 1829). Maria’s comment concerning women and “night work” is from William F. Macy’s Scrap Basket. Lucretia Mott’s remarks are quoted in Margaret Hope Bacon’s biography Valiant Friend (New York, 1980). Although Mott never lost her love for the island (visiting it many times), not all of her memories were positive. As a child she was horrified by the sight of a woman being publicly whipped in front of the town hall. According to Bacon, “Seventy-five years later she led grandchildren and great-grandchildren to the spot where the whipping post had been and told them in a trembling voice how angry it had made her.”

  Mrs. Folger’s letter, dated June 6, 1768, is at the NA and anticipates the emotions that would be expressed by whalemen’s wives in the nineteenth century when three-year voyages became the norm. See Lisa Norling’s “ ‘How Fraught with Sorrow and Heartpangs’: Mariners’ Wives and the Ideology of Domesticity in New England, 1790–1880” for a sensitive reading of similar letters from wives in the New Bedford area.

  Opium bottles were uncovered during sewer work in the 1980s; see my article on Crèvecoeur and the Nantucket letters (cited earlier). Combine the long absences of the whalemen with Quakerism’s proscription against “indulgence of the grosser animal senses” (the words of the religion’s founder, George Fox) and you have the makings of what we would call today unhealthy or abnormal conjugal relations. As Helen Wright points out, one of Maria’s married sisters admitted that she could not bear to touch another person’s skin; another proudly stated that in all her years of married life she had never seen her husband naked; yet another insisted that it was impossible for a woman to enjoy sex. There is a Nantucket tradition of a different sort that claims the whalemen helped their wives cope with the long periods of separation by providing them with what were known as “He’s at Homes”: porcelain sexual aids from China.

  The poem referring to the proper “sphere” of a wife is contained in the “Misc. Papers, Letters, etc.” file at the NA. For more information concerning William Mitchell, see Helen Wright’s “William Mitchell of Nantucket,” HN (1949). The story from the Nantucket Gazette of Walter Folger, Sr.’s independent discovery of how to make sperm candles (so as to break William Rotch’s island-wide monopoly of the technology) was cited earlier. The anecdote concerning Mrs. Folger, Jr.’s comments concerning her studious husband come from the Scrap Basket; Wright speaks of Maria’s visits with Folger, Jr., and Phoebe Folger.

  One of the young people Maria deeply influenced was Alexander Starbuck, historian of both the island and whale fishery, who as a boy used to work at the Atheneum. In a letter to Starbuck dated August 24, 1859, she wrote, “My Atheneum ‘boys’ have turned out wonderfully well—they were good boys at the outset or I should not have employed them, and I hope they learned no evil from me” (NHA Collection 5, Folder 1).

  The letter concerning the degeneration of Quakerism appeared in NI (May 31, 1844). The description of a Nantucket Quaker meeting comes from a letter dated September 2, 1849, in the NA. The Quaker Committee Book of Objections (previously cited) is at the NHA.

  The reference to the beauty of Nantucket women is made by William Comstock in The Life of Samuel Comstock; he also describes the “very select” nature of social gatherings in A Voyage to the Pacific, Descriptive of the Customs, Usages, and Sufferings on board of Nantucket Whale-Ships (Boston, 1838), published, interestingly enough, by the Seamen’s Journal Office. Elmo Hohman speaks of the use of chock-pins as a Nantucket status symbol in The American Whaleman. That Nantucket’s courting rituals were an ancient part of the island’s social fabric is indicated by the reported persistence of the age-old custom of “bundling” on Nantucket, in which a courting couple spent the night in bed together divided by a wooden “bundling board.” According to William F. Macy, bundling was still being practiced on Nantucket long after it had been abandoned elsewhere in New England (the last recorded use of bundling on Cape Cod occurred in 1827); see Henry Reed Stiles, Bundling
, Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America (1869; rpt. Cambridge/ Watertown, 1991).

  The Scrap Basket has several anecdotes concerning Maria’s dark complexion and deep voice. The reference to Nantucket girls being blond with black eyes comes from an article written by a Dr. Hobbs for the Boston Atlas and reprinted in NI (August 17, 1860); Hobbs also states: “Grace of carriage may also be said to be a characteristic of the Nantucket ladies; as is likewise a good development of chest. There is little consumption among them, but much of muscle, florid cheek and ruby lip. Some of these possessions, or all of them, added to their excellent education, refined manners, and virtuous principles, account for their meeting so readily with husbands.”

