A HISTORY OF OLD NANTUCKET
IRON RULE WITH A WOMAN'S TOUCH
© 1989 Duncan Caldwell
Nantucket! Walk that island shaped like a fishhook baited among shoals prowled by rips and eddies - where the Gulf Stream makes its break for the open seas - and you tread the scalp of a continent. Underfoot is such a hodgepodge gouged out of valleys and ground off peaks by the last icecap's onslaught, that you can sift samplings from far inland through your fingers. The combined glaciers sprawled beyond the obliterated shore and dumped their load just short of the brink of the continental shelf, where its burden would have tumbled into the pit.
Then under a resurgent sun, the ice cliffs shrank northwards, leaving lagoons contained within terminal moraine which reached from Plum Island in the North around the rim of Cape Cod, then back inwards in a seawall now all but scoured off the seabed except at its strong points: Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and finally Long Island, anchoring the ramparts in the South. Draw a curve through the remnants and Holland's dikes pale by comparison.
But a Nantucket beachcomber finds other scraps - from every shore touched by man. The great homing of ships into the remote impractical harbor, despite the sandbar growing across its mouth that ever larger whale ships had to be lifted over by a floating dry-dock called a "camel", is as improbable as the island's arrival in cold storage. Yet in the last of three heydays, just before petroleum was refined enough to burn cleanly, the little town and its far-flung transplants in such places as Nova Scotia, Wales, Dunkirk and Honolulu, kept the western world lit and lubricated the Industrial Revolution's first engines.
The whalers' capital was nothing short of a planetary assembly gathered upon a windswept strand, which was in closer contact with the world's farthest reaches than London or Paris. The waterfront of the 1830's, when the biggest catches were logged, bustled with exotics. Azoreans and Kanaks, a term applied to any natives of the South Pacific, mixed with free blacks, from a neighborhood known as Little Angola, and Quaker merchants wearing somber clothing and broad brim hats. Drays carted hogsheads full of staples amid armies of casks covered with seaweed that kept the sun from splitting them and spilling oil wrested from the Doldrums to the Horn. The wharves were piled with crates and bales of provisions which arrived daily and even hourly in packets that contrasted with bluff-bowed whale ships built to lug cargoes, rather than meet deadlines, both in their sleekness and the increasing appearance of funnels among their rigging.
Outfitters swarmed over ships, which were departing about once a week, hurrying to send them outward-bound. Coopers fashioned and stowed shooks, as disassembled barrels were called. Caulkers smote reeking tar into hulls to make them seaworthy for dogged cruises of up to five years. Among the smitheries, boat builders, warehouses, refineries, ship chandlers, sail lofts, and hardware and grocery stores, braiding carts shuttled along tracks within long ropewalks and factories turned spermaceti mined out of decapitated whale heads into the cleanest burning candles until the invention of paraffin.
Yet this center of industry, which was long the third largest town in Massachusetts and the headquarters of a global butchery, came close to being a commercial and cultural matriarchy, where one census showed but one man per four women. In fact, Center Street itself was known as Petticoat Lane because of the number of businesses managed by women in the absence of husbands. One women's club even encouraged the imbalance by forbidding marriage to any suitor who had not slain a whale - although the demand fizzled after a doctor, who happened to be an off-islander, or "coof", fulfilled his beloved's injunction, only to spurn her after a voyage - for putting him through hell!
For all their rectitude, Nantucket's women had to concoct remedies to fight the depression and loneliness, which were often a consequence of their men's absence. Each day saw a round of visiting in two-wheeled canopied carts, or "calashes", which jostled through ruts and muck since the community was too frugal and disdainful of the materialistic conveniences of "The World's People", or non-Quakers, until the last years of its prosperity, to buy proper carriages, pave the streets or waste oil on street lighting. But despite their frugality, many women resorted to laudanum and one man, who offered to spend the night in the homes of women whose husbands were away - so they might sleep tight in the knowledge that a man was under the roof - was booked up weeks in advance.
Strangely enough, this matriarchy was not just a matter of expediency but had its roots in respect shown for one extraordinary woman - long before whaling focused Nantucket's energies. Mary Coffin Starbuck, seventh child of the man who had bought the island as a fiefdom, was already revered as "The Great Woman" for her strength of character when she allowed a visiting Quaker missionary to hold a semi-clandestine meeting in her home. Although isolation gave Nantucket's inhabitants some immunity, her courage was remarkable, considering that a Quakeress who had refused to abjure her beliefs, or even to leave Massachusetts, had just been hung in Boston. By daring to give the missionary sanctuary, Mary Starbuck became such a moral example that her home became known as "Parliament House" as the islanders converted. Not only did she plant Quakerism in the most fertile soil it has ever grown in, but she set equally important precedents for independence and matriarchal authority while providing the island with its institutional backbone.
In the following years, whaling progressed with a series of organizational breakthroughs, inventions and discoveries by Nantucketers that ensured their hegemony. First came the discovery that sperm whales - with their purest of all oils - abounded on the open ocean, then the perfecting of on-board tryworks - to extract the oil - which, for the first time, didn't ignite sails in showers of sparks.
This revolutionized the industry since ships no longer had to return to shore to render blubber, before it rotted in casks. Suddenly odysseys for ever larger cargoes could be conceived of, and, because of the profit-sharing system used by Nantucketers, which gave everyone involved from the outfitters to the cabin boy his "lay", its well-motivated frugal whalers were unbeatable. The result was the quick search for migration routes that could be followed with the seasons and fresh grounds to replace ones whose whales had been exterminated or fled. Soon new “fisheries” were opened off Brazil and the Azores, then Angola and finally around the Horn, which opened up the bounty of the Pacific.
Although Nantucket's prosperity was interrupted twice, when this center of Quaker pacifism got caught between mainland authorities and England during the Wars of Independence and 1812, it became ever more matriarchal as women were forced to take over businesses while their men pursued an increasingly remote and elusive prey. Wives even took to running businesses if they hadn't been left with one, since a voyage's success was always in doubt. At one extreme, widows of men killed in the "fishery" were allowed to sell crafts and food once a year on Shearing Day, when the entire population corralled the flock that grazed untended on the commons.
At the other was Keziah Coffin. Although originally a Quaker, she was "set aside" by the elders for thumbing her nose at them by refusing both to get rid of her spinet and to stop her daughter from learning to play it. Crevecoeur cites "Aunt Keziah" as one of the island's businesswomen before the Revolution, but she really came into her own during the conflict. On her own initiative, she wrote Admiral Digby, the commander of the blockading British fleet, avowing her loyalty and intimating that the populace were all but universally Tories, even though there is evidence to the contrary.
First of all, despite the fact that the Boston Tea Party had vandalized ships from Nantucket, the islanders had been ambivalent at best towards England for some time. Long before the troubles, the home country had imposed levies on imports of Nantucket's oil and forbidden it the rich Newfoundland grounds to favor English whaling. Secondly, many of the ships which had escaped the British had been forced to seek the protection of France, where Nantucketers had practically transformed Dunkirk into a New England community under the leadership of William Rotch - the merchant who engineered Nantucket's survival with consummate diplomacy, even as he founded New Bedford - which would ultimately displace Nantucket like a whaler's Carthage subverting Tyre. Most telling of all, of the 131 men commanded by John Paul Jones, no less than 21 were from the island.
Despite this, Keziah had the audacity and shrewdness to request that her ships be allowed to sail freely between Sherburne, as Nantucket town was then known, and the British bridgehead at New York. Admiral Digby rewarded her rare loyalty by granting her a monopoly, so that the populace was quickly at her mercy. This must have seemed sweet vengeance after she had been ostracized not only for her spinet, but also for building the grandest house on the island - which she'd had the gall to face north, when houses had always faced south regardless of neighboring streets. Her success with the British went to her head. She set prices according to the most shortsighted interpretation of what the market could bear, forcing the entire population to mortgage property just to survive.
Finally, however, the population took the audacious step of proclaiming the island’s neutrality and was permitted by the independentists to trade in fish and firewood. The islanders had become increasingly effective at arguing their special needs, as an undefended island in the middle of sea lanes, so the mainland authorities had already allowed many Nantucket ships forced to register with the British to trade freely. The result, though, of the new lifeline was Keziah's demise.
The townspeople boycotted her, so she had to sell the many properties she'd foreclosed on to raise cash to meet obligations she'd made in New York for hoarded goods. But even then her assets turned to dust, since nobody but the original owner would bid, and then only for a vengeful pittance.
At this point, her unwitting husband returned from sea and the spell was broken. He salvaged a few scraps while she donned black in protest and left the island, swearing never to return. But in her dotage, her daughter brought her back, whereupon she hired a lawyer to harass her persecutors of old by keeping a suit "in court as long as I live" - regardless of its being a lost cause. In a cautionary ending, she died when she tumbled down a staircase on her way to court.
The men, too, had their Pharisees and renegades and suffered as much or more from their incredibly long wanderings over bleak oceans. Their clapboard and wood-shingled mansions often have functional, harmonious, taut proportions with modest yet stately white porticoes designed by middle-class Deists. On many of the rooftops are terraces now known as "widow's walks", with their suggestion of foreboding and loyalty, although they were mainly designed as fire-fighting platforms in an age of hand pumps, no lightning rods, and blazes which on two occasions jumped from roof to roof to sweep away much of the town.
These were the houses of men who would sometimes spend all of a year and a half with their families out of twenty years of sailing, so it is small wonder that they often witnessed Strindbergian tensions. The majority of the captains were Quakers renowned for frugality, expertise, persistence and shrewd righteousness, but occasionally the perilous, lonely and tedious voyages, which the whaling officers and harpooners were increasingly almost alone in repeating as America expanded economically and westward, had the effects of long confinement and adversity. As a result, captains, who were upright and pious during the short turn-around periods they spent ashore, increasingly grew tyrannical or fanatic under sail.
There were many reasons for this. First of all, survival of the fittest, since these men rose by dealing forcefully with malcontents, of whom there were ever more because of the declining quality of recruits as easier professions opened up and voyages became global in quests for disappearing quarry. In later years, crews were often filled out with derelicts hoodwinked by unscrupulous agents who were not above delivering them in a stupor to a ship anchored offshore so that they sobered up to find themselves on the high seas.
Even the innocents, who had fallen for tales of tropical isles and a premium upon getting underway, would find it almost wiped out because of small print that allowed for deductions for their kits and transport. Along with such men, who could be expected to bear a grudge, were those on the lam, who joined in the same way as fugitives join the French Foreign Legion. Finally, there was a global assembly. Harpooners were often local Indians whose ancestors had perfected the technique in shore whaling. Azoreans made good replacements for green recruits who wouldn't fall into line by the mid-Atlantic, and a host of indigenous islanders signed up along the way to replace the dead and deserters for a smaller share of profits than their American counterparts.
Though most captains appear to have ruled these motley crews with rectitude, the aberrations could be terrifying. One captain from New Bedford, Nantucket's offshoot, seems to have ruled by picking a scapegoat, who he had stripped naked and scrubbed with a brick and lye every day until the man went mad. Another captain was only stopped by his wife (one of the few to accompany her husband) from crucifying twelve deserters on his spars, after he had recaptured them by stealing back into port.
In fact, after being practically omnipotent for years on end, the captain would return to the pacifist and feminist stronghold, which may have something to do with why a fairly large number ended up living on the moors as virtual hermits, if they didn't become inflexible theocrats enforcing Quaker discipline.
It is no wonder, then, that even ashore, among the brethren, bitter and often cruel conflicts broke out on several occasions to reveal tensions, which had flared from the start.
The first one, naturally, involved Native Americans, although the whites' first dealings with them are notable for being more scrupulous than usual. Thomas Mayhew, who was to sell the island to the first settlers for a small profit and beaver hats for himself and his wife, had in fact bought the island so his son could proselytize to the natives, although they at first protested that they weren't so stupid as to exchange 37 gods for just one. After his son's death, however, he sold it with the stipulation that the settlers should repurchase deeds from the sachems.
Not surprisingly, this injunction was loosely interpreted, since there were three competing chiefs and no chief ever sold land within his own territory. Needless to say, once the Indians got over gloating at how they had done each other in and began to realize that they were being displaced, the usurpation led to a bitterness which finds its most poignant expression when the last Native American man to survive diseases imported by the invaders was dragged into court shortly before his death to face a charge of shooting over the heads of souvenir hunters desecrating an native graveyard on his farm. Asked if he'd do it again, this gentle man was so dignified, though unrepentant, that the sympathetic judge freed him.
As if their situation were not precarious enough while they were still so out-numbered though, the first settlers invited internal feuding by setting themselves up over the craftsmen brought in to make the settlement viable. A furious struggle, which lasted for 150 years, quickly erupted between factions led by the very two men who had surveyed the island for the settlers, Tristram Coffin, their leader, and Peter Folger, who had served as Tristram's interpreter and was honored by the Indians as the "White Chief's old young man" or young man of great wisdom - a title becoming to the man who turned out to be Benjamin Franklin's grandfather and spiritual ancestor.
Folger and his ally, John Gardner, a professional fisherman, who was needed to catch the cod the island had to pay as a tax, represented the generally younger "half-sharemen" in their fight for equal votes and an end to proxy voting by off-islanders, while Tristram Coffin and his partners fought for their weighted shares which they hoped would guarantee their families control in perpetuity.
But this control eroded once Gardner arrived. Taking advantage of the fact that he had to deliver the first codfish tax to New York - which was as natural an administrative center for the island as any then, because of the sheltered passage down Long Island Sound - he vigorously petitioned Governor Lovelace to void the proxy votes of off-islanders and so impressed him that he got himself appointed the permanent captain of the Nantucket militia while winning the Chief Magistrate's job for his brother into the bargain.
Then New York fell again to the Dutch and the Coffin faction could do nothing but hope that the English would reconquer it and send a governor sympathetic to their interests. At last New York was retaken and Coffin and Gardner each raced under full sail to get in the first word in a politically fraught antecedent of the America's Cup. Gardner was unbeatable, though, since none of the other Nantucket vessels were a match for his sleek trading sloop, the Expectation. Yet despite his having saved the day, Gardner's democratic charter backfired when King Philip's War broke out and forced Tristram Coffin's many mainland relatives to seek refuge on the island.
This turn of events must have seemed a grim irony indeed to the half-sharemen, because the island owed its safety to Coffin's arch-enemy, Peter Folger, at a time when 40 out of the 90 white towns on the mainland were being destroyed and the largest battle ever fought in New England, the Great Swamp Fight, was about to be waged. King Philip, the Wampanoag leader who had gone to Harvard but who saw the English invasion for the threat it was, had come to Nantucket shortly before with a war party to avenge himself upon a local Indian called John Gibbs for the unusual capital crime of mentioning the name of Philip's father. Folger rode out to parlay with Philip as the king’s braves beat the brush, trying to flush the culprit, who the settlers had spent heavily on to send to Philip's alma mater. Then when Philip laughed at Folger's offer to buy him off with the paltry sum in the settlement's possession, Folger bluffed by warning that he was only the vanguard of an army. The local sachem nodded confirmation, so Philip brusquely made do with Folger's gold and beat a hasty retreat. Then John Gibbs, the intended victim, burst out of hiding, embraced Folger as his savior and led his tribe in a Christian prayer and, what's more, an oath to the English king.
But three years after John Gardner's coup, the very hospitality of the local Indians indirectly proved the democratic faction's undoing. Suddenly the Coffins had their slim majority after Thomas Macy, the Chief Magistrate, whose term was just ending, changed sides. The Coffins immediately disenfranchised both Gardner and Folger, who was also the court clerk, and ordered Folger to hand over the court records which he had kept in his capacities as keeper of the Indian deeds and land surveyor, not to mention his other roles as the town's preacher, miller, poet and watch maker. Folger categorically refused on the grounds that Macy's directives were null because his term had expired.
The Coffins reacted by clearing the pigs and snow out of the town's hitherto unused jail and imprisoning Folger for over a year, although he was eventually only required to stay in his cell by day. Despite this concession, every Sunday half the townspeople would gather in the street between the cell and the church across the street where the Coffin faction was worshiping, to listen, with their backs turned on the official congregation, to Folger preach from the pigsty.
The local Wampanoag, who revered Folger, now threatened trouble, but, despite this, his persecutors continued their wave of arbitrary arrests, even harassing the indomitable Gardner who warned those who'd "meddled with him" that they'd have done "better [to] have eaten fire." Finally the Governor took the matter in hand and nullified the fines and disenfranchisement, although the Coffin faction didn't know when to quit and superseded his authority by ordering the constable to confiscate Gardner's cattle.
In spite of this last gasp, the pendulum swung back as Coffin's relatives returned to the pacified mainland, so that by 1680 Gardner had become Chief Magistrate himself, a position which he occupied with magnanimity since he used his influence with the governor to get Tristram Coffin off the hook when a disproportionate amount of salvage disappeared from a shipwreck.
To all appearances, the schism ended during the ensuing century as the families intermarried, resulting in an increase in the mentally handicapped, but an episode all too reminiscent of Folger's persecution occurred in the strange case of the Great Bank Robbery in 1795, during a period of growing tensions. The Quakers were losing members to other sects because of their elders' readiness to impose bans of silence and ostracism for such offenses as wearing a wig or shoe buckles, playing an instrument or singing, or even preparing a fervent sermon in advance instead of depending on God's spontaneous inspiration. But a group of nonconformists, who had the gall to make a wig shop their unofficial headquarters and who were Federalists to distinguish themselves from the Quaker Overseers who favored Jeffersonian Democrats, wanted to break the Overseers' reign and had even begun to attack the sacred indivisibility of the commons bequeathed to Nantucket by Tristram Coffin, in hopes of being able to exchange their shares for tracts of actual value.
Against this background, Nantucket's first bank was founded by an unsteady alliance consisting of a majority of Quaker elders and a number of their opponents. One morning, Randall Rice, the bank's cashier, but also a lawyer, speculator, butcher and off-islander, was opening up, when he discovered that the lock on the vault - which is said to have been the first lock on the island - was jammed. Upon breaking in, he discovered that a chest containing an international trove of coins had vanished along with the cash. To make matters worse, as soon as he'd reported the crime, the elders, acting as vigilantes, arrested him on the assertion of an old antagonist that he had been acting furtively. Despite this, he and several other suspects were ordered released for lack of evidence, although one, the court clerk, was fired.
Finally the bank's president hired an astrologer to catch the culprits and his descriptions matched those of the four men most inimical to the elders. When Rice and his fellow scapegoats faced an inquiry in which all sides were assisted by the first lawyers to work on the island, the astrologer's divination was introduced as evidence along with several corroborating dreams and the testimony of three people who all said they had either seen the suspects entering the bank or nearby, despite thick fog. Before the end of the trial, though, all three witnesses were arrested for admitted perjury, and, in retrospect, even the judge does not seem above suspicion, since he ended up being the first in the state impeached for accepting bribes.
In the hearing's aftermath, the hapless Rice was imprisoned on an exorbitant bond and had to mortgage everything to defend himself even as his adversaries arranged to have him tried in Boston where a jury wouldn't know the trial's background. Despite this, nobody was indicted and all might have gone relatively well had not the exonerated suspects sued their persecutors for malicious prosecution. When one of the elders was ultimately humbled by losing a countersuit, he reopened the criminal prosecution in Boston so that Rice and 4 other defendants were put on trial. This second politicized trial with famous Federalists arguing for the defense ended with the sole conviction of Rice even though the judge believed him innocent.
What makes all this so extraordinary is that, after the first prosecution, the freed suspects had begun a nationwide search for clues as to the real culprits by means of Nantucket's trading connections. These private inquiries soon led to thieves from New Haven who sailed from port to port fencing goods. A Nantucket captain finally collared one of the gang and fetched him to the island before heading off to catch yet another. Back on Nantucket, both men confessed and fingered the mastermind, yet were able to escape not only the bank directors' jail, but the remote island, as soon as they threatened the elders' case. What's more, the directors ensured that neither confession was ever introduced at Rice's trial.
Then, after Rice's conviction, one of the acquitted defendants, Albert Gardner, again captured one of the escapees and brought him to the Boston jail where the robber was ironically incarcerated in the cell beside Rice's. When the former jury got wind of this, they repented, but once again the criminal escaped, never to be recaptured, and Rice was refused any remedy because of the political influence of the elders. Finally an off-island governor again intervened against persecution and freed Rice, but only after Rice's home had been seized and his family had died. Worst of all, upon his return to the island, he was arrested for being in debt.
It is no wonder, then, that the Quaker presence was coming to an end. When two families imported the first carriages, one family broke under the elders' threats and sent theirs back, while the other didn't and subverted the old discipline more effectively than invaders. Similarly, when Professor Mitchell, a later bank clerk, was put "under dealings" by the Overseers for allowing his daughters a piano, he warned the elders that it was unwise to threaten a man who held a mortgage on their Meeting House.
In the 1830's the Quakers began to break apart. First the Hicksites, who stood for greater personal choice, broke away, then the orthodox Wilburites and more worldly Gurneyites, who put headstones on their graves, unlike earlier generations who had shunned a widow for putting roses on her husband's plot, quarreled over who should get a Meeting House - when, if they had only known, the question was moot because there would only be a couple Quakers left by the century's end.
With strange symmetry, the whaling industry collapsed at the same pace. The sandbar crept across the harbor mouth claiming ships despite the ingenious floating dry-dock the town had built to lighten and tow ships over the bar in an effort to compete with deep water ports built up by Nantucket emigrants. Then crews deserted in California during the Gold Rush while young men immigrated westwards. And worst of all, whales grew scarce as they were over-hunted to the brink of extinction. The writing was already on the wall by 1846, when fire destroyed most of the town, 400 buildings in all, because two fire brigades disputed the honor of dousing a blaze in a hat shop. Yet the townsmen found the warnings illegible after so many comebacks, so the town rebuilt itself only to dwindle within a decade.
In the larger context, American whaling was on the decline and would receive its deathblows in two cataclysms. First came the Civil War. Ironically the Union tried futilely to blockade Charleston and Savannah by scuttling dozens of whalers loaded with granite in their choke points, while the few remaining Yankee whalers, which were ignorant in many cases that the war had even started, were being picked off at the Bering Straits by a Confederate raider outfitted in England. By 1871, when an assembly of 32 ships, representing almost every port still whaling, was crushed by the icepack against the Alaska coast, Nantucket had neither a representative nor anything to lose. Its men had come home to roost.
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© 1989 Duncan Caldwell