She recited the names of the Nantucket streets like a little poem. ‘Easy Street, Candle Street, Whale Street.’ She said, ‘You’ll notice that the bank here is the Pacific Bank; that’s from the whaling days when the men used to go around Cape Horn. The place was virtually run by women then.’ She pointed to yet another line of sweet houses along a bricked pavement. ‘They used to operate the business side of the community from here,’ she said. ‘They called it Petticoat Row.’
You could see that she loved the island. ‘Take a look at those railings,’ she suggested. ‘And those balconies. Just like ships’ rails. That’s because they were made by ships’ carpenters.’ We were wandering about the town now, under the fine trees. Every house had its own beauty; some were magnificent. ‘Those three,’ she said, pointing to a line of big, fine, brick houses, ‘they are called the Three Bricks. Joseph Starbuck, a wealthy whaling man, built them for his three sons. Each is identical. So they wouldn’t quarrel.’
If the houses were splendid, their porches and doorways were delicately elegant. The richest families, descendants of those first tough settlers, of Jethro Coffin, lived here, silver knockers and letter-boxes on their doors. The Coffins, the Foulgers, the Macys, names that went from the island to make their marks on American history. Here too were born Benjamin Franklin’s mother, and Maria Mitchell who, one night looking at the heavens through a telescope, discovered a new comet. It was not an important comet, but a comet it was. She was the first woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For once, and for me it is a rarity, I found the town more fascinating than the island. The hinterland is pleasantly moored and wooded, wild cranberries flourish and there are deer (hunted two weeks in the year, one week with guns, one week with bows and arrows). There are widespread beaches, some modest cliffs; and a quaint wooden fishermen’s village called Siasconset, known as Sconset, is hung with roses and heavy with sea scents. A clanking railway once ran the seven miles to Sconset and back. Its headlamp, the size of an icebox, is displayed in the Peter Foulger Museum in Nantucket town, another wonderful exhibition of the island’s past. It is next door to the Whaling Museum, formerly the Candle House where spermaceti candles were produced. Rarely has the history of a small place been so splendidly preserved.
On the fringe of the town, on the forehead of what passes for a hill in Nantucket, stands a windmill waving its arms like a bonneted woman in a mild panic. Carol Nickerson said, ‘It still grinds corn every day and it’s been there for 235 years. Not bad considering it was built of driftwood picked up from the beaches.’
There were four windmills once. The others have all ended up as firewood. ‘That’s the greatest problem on this island – always has been,’ said Carol. ‘Fuel. Once the sailing ships were finished, so was the driftwood. The Quakers never had a fire lit in a bedroom, it was considered a terrible extravagance. Even today wood is very expensive. When the harbour froze last winter and the weekly oil tanker couldn’t get in we began to shiver. For some it was almost as bad as the beer not arriving.’
Once more I returned to the cobbled town, wandering down by the quay. Now the yachts and businesslike fishing cruisers are at the berths where once lay the brave whalers. But sitting among them is another piece of Nantucket’s history – its famous lightship. Once it was the first light of the New World, signalling landfall to ships crossing the Atlantic. I remember the thrill when I first saw it many years ago from the deck of the Queen Mary.
Now it sits like a large, red, friendly dragon; its huge anchors like protruding teeth. Its mast-top lanterns in their cages rival the domes and cupolas of the white churches and civic buildings behind it. Once its marooned crew used to occupy their lone hours by making exquisite lidded baskets which are still made on the island today, often ornamented with scrimshaw work, the carving on tusks and teeth of whale and walrus, which the whaling men perfected in their years of voyaging.
Turning from the waterside I paused at the door of the Pacific Club, on Main Street Square, formed by the famous whaling captains. The old Nantucketers still sit in there, winter and summer their feet on the rail of the stove, around them on the walls more pictures, models and mementoes of momentous voyages to a distant ocean. One of the members told me that, generations back, his family had come from ‘the Western Island of Portugal’. He meant Madeira. His name is Herbert Wood and it was not until the next day that I realized the probability of why his family had adopted their surname. In Portuguese the word madeira means ‘wood’.