  Audubon wrote about the limited intellectual scope of most Nantucketers in his letter to his son (previously cited). In his account of his voyage aboard the Hero, Moses Morrell wrote in 1822 that Nantucketers were “with few exceptions . . . avaricious, ignorant and superstitious.” In a poem entitled “Nantucket Sorosis [sic]” included in her book Harvest Gleanings, Anna Gardner speaks derisively of the island’s response to the formation of a “Woman’s Club,” while applauding women’s aspirations for something “above the groveling subject life” that apparently was considered, in her own words, a “woman’s only proper sphere” on Nantucket.

  Mitchell’s poem about Maushop, entitled “An Old Story,” appears in the verse collection Seaweeds from the Shores of Nantucket (Boston, 1853). For a discussion of Melville’s visit with Maria Mitchell and the poem he ultimately wrote, see my article “Hawthorne, Maria Mitchell, and Melville’s ‘After the Pleasure Party,’ ” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance (December, 1991).

  To the credit of island “capitalists” (despite the claims of the NI in 1846), there were other, nonwhaling businesses (from silk weaving to the manufacture of shoes and straw hats) attempted on Nantucket in the nineteenth century, none of which proved economically viable.

  The best first-person account of the Fire is by William C. Macy in the second edition of Obed’s History of Nantucket; see also Stackpole’s “The Great Fire of 1846,” HN (1949). Although the damage done by the Great Fire was of astounding proportions, the worst to occur on the island as far as the loss of human life happened on February 21, 1842, when the Quaise Poor Farm burned down, killing ten of the fifty-nine occupants. When the Poor Farm was rebuilt it was equipped with what may have been the island’s first forced-hot-water heating system, described in the Vineyard Gazette ( July 19, 1849) as “zinc pipes through which hot water is constantly circulating, without the danger of the house being again fired by the carelessness of imbecile persons.” Jenks’s report concerning the 1846 Fire is quoted in full by Hugo-Brunt in “An Historical Survey of the Physical Development of Nantucket.” Emerson speaks of the post-Fire looting and the concentrated wealth of the island in his Journals; Wright describes how Maria destroyed her private papers soon after the Fire.

  Adding to the general trauma experienced by the Nantucket community in 1846 was yet another bank scandal involving (this time) Barker Burnell, Jr. The NI ( January 1, 1847) provided a recap of that “eventful” year: “First came the failure of the bank, accompanied, unavoidably, with great distress and prostration of business. . . . Men knew not whom to trust, every one, for a time looked suspiciously upon his neighbor. Mutual confidence was just beginning to be restored, and the old spirit of union and cooperation to be again manifested,—when a deluge of fire came upon us, and swept away nearly one third of the town.”

  Parker’s reference to Nantucket women is quoted by Wright. See Will Gardner’s “Nantucket Farms,” HN (1947), for an account of the more than 100 farms on Nantucket in the 1850s. Anna Gardner’s poem “Nantucket Agricultural Song” is in Harvest Gleanings. Julian Hawthorne’s description of Maria is in Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife (Boston, 1884). Maria’s letter stating her appreciation for Nantucket is undated and addressed to a Mrs. Crosby (NHA Collection 5, Folder 1). Anna Gardner’s words concerning Lucretia Mott and Nantucket (in Harvest Gleanings ) might also be applied to Maria Mitchell: “Though Nantucket, this little world by itself, was her native isle, it cannot properly be said of one so cosmopolitan, with so large benevolence of soul, and world-wide sympathies, that she belonged to any small locality or even to America. . . .”

  18. F. C. Sanford, the Mythmaker

  In his island History, Alexander Starbuck speaks of the “lack of cooperation” of Nantucketers when it came to developing alternatives to whaling. The reference to the island as the summering place is from NI (August 14, 1845). Mary Starbuck’s comments concerning the islanders’ pride in the past and lack of enthusiasm for summer people were made in an article entitled “A Protest from Old Nantucket” in the Boston Evening Transcript and reprinted in NI (undated clipping in NHA blue-dot file); see also her article “Whale Oil and Spermaceti” in New England Magazine ( July, 1902), where she writes: “The old Nantucket is a thing of the past. . . . A new Nantucket is being evolved, but what shall be its character no prophet may yet foretell.” One of the best short treatments of Nantucket at its “lowest ebb” is to be found in Marc Simpson’s “Taken with a Cranberry Fit: Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in the exhibition guide Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (San Diego, 1990). Samuel Adams Drake in Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast (New York, 1875) describes the emptiness of Nantucket at this time. W. B. Drake in “Nantucket,” Lippincott’s Magazine (September, 1868), speaks of Nantucket being death-like; cited by Simpson.

