Away Off Shore

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Meanwhile, the whalemen’s activities in the Pacific Ocean were bringing them in regular contact with yet another people of color, and by March of 1822, a handful of Hawaiians had made their way to Nantucket. In April of that year, the Inquirer reported that seven of them were attending Sunday school at the First Congregational Church. Soon a story appeared in a Boston paper under the headline “Heathen School in Nantucket”: “The place has long been the resort of youths from pagan countries. . . . [T]here reside there twenty Society or Sandwich Islanders who on stated evenings when the sky was clear, assembled in the streets, erected ensigned idols, and in frantic orgies paid their homage to the Host of Heaven. No Barnabas or Paul running among them, saying, ‘Why do you do such things?’ ”

  As was to be expected, this inspired an immediate response from a Nantucketer who did indeed “recollect seeing the tawny youngsters alluded to in merry gambols.” Rather than apologizing for his fellow townspeople, the respondent applauded the fact “that nobody disturbed them while they worshipped the Host of Heaven.” He then concluded by suggesting that the “disinterested missionaries” currently at work throughout the Pacific could do with some of the Nantucketers’ tolerance for foreign cultures.

  By 1825 the Inquirer estimated that there were “more than fifty natives of the South Sea Islands employed on board the whaleships belonging to this port,” and that “many are now on the island. They are extremely tractable, free and ingenuous—and if they become vicious the fault is not their own.” Where these Polynesians lived while on Nantucket is difficult to determine. Few, if any, of them seem to have settled permanently on the island; no South Sea Islanders are specifically mentioned in the census rolls. Some may have stayed in Absalom Boston’s boarding house between voyages. In any event, if we recall the scene aboard the Hero in Oahu (see Chapter 15), the treatment of these Sandwich Islanders seems to have been of an entirely different order from that experienced by their sisters.

  By 1830, the year of the Loper banquet, things had begun to change within the Nantucket whale fishery. A dramatic increase in the number of Portuguese sailors, as well as an ever-expanding pool of South Sea Islanders, resulted in a gradual decrease in the number of African and Native Americans employed on Nantucket whaleships. Throughout this period (1830–60), working conditions and pay on board the whalers went from bad to worse. In fact, the pay on a Nantucket whaler gradually became so low that many a greenhand discovered that when the voyage was over and the cost of his clothing (provided from the ship’s “slop chest”) was subtracted from his “lay,” he actually owed the owner money! Reuben Delano, for example, tells of returning home from his first whaling voyage only to realize he was forty dollars in the red. His response was fairly typical: Get drunk and go to sea again, thus entering the same vicious circle that had been a Nantucket tradition ever since the first days of Indian debt servitude in the seventeenth century. Now, however, the circle had widened.

  But as the circle widened, Nantucketers turned increasingly inward, jealously guarding their privileged status as ship’s officers with a truly clannish intensity. Although all off-islanders or “Coofs” were outside this charmed circle, Nantucket whaling captains were by no means color-blind in their abuse of off-island crews. According to one observer, “an African is treated like a brute by the officers of their ships. Should these pages fall into the hands of any of my colored brethren, let me advise them to fly Nantucket as they would the Norway Maelstrom.” Thomas Nickerson also mentions the Nantucket whaling captains’ reputation as “Negro drivers,” and in the case of the Essex, all six of her off-island African-American crew members died, whereas seven out of fourteen white crew members survived.

  Whether or not a man’s color had any direct bearing on his chances of surviving the Essex disaster, Herman Melville, who may have been one of the island’s biggest fans, recognized that its whaling captains could be racists of the highest order. In an article entitled “The ’Gees” (in reference to “an abbreviation, by seamen, of Portugee, the corrupt form of Portuguese”), he satirizes the attitudes that were then prevalent toward Portuguese sailors. After specifying the traits that distinguish the ’Gee as an “inferior (though hardy) race,” whose main attraction is that they will work “for biscuits instead of dollars,” Melville points to “old Captain Hosea Kean, of Nantucket” as the world’s leading expert in procuring ’Gees. This is a man whose appetite for cheap labor has made him a veritable ’Gee connoisseur: “Like the Negro, the ’Gee has a peculiar savor, but a different one—a sort of wild, marine, gamy savor, as in the seabird called haglet.”

  Underlying Melville’s bitter satire is the fact that while island Quakers enjoyed an ever-increasing reputation as high-minded abolitionists (Frederick Douglass would begin his career as an orator during an anti-slavery meeting at the Nantucket Atheneum in 1841), they showed little interest in addressing the problems in their own backyard. The irony was not lost on J. Ross Browne, who wrote in 1841: “Massachusetts being largely interested in the whale fishery, has constantly before her practical demonstrations of the horrors of slavery. The philanthropists of that state will, it is to be hoped, make some grand efforts in behalf of the seamen employed in their whaling fleet, as soon as they dispose of the African race.”