It was a hot, late afternoon when I reluctantly left Nantucket Island. I walked on the bumpy brick pavements beneath the dusky shadows of the elms. Close, all around, was the feel and the smell of deep summer. A window was open facing out onto the lawn of a shingled house. Someone was playing a piano and the gentle notes drifed out into the sunlit air.
The steamer was calling from the harbour and I just reached it before the gangway was pulled away. People waved and, again, some cried. As we left, the houses lining the town and the bay seemed to be watching, quiet but intent, as they have done for many a thousand ships before.
Rounding Brant Point, by the pepperpot lighthouse, I saw that many people were each throwing two coins over the side, a tradition which, they say, ensures the traveller will return to Nantucket, the Little Grey Lady of the Sea.
I threw my coins also. For I want to return some day. It is a delectable place.
NANTUCKET situated latitude 41°17′N and longitude 70°10′W; area 56 sq. m (128 sq. km); population approx. 7,200; USA
The Californian Channel Islands
California Dreaming
. . . the island-valley of Avalon
Where falls not hail, or any snow.
TENNYSON, Idylls of the King
Spring comes to the Californian Channel Islands in a flush of fresh flowers; the seas are quieted, the seals are breeding and the winter storms are past. Great, conscientious whales make their annual voyage to southern calving grounds, cruising off the untouched and deserted islands. Los Angeles, one of the world’s most popular, peopled and polluted cities, with its unending environs, sits under a shelf of smog on the adjacent coast.
Spaniards, nosing up from Mexico in the sixteenth century, found the islands – inhabited by harmless Indians – and gave to some of them names from their ever-ready reckoner of saints, San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz, with Anacapa keeping close company in the Santa Barbara Channel; further south and more apart, like distant relatives, are Santa Barbara, San Nicolas, San Clemente and Santa Catalina. Santa Barbara, Anacapa and San Miguel are reserved for nature and San Nicolas and San Clemente are reserved by the US Navy. Only Santa Catalina has a settlement of any consequence, the mild little town of Avalon.
The islands are places of sun and seafrets, storms and stories. San Nicolas, the most isolated, is haunted by the shade of a pathetic Indian woman who lived there alone for eighteen years.
It was in 1835 that the Mexican government, for reasons unknown, sent the ship Peor es Nade to remove the Indians from the island to the mainland. The captain, primarily interested in otter-hunting, chafed at the chore. The weather was souring. There was distress and confusion among the simple Indians and one woman realized her baby had been left in the hills. Frantically she returned for the child and the ship sailed without her. Until 1853 she remained wild and marooned on San Nicolas, occasionally sighted by hunters and sailors, but always vanishing. Eventually sealers George Nidever and Carl Dittman (a German, known as ‘Charlie Brown’) found her dressed in feathers and crouching in a hut made of whalebones. They took her to the mission at Santa Barbara. She spoke a language none could understand and no one discovered what had happened to her child. She was baptized Juana Maria Peor es Nade, but the woman who had survived eighteen years in the wild died within a few days. It was probably the change of diet. Peor es Nade means ‘Better than Nothing’. Ironically it was not.
Hardly had the small plane, flying me across the chan
nel, taken off from Santa Monica and turned from the land to the sea when the pilot, Bruce Hanson, grimaced and banked the aircraft away. ‘The Navy have just warned us off,’ he sighed. ‘They’re having practice bombing runs from the air station at Point Mugu. We can go back at noon when they quit for lunch.’
Mugu, the way he said it, sounded enough like Magoo, the cartoon character who doesn’t see very well, to make me more than willing to wait a couple of hours until they had stopped their war for lunch. We returned to Santa Monica but, as it happened, the time was not wasted. Santa Monica airport has a huge runway built in World War II, now used exclusively by light aircraft, so that the Cessnas and Pipers take off from its vastness like sparrows flying from a freeway. It also has the singular sight of aircraft driving along streets in the company of automobiles and halting, like them, obediently at traffic lights. There are, in addition, a small museum and library, mostly concerned with aviation but in which I unearthed records of the strange happenings among the Californian Islands on the night of 23 February 1942.
At seven o’clock that evening there took place the only enemy action directed against mainland America in World War II. A Japanese submarine surfaced among the concealing Channel Islands and fired thirteen shells into the coastal oil refinery at Tidewater near the town of Santa Barbara. President Roosevelt was broadcasting one of his famous radio fireside chats at the time. Few of the population listened to the end. For twenty minutes the submarine fired shells from her 5½-inch guns causing unimportant damage and no casualties. Later a rumour circulated that the Japanese commander knew the Tidewater Refinery well and this was an act of personal pique since he had once been refused a job there!
At noon Bruce Hanson wheeled out the Cessna again and we trundled along the Santa Monica roads, crossing the runway while cars waited at the stop signal. He was a young man; made redundant as a commercial airline pilot, he was filling in time piloting charter flights. ‘It’s usually to Las Vegas, Palm Springs or Reno, some place like that,’ he said. ‘This is more interesting. I’ve never been out to the Channel Islands. I’d like to take a look.’
In the event the delay had worked in our favour because early mist that had cobwebbed the channel had now dispersed and it was a spring day, sharp and sunny. We set out over the bright sea and headed for Anacapa.
Anacapa was the only island in the archipelago to escape being canonized by the Spaniards. Its name means a mirage or a dream, a word used by placid Chumash Indians who had made their homes in the islands, later to be wiped out by the savage men from the Aleutian Islands, off Alaska, recruited by the Russian-American Fur Company to hunt seals and sea-otters.
From the sky, as from the ocean, it is easy to see how appropriate were the poetic Indians, for the island changes shape and form with distance, weather and season. Sometimes it lurks in fog, at others it appears to be progressing through the waves, wagging a tail; in the damp winter it is the colour of a greengage, in spring spread with bright flowers, and in summer heat as brown as a loaf of rye bread.
Now it was spring with the flanks of the isle vivid yellow with the flowers of the giant coreopsis. Their glow in the sunshine can be seen on the mainland twelve miles away. We lost height as a Navy jet, late for lunch, streaked homewards just above. Now I could see that Anacapa was divided into three sections: a big one towing a medium-sized one and that in turn towing a small island. It looked like one of those disjointed toy snakes derived from Professor Rubik’s renowned cube.
At the most easterly tail of the smallest isle, which we came to first, is one of those wonderful pieces of accidental architecture, an arch rock, sculptured over the sea, waves rushing through, iced with the deposits of generations of seabirds and, today, patrolled by a thoughtful squadron of brown pelicans.
There is a lighthouse on the East Island, keeping its eye on Arch Rock. In 1853 the paddle-steamer Winfield Scott clattered ashore on Middle Anacapa in fog. She was carrying 250 passengers from the California claims, all clutching their gold. They managed to reach the shore but it was eight days before they were rescued, cold, wet, miserable, and having spent a worrying and sleepless time sitting jealously on their bags of gold dust.
People who travel across to Anacapa, to watch its migrations, marine life and to marvel at its million flowers, are warned by the US Coast Guard Service to stay clear of the lighthouse and its foghorn. The foghorn, say the serious authorities, is loud enough to damage your ears permanently. Perhaps the pelicans are stone deaf.
After the wreck of the Winfield Scott the US Coastal Survey commissioned a series of drawings of Anacapa’s varied shapes and forms to determine whether a lighthouse could be built. A coastguard named James Abbot McNeil Whistler added sketches of seagulls drifting across the cliffs to the drawings. That was eighteen years before he left the service (under a cloud), went to Paris, painted his mother, and won fame.
From the Cessna the basic human additions to the offhand brilliance of nature were easily apparent. A spidery path, the lighthouse itself, random red-roofed buildings like Monopoly houses set on the swaying back of the island. The authorities used to have trouble with the water-tower because men in passing boats, with nothing better to do, would shoot at it with rifles. The tank began to leak like a sieve, so the target was rebuilt disguised as a church. As a warden of the US National Parks Service put it, ‘Only a few people shoot at it now.’
We traced the steep red coast, its indentations pushed inland and becoming shadowed valleys. No people were visible, only the birds cruising against the green, or the seals and sea-elephants lounging like holidaymakers on some of America’s most private beaches.
Anacapa’s Middle Island is separated from the eastern segment by a gulf 200 yards in breadth, which, even on our fine day, frothed and gurgled below us, the southern oceanic waves meeting the seas of the Santa Barbara Channel with great conflict.
In sunlit clearings of the kelp forests below the sea on the eastern end of the island you can still see the shadowed skeleton of the paddler Winfield Scott. Unlikely as it is that any of the goldminers left their gains behind, a Captain Martin Kimberley of Santa Cruz Island came upon the wreck a few days after the disaster, ‘filled with the choicest sort of food and wines, and a great many other things’ – and this when the survivors had been shivering and starving on the shore. A fine mirror and a large carved eagle were also rescued by the lucky captain and hung thereafter in his island home.
Bruce Hanson was examining the land with as much intensity as I was. ‘Gee, I never realized it was like this,’ he muttered. ‘See what you miss when you just fly to Vegas.’
While the gulf between the first two of Anacapa’s three islands is considerable and turbulent, that between Middle and West isles is a gully barely wide enough to thread a rowing boat.
West Anacapa, burly, razor-backed and crimson-cliffed, rises to nearly 1,000 feet. This is the place where pelicans nest, flying about with their charming ungainliness, as if their minds were elsewhere. We could view them ambling below as we flew at not much more than a pelican’s pace around the flank of the all-but-inaccessible island.
Few people have ever tried to survive on West Anacapa, although the Chumash Indians managed it, and their middens and the remains of their camps are traceable. Archaeologists have disinterred them and have found also, with wild delight, the bones of the extinct white-footed mouse.
This is a place of caves, some of which have only ever been seen through binoculars. Coves and rockpools are thick with sea anemones; limpets, crabs, lobsters, crayfish and abalones are piled high. Chinese and Japanese fishermen used to make a harvest here but they don’t any longer although it is still a popular fishing ground. Otherwise it is a place left to nature. On a good day, from the highest peak, Vela, a peaceful man with a spy-glass could probably see the traffic on the Ventura Freeway on mainland California.
Across a channel from Anacapa the misty hills of Santa Cruz Island climb to 2,500 feet. It is riven with sharp valleys as though i
t had at some legendary time been attacked by a giant wielding an axe. Through many of the valleys springtime streams were tumbling and spilling out into the blue Pacific. When fog gathers on the peaks it splits and crawls separately through the divided valleys like slowly unrolling muslin. The Chumash used to think these were the fingers of God.
Once there were many Indian villages on the island; there may have been a population of several thousand. Their bones and belongings have been found in caverns and tunnels that emerge along the coast. From the aircraft there seemed to be hundreds of caves, row upon row, and up and down the cliffs at all levels, like the open mouths of a singing choir. In these dark places also have been unearthed the teeth and bones of even earlier inhabitants – dwarf elephants.
When Spanish explorers first made a landfall on the island they found the natives pleasant and honest. So honest, in fact, that a metal crucifix, carelessly left behind by one of the Fathers, was returned the next day. One priest recorded, ‘At daybreak it was discovered that one of the little canoes of the island was coming to the ship, and that one of the heathen was carrying in his hand the staff with the holy cross.’ So they called the island Holy Cross – Santa Cruz.
For their pains the Chumash were eventually reduced to serfdom and penury before final elimination. The Mexicans chose Santa Cruz as a penal colony. In 1830 cargoes of malefactors were shipped across to what is now known as Prisoners Harbour. A contemporary account describes the convicts as ‘naked and in a filthy condition’ as they stood and listened to the commandant telling them that they had been sent to ‘improve their morals and for colonizing California’. The second condition they fulfilled quickly and exactly. They built quiet rafts and boats and slipped across to the mainland where they dispersed and mixed with the population and where their descendants live today.
My World of Islands Page 4