  For information regarding F. C. Sanford, I have depended primarily on these sources: Dr. Will Gardner’s “Memorial to Frederick Coleman Sanford, 1809–1890,” a handsomely bound scrap book and narrative at the NA; Sanford’s assorted papers, also at the NA; the NHA’s green-dot file on Sanford, which contains a manuscript by Edouard Stackpole about Sanford; and George F. Worth’s transcription of Sanford’s articles in the NI and other newspapers, to be found in NHA Collection 129, Book 19.

  Sanford speaks of Nantucket as “the Chief in the World!” in a letter dated November 10, 1875, to Alexander Starbuck who was in the midst of researching his whaling History (NHA Collection 144, Folder 11). Starbuck apparently came to have a less glorious view of Nantucket’s whaling history than did Sanford, who wrote him a nearly continual stream of letters during this period; see Starbuck’s reference to “shattered idols” in the Preface.

  A traditional Nantucket anecdote concerns a Captain Manter, an islander like Captain Gardner who found himself in the jaws of a whale; when asked what he was thinking while in the whale’s mouth, he replied, “Wal, I thought he’d make about sixty berril” (in E. U. Crosby’s Eastman Johnson at Nantucket, Nantucket, 1944). In her diary, Kezia Fanning mentions the two Cantonese merchants on the island in 1807, as does Stackpole in The Sea-Hunters. Sanford recorded his account of Gardner’s involvement with the Chinese in his copy of Vincent Nolte’s 59 Years in Both Hemispheres, which he donated to the NA. Irene Jaynes Smith writes of Sanford’s marginalia in her description of Sanford’s collection, included in Gardner’s “Memorial.”

  One of Sanford’s ancestors was Peleg Sanford from Newport, whose account book is one of the best sources of information on seventeenth-century trading practices; cited in Carl Bridenbaugh’s Cities in the Wilderness (1938; rpt. London, 1966). The tradition at the Zenas Coffin Counting House was a New England–wide practice; as early as 1665, merchants in Boston were meeting every day at 11:00 to discuss business (in Bridenbaugh). William C. Macy speaks of the Panic of 1837 in Part 3 of Obed Macy’s History.

  A total of four whalers were built at the shipyard on Brant Point: Charles Carroll (1832), Lexington (’36), Nantucket (’36), and Joseph Starbuck (’38); it seems to have been a relatively “high-tech” yard, with the Nantucket featuring “live-oak” and copper-fastened construction, which was state-of-the-art at the time. See Elizabeth Little’s “Live Oak Whaleships,” HN (October, 1971), for an interesting account of shipbuilding during and be
fore this period. The Charles Carroll was built specifically for Captain Owen Chase, survivor and first mate of the Essex. Sanford purchased the Rambler, a 318-ton ship, from Aaron Mitchell in 1838; a conservative estimate places the dollar amount of oil the ship brought in for Sanford at 1.5 million over the course of its career. Providing an interesting insight into the practices of a Nantucket whaling merchant in general and Sanford in particular is this record of his “Proffits” from his various ships in 1841:

  In a letter to Alexander Starbuck (December 21, 1875), Sanford describes his trip “around the world” and to New Zealand in 1838; it was during this voyage that Sanford assembled “the first statistical sheet ever made up on the whale fishery”; he claims that he soon “gave it up to others” (NHA Collection 144, Folder 11). Gardner’s “Memorial” contains a detailed analysis of the many transactions involved in Sanford’s gradual acquisition of the land surrounding the Barnabas Coleman House. Sanford’s agitation over what he called “Gold Mania” in California was so great that he wrote Captain Bunker three nearly identical letters in the course of a single month just to make sure he got the message (NHA Collection 3, Folder 35).

  Once the bugs were worked out of the system, Ewer’s camels were able to carry a whaleship across the bar in as little as four and a half hours; see H. Flint Ranney’s “Whaling and Nantucket—the Decline,” HN (April, 1961), for a detailed account of not only the camels but the efforts to dredge a channel across the bar. Sanford spoke of the tendency toward centralization in his November 10, 1875, letter to Alexander Starbuck, adding that in the old days, “New Bedford was nothing, nor any other port on this continent, aside of our old recovered entrepôt. I can remember when they came from every point in New England. Yes! even from the Vineyard to earn a whaling reputation.” William C. Macy’s comments concerning the Nantucket whaling captains’ conservatism are in his addendum to Obed Macy’s History.