  Meanwhile, back on the island itself, the disparity between Nantucket’s public reputation as an abolitionist stronghold (a “refuge of the free” according to the Quaker poet John Green-leaf Whittier) and the reality of being a nonwhite Nantucketer was becoming disturbingly apparent. In 1840, Eunice Ross, a seventeen-year-old student at the African School on York Street was denied entry into the town’s all-white high school, even though she had passed the entrance exam. During the next six years, attempts to change Nantucket’s segregated status quo were met, for the most part, with strong opposition. In 1842, it was reported that town officials had allowed pro-slavery rioters to harass an abolitionist meeting, while selectmen and school committee members led a continuing battle to keep African Americans out of their high school. One Nantucketer, David Joy, became so disillusioned with his native island that he moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he reported, “there is less bitterness and determined pro-slavery.”

  There was another Nantucketer, however, who refused to give up the fight to open the school system to African Americans. In 1845 Absalom Boston filed suit against the town so that his seventeen-year-old daughter, Phebe, could attend the high school. Finally in 1846, after a major shake-up in the composition of the school committee, the system was integrated, allowing not only Phebe Boston but also Eunice Ross, who was now twenty-four years old, to continue their educations. Three years later the pride that Boston must have felt over this dramatic turn of events changed to sorrow when Phebe suddenly died of dysentery.

  For Boston, this was only one of many personal losses. By the time he died in 1855 at the age of sixty-nine, he had been preceded by two wives and five of his children. Abram Quary, it was said, lost not only his wife but also all his children prior to taking up residence in Shimmo. Although members of the Boston family would remain on the island into the twentieth century, Quary’s death in 1854 marked the symbolic, if not the literal, end of Native Americans on Nantucket.

  Quary’s race was not the only native culture to endure devastating changes as a consequence of their contact with white Nantucketers. As we have seen, by the 1820s the whalemen’s attention had turned to the peoples of the South Sea Islands, known collectively as “Kanakas.” If the men proved “tractable” whaling hands, the women were just as easily coerced into prostitution. Of all the island whaling ports, the worst, according to the historian Ernest Dodge, was the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, with which Nantucket had an extremely close connection (see Chapter 18). Whereas most Nantucketers had at least a modicum of respect for the Sandwich Islanders, many dismissed the Maoris of New Zealand as “cannibals.” The whaling captains’ fascination with the Maoris’ skill in manufacturing shrunken heads created a black mar
ket in these artifacts that encouraged rival tribes to war against each other so as to acquire more heads for the illicit trade. Indeed, if a whaling captain saw a native whose facial tattoos especially appealed to him, he “might order a head on the hoof, so to say,” and when he returned on his next voyage, the shrunken head would be waiting for him.

  Prostitution also flourished on the Bay of Islands. In Dodge’s words, an extremely “lucrative business” centered on “supplying the captains—more fastidious than their crews—with temporary wives.” Meanwhile the captains’ ships became what the second American consul at the port described as “floating castles of prostitution.” Due to the effects of disease and the shrunkenhead market, the Maori population was cut in half by 1839, a pattern that was repeated wherever the whalemen roamed throughout the Pacific.

  As early as 1825 the Nantucket Inquirer commented: “Thus the benefits as well as the evils of civilization are gradually spreading throughout these remote regions—leaving the question still undetermined, whether savage or cultivated man be most capable of enjoying happiness.” By the 1840s, when Herman Melville saw these islands firsthand, it was no longer an open question. In a lecture entitled “The South Seas,” first delivered in 1858, he claimed that “the whalemen of Nantucket” had, with “those brutal and cruel vices which disgust even savages with our manners,” spearheaded the transformation of “an earthly paradise into a pandemonium.”

  Late in life Melville would meditate in verse on how the whalers he had once glorified as “so many Alexanders” in Moby-Dick might also be considered “pirates of the sphere . . . who in the name of Christ and Trade” (read: Quaker whalemen) “dispossessed . . . the Indians East and West” while “Deflower[ing] the world’s last sylvan glade.” If a temporary window of opportunity opened on Nantucket for African Americans such as Absalom Boston, it must be placed in the context of what happened to these “Indians East and West.” On the island today, the human cost of the Nantucketers’ remorseless hunt for whales can still be seen in the sad, mournful eyes in the portrait of Abram Quary.

