My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  Never before had I been confronted with a shut airport. But the door was firmly locked and there was no sign of anyone. The plane sat like a large, sad, wet bird. The taxi went and I stood in the airport doorway watching the fog drip from the aircraft’s wings. A man appeared on the other side of the glass door; he held up eight fingers and mouthed the word ‘huit’. It was five to eight anyway so he opened the door. Where was I going?

  ‘Halifax,’ I told him. ‘No ’alifax, aujourd’hui,’ he shrugged. He pointed to the plane.’ ‘Im . . . ’im go Montreal aujourd’hui midi.’

  I looked at my ticket. Not for the first time this intrepid island traveller had mistaken the day. I shrugged like everyone else did and waited for the taxi to take me back. The next day I was at the airport at eight and this time ‘’im’ was going to Halifax. It was still misty but the pilot was used to that. We shook the town with our roar down the runway. I looked from the window but the islands were quickly vanished below the clouds. I wondered what will happen to them.

  SAINT-PIERRE ET MIQUELON situated latitude 47°N and longitude 56°50′W; area 93 sq. m (242 sq. km); population approx. 6,500

  Nantucket

  The Far-Away Land

  . . . these naked Nantucketers, these sea-hermits, issuing from their anthill in the sea . . .

  HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick

  The traveller arriving on Nantucket from the sea on a day of calm and fog experiences something that is almost mystic. The small steamer from Hyannis on the Massachusetts mainland had sailed in July afternoon sunshine but as soon as we were beyond the harbour bar the fog lay like a cloth over the ocean. It was as if it had been awaiting us.

  For more than two hours the ship travelled blind on water as flat as tin, sending out baleful little grunts from its fog horn. Misty seagulls followed for a time, like hovering ghosts. We had nothing of the special joy that comes on approaching an island; to see it grow from the sea, take shape and colour and size. Instead there was a different joy: Nantucket crept towards us from the fog. First a swaying buoy, like a surprised man attempting, and just succeeding, to walk on water, then another, and then the dark low shoulder of land. It drifted towards the boat, rather than the boat towards it. There were two long green stony breakwaters, an opening channel, a pepperpot lighthouse on a sandspit. And then the houses of the town, the sea on their doorsteps, moving mistily, dove-coloured, old and dreamy. No wonder the sailors called Nantucket the Little Grey Lady of the Sea.

  As soon as we had rounded the point into the arms of the harbour, a surprise to the voyager, the sun emerged and within moments the mist had gone about its business, out to sea. It had done with us.

  As always on islands the arrival of the ship, whether it comes once a month or half a dozen times a day, is a matter of excitement and importance. For different people each docking is different. Now there were shouts from ship to shore, waving and anticipation. An apparently eccentric lady trotted a black horse in circles on the beach while three youngsters held a banner proclaiming, ‘Crazy Aunt Rides Again’. The performance caused a family standing at my elbow to almost weep with joy and surprise.

  To be alone, as I was, on such occasions as a landing is a strange thing. Families disembark, piled and hung with luggage and paraphernalia, children shout, people embrace and kiss and sometimes burst into tears on the quay. The solitary explorer can only creep through it all, rather guiltily, and look around for a taxi.

  My taxi, quickly discovered while everyone else was occupied with their gregarious business, carried me only half a mile to an elegant wooden house, set on a knoll at the centre of the exquisite town of Nantucket. Appropriately called the Overlook it has long balconies like the deck of an old-time paddle-boat and from one of these it is possible to look out over the maritime streets, over the shingled walls, white windows, the roofs with their walks, over the summer elms and far out onto the evening sea. I smiled to myself, the grin of an explorer who knows he has not made a mistake. He has come to the right place.

  Ever since I first saw the Nantucket lightship, the first eye of the New World, on a ship voyage to America, I had wanted to be on the island. Now, here I was. And in the quietness of the evening I heard the town clock strike fifty-two.

  The clock struck fifty-two again at seven the next morning, as it has been doing for generations. It used to be (and probably still is) to ensure that people woke up to the day’s work. It calls the curfew at night and sounds another fifty-two strokes at noon to remind everyone it is time to go to lunch.

  Walking about that place in the sunlit morning I was entranced. Here, thirty miles out in the ocean from the heat and business of an American July, was an island and a town that its inhabitants from two centuries ago would have no difficulty in recognizing. Trees spread like clouds over the streets, their ancient roots pushing the brick pavements into hills and furrows. The main streets are cobbled, laid down in Nantucket’s whaling days to prevent the horse-drawn drays, used to drag the casks of blubber from the quayside, from sinking into the mud of unpaved streets. Some say the cobbles were brought from Gloucester, Massachusetts, others from Gloucester, England, taken across the Atlantic as ballast in ships come to fetch the whale oil.

  For this small town on an oddment of land fourteen miles long and five miles at its widest, was, in the last half of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, the greatest whaling port in the world. Silver door knockers and letter-boxes on the elegant doors of the rich houses built in those times are testimony to its wealth; those houses were later to see ruin and poverty and grass growing in the streets.

  Nantucket has kept its name from the earliest Indian inhabitants, the Wampanoags (part of the Algonquin tribe) who called it the Faraway Land. Explorers busily charting the eastern seaboard of the New World in the 1600s, noted its presence; among them Bartholomew Gosnold who sailed by, however, and landed on the Elizabeth Islands (named after his sovereign) and later on Martha’s Vineyard (named after his daughter), which was another day’s sailing. Even now the Nantucket people find it hard to understand or forgive Gosnold for sailing by. What sort of explorer, they ask, could leave Nantucket aside and discover Martha’s Vineyard?

  Later men came ashore, found the Indians anxious but equable, and made the customary sly deals involving pretty beads for landrights. An Englishman called Thomas Mayhew was the island’s first white owner and he sold it to a group of nine compatriots who had grown tired of the religious intolerance in the new settlements of Massachusetts. It is strange to think that the near-descendants of those who had first gone to America to escape persecution were themselves made to flee it. They knew they could live unmolested on the island far out in the uncertain sea and they bought it from Mayhew by deed dated 2 July 1659 in a poetic contract involving ‘Thirty Pounds in good Merchantable Pay and Two Beaver Hats, one for myself and one for my wife.’

  The names of the signatories still ring familiar in Nantucket, in mainland Cape Cod, and in the West Country of England from whence they originally came. One of them, Tristram Coffin, a Devon man, was the sire of a family that reached a thousand names within a few generations.

  Tristram died in 1681. Not much later his grandson, Jethro Coffin, married Mary Gardner, a union that healed a breach between the two pioneer families dating from their earliest days on the island, the settlers having brought their politics with them. The couple lived in a house which can still be seen in Nantucket today. Walking on its bent floors, climbing its tight stairs, seeing the furniture and implements, the guns, the cooking pots and the farm implements of those shadowy times brings a feeling of great poignancy. In that house you can smell the dust of history; to stumble around it is to touch the life of those far days. There is one legend about the little closet by the bedroom where Mary and her baby are said to have been sleeping one night while Jethro was away. In the early, dark hours a drunken Indian, hiding in the loft, fell through the ceiling into the closet. Mary, a capable lady, chased him out but never again slep
t in the house without her husband. Who can blame her?

  It was accidental, but appropriate, that I should be in Nantucket on the Fourth of July, for the very roots of the rebellion that gave America its independence are right there among the cobbles in Main Street Square.

  As one of the vanquished British I found it politic to remain under the shade of a large hanging bough while the touching little parade that marked the day for the island went by. It was led by a portly but stern-faced contingent of National Guardsmen, veterans sloping veteran carbines, but bearing the Stars and Stripes with all the uprightness they had in youth. Behind them came a band, playing its best, and then children, all gloriously out of step as only children can be. It was not that some left legs went forward at the same time as some right legs; that would have been too simple. No, by some miracle of timing each boy and girl marched somehow one out of step with all the others. Several trucks bearing old people came next, waving vigorously to bystanders and appearing in danger of plunging from the vehicles by reason of sheer enthusiasm. Then a pair of clanging old fire engines. In the middle of it all, incongruously, considering the day and its history, was a vintage British sports car, an ancient MG.

  Short and nondescript thought it was, the procession entirely matched the smallness and sincerity of Nantucket. As it marched by the fine brick building called the Pacific Club, the Stars and Stripes wafted across the names of three ships engraved above the old windows – Dartmouth, Beaver, Eleanor. In 1773 the three vessels, owned by William Rotch, whose Counting House was in the building, sailed for London with cargos of whale oil. Upon their return, loaded with taxed tea, they put into Boston, and it was on these vessels that the Boston Tea Party, the first rebellious act that led to war, took place.

  Nantucket, with strong ties, both emotional and, perhaps more important, commercial, with London, made some forlorn attempt to remain neutral, with the result that her whaling vessels were fired on by both sides; it was a lesson that, even then, went unlearned for the warring British, French and Americans all sank Nantucket ships during the war of 1812, two generations later.

  But small islands are good at survival and at the end of the Revolution another ship made sail with her orders from the Rotch Counting House in Nantucket. She was called Bedford and was the first vessel to fly the Stars and Stripes in a British port. Londoners flocked to the banks of the Thames as she sailed in with a cargo of whale oil.

  The whaling days were as unpredictable as the Atlantic weather. Fair times were followed by foul. Nantucket men had first seen Indians taking oil from beached whales while they themselves were tilling the traditional farms and trying to raise sheep. It was not long before they were out in the seas with the Indians catching the great creatures and dragging them into the port. They invented the dangerous art of deep-sea whaling and their adventures knew no bounds. Before the start of the nineteenth century the Beaver ventured far down the ocean, rounded Cape Horn, and sailed triumphantly into the widespread Pacific to hunt the great whales there.

  A visit to the wonderful Whaling Museum in Nantucket Town today makes you realize the thrill of those amazing days. Men would go away for five years at a stretch, sailing home one day with a full cargo of oil that made the owners, at least, rich men. Sometimes they voyaged from the harbour never to return. The ‘walks’ on the tops of many houses, the white balconies on the very pitch of the roofs, were places where those left behind waited and stared out to the blank ocean for the ship and the loved one who never returned. Some call them ‘widows’ walks’.

  A cargo worth $50,000 was not uncommon. Guns were fired and bells would ring as the whaler came home. But the risks were huge and the price in human life high. One of the Coffin family, a captain, lying bleeding on his deck in a terrible sea, ordered his servant to amputate his leg and ‘not to hesitate’. The man did as instructed, using a whaling knife. He cauterized and sewed the stump – then both captain and servant fainted.

  In the museum is a print showing how the crews of seven ships escaped across the Arctic ice when the winter closed in on them. In the background are the islands of Great and Little Diomede, at the top of the Bering Strait. Stories of Nantucket men travelling across the ice-cap for hundreds of miles are not uncommon. Boats overturned in awesome storms, men drowned as the angry harpooned whales towed them through the sea on what became known as the Nantucket Sleigh Ride. Disease, mutiny, great privation, took toll. The man who came home was lucky as well as wealthy.

  Today in a safe in the town archive is an account of an adventure without parallel, written in the hand of Owen Chase, mate of a Nantucket whaler. It begins:

  Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing

  Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex of Nantucket; Which

  was attacked and Finally destroyed by a Large Spermaceti

  Whale in the Pacific Ocean; with an Account of the

  Unparalleled Suffering of the Captain and Crew during a

  Space of Ninety-three Days at Sea in Open Boats in the

  Years 1819 and 1820. By Owen Chase of Nantucket, First

  Mate of the Said Vessel.

  Even today people on the island do not like to be reminded of the story because the starving men resorted to cannibalism, eating their dead shipmates. One of the first to read Chase’s account, however, was Herman Melville. The destruction of the Essex by the great whale later became the epic Moby Dick.

  Ashore, the leading whaling families lived with tremendous riches. No commodity in the world, whether silk from China or perfume from Paris, was too fine for Nantucket. Opulent houses were built, materials being brought across the sea at much cost. Social life flourished.

  But there was in the island a strong Quaker conscience, harking back to its early days, and with that came the inherent feeling that at some time things would go wrong; all was vanity and the piper would have to be paid. The feeling became reality. First the sand bar of the harbour became a barrier for heavier ships and they went instead to New Bedford on the mainland. An ingenious pontoon called a Camel was devised which lifted the vessels over the bar and into the deeper harbour. Then, in the true tradition of American stories, an epic fire burned through the wooden streets in the town, destroying the warehouses and raging among the ships in the harbour. Then kerosene was discovered in Pennsylvania. It was cheaper, far cheaper, than whale oil.

  Depression closed over Nantucket. Men went off to the Californian gold rush, never to return; the harbour clogged, houses were deserted and fell down. The blackened ruins of the fired buildings were left like some dire Biblical warning; weeds sprouted between the cobbles. The island which had known the best of everything sank into poverty, its trade vanished. It required a miracle to restore it to life. In due time the miracle occurred.

  With the coming of night the island – as all islands do – became a different place. It was as though the sea and its cousins, the wind and the rain, took advantage of the darkness to make their raids; on other nights the dumb fog patrolled the coast. One night, in my bed in the old wooden room at the Overlook, I lay through the early hours and enjoyed the racket of a hooligan storm charging in from the ocean, banging its way through the hollow streets, clattering the wooden roofs with rain. On another, the fog came slyly back, moving across the low island. All night the foghorn sounded, like a single morose note on an organ played again and again.

  But the mornings were washed clean. The sun shone on the unending sea and the town was bright. In Main Street the Nantucket farmers and gardeners sold gleaming vegetables and fruit from carts. The cobbles were thronged with visitors and from the harbour came the happy hoot of the steamer as it approached from Cape Cod.

  It was the ubiquitous Coffin family who once again began it all – the return to the good days. Unwittingly perhaps but with that strange serendipity that is the gift of some. It was in the 1880s when the island was at its lowest fortune, the whaling days gone forever and the people living an almost castaway existence in the Atlantic, but some
one had the notion to have a family gathering of Coffins at the place where they had first landed as pioneers.

  Five hundred assorted Coffins from the New England states arrived in Nantucket, crowding the decks of paddle steamers, and toured the quaint place that was the primitive home of their sturdy ancestor Tristram. Accommodation had to be found for them. Houses were quickly converted and there is an evocative photograph of the balconies of the Overlook (then Veranda House) lined with Coffins. It was the beginning of a new life for Nantucket.

  Today the summer visitors outnumber the inhabitants by five to one, but Nantucket keeps its head and its appearance. The natives have a shrewd eye and a hospitable nature, a difficult combination. But, for all their friendship and optimism, they keep something of themselves to themselves. Although Carol Nickerson has lived in the island since 1945, after her husband died in France, she is still regarded as an off-islander. ‘There’s a story,’ she smiled, ‘of a man who came here as a small child and died at the age of ninety-one. On his tombstone they wrote “Farewell Stranger”.’

  She was a busy lady, born in 1911, whose mother still swam every day. She was married now to Gibby Nickerson, a Nantucketer and a fisherman. Once he was asked to take a funeral party out to sea and to scatter the cremated ashes on the waves. This accomplished, he suggested that they might like to do a little fishing. They declined.

  In the summer Carol took visitors around and in the winter she helped with the scallop harvest. ‘That starts about November,’ she said, ‘and it sees us through the winter. All the people are gone then and the permanent residents have the place to ourselves. Most of the shops shut and the shutters go over the windows of a lot of the houses. We go around and cut a few blooms from the gardens. It’s called pruning.’