  CHAPTER 17

  Maria Mitchell, the Provincial Cosmopolitan

  IN ONE SENSE, Nantucket was an island of astronomers. The whalemen depended on stars for navigation; stars were also the one thing the whalemen still shared with their wives and children even though they might be separated by two oceans and a continent. Just about every house had a roof walk (no one on Nantucket referred to them as “widow’s walks”), and with ship’s telescopes as common as umbrellas are today, it was only natural that Nantucketers took more than an ordinary interest in the heavens.

  In 1829, when Maria (pronounced “Ma-RYE-ah”) Mitchell was only eleven years old, the editor of the Nantucket Inquirer, Samuel Jenks, attended an astronomy lecture delivered by her father and then wrote an eloquent editorial on the importance of the science to all members of the Nantucket community—not just to both landsmen and sailors but to women as well as men: “Are the imaginations of women less vivid than those of men? If not, why should their minds be denied the privilege of contemplating the countless orbs of argent light that roll in silent magnificence through the deep illimitable expanse?” Although this opinion may have made perfect sense to most Nantucketers, it would have struck many off-islanders as a shocking outrage. Even after she had made a name for herself in the world’s astronomical circles, a “learned” gentleman asked Maria if the delicate constitution of a woman made it difficult to stay up late watching the stars. “Sir,” she responded, “my mother had more night work than astronomy will ever demand of any woman. She brought up eight children.”

  As Crèvecoeur had observed back in the eighteenth century, the whale fishery tended to foster a more independent breed of women; also at work among the islanders was Quakerism’s belief in the spiritual and intellectual equality of the sexes. With their husbands away for extensive periods of time, Nantucket wives were required not only to manage the household but also in many instances to run their own businesses so as to keep money coming in. The women also maintained an active network of social ties, visiting each other on what Crèvecoeur described as an “incessant” basis. When a husband returned from a voyage, he joined his wife in the socializing, an unheard of practice on the mainland where women and men traveled in entirely different social spheres. Commented Lucretia Mott, who was born and raised on Nantucket before moving to Philadelphia, “How odd it would seem to the natives [of Nantucket] for husbands to not be as ready as wives to visit.”

  But for those of us from the twentieth century looking to Nantucketers such as Mott and Mitchell as prototypes of the modern woman, it is easy to romanticize the island into a utopia it never was. Nantucket women were, for the most part, independent out of necessity, not out of choice. Loneliness and the nagging fear that their husbands might never return were a constant part of life on Nantucket. In a letter written by the wife of the whaleman Peter Folger, a sense of frustrated longing underlies what is an otherwise extremely level-headed (and very Mary Starbuck–like) communication:Loving Husband, I write these lines to let you know that we are all well at present, and I hope this letter will find you the same. I lack for nothing this world affords but only your good company. I hope it won’t be long before I have your company. I want to hear from you very much. I would not have you think it strange that I sent no letter by Barzillai Folger. At that time I had neither pen, ink, nor paper.

  In her comments concerning her brother Jonathan, Mrs. Folger offers insights into the difficult, even desperate process by which two young Nantucketers found the time and opportunity to fall in love: “Jonathan came here . . . and is now gone again. . . . He sailed 20 days ago for the Davis Straits. Jonathan went upon Town almost every night. He would have married before he went away [but] Father would not consent to it yet.”

  The cumulative pressures of such a life inevitably took their toll. Whether or not opium was as widely used by Nantucket wives as Crèvecoeur claimed, large numbers of opium bottles have been found amid the buried refuse of the Great Fire of 1846. The long stretches without a sexual partner (while their husbands were amid the notorious temptations of the South Sea islands) must have also been difficult to bear (see Notes). In any event, the three-years-away, three-months-at-home cycle of the Nantucket whalemen, while it may have produced its share of “superior wives,” was not without its emotional, psychic, and physical costs.

  And even though women were given a remarkable amount of responsibility and independence on Nantucket, married couples did not necessarily enjoy an equal partnership. He may have been almost always gone, but the husband still ruled the roost. In the late eighteenth century a young Nantucket woman addressed a poem to a friend who had just been married:Small is the province of a wife

  And narrow is her sphere in life

  Within that sphere to move a right

  Should be your principal delight.

  For all their “peculiarities,” Nantucketers were also very much a product of their times.

  To a certain extent, the young Maria Mitchell enjoyed the benefits of Nantucket life while remaining insulated from many of its drawbacks. On an island where most children grew up barely knowing their fathers, Maria’s childhood was dominated by the presence of William Mitchell—a remarkably capable and broadminded man, who worked as (among other things) a farmer, teacher, and bank cashier. By the time Jenks’s editorial about astronomy and women appeared, the eleven-year-old Maria was already assisting her father in his astronomical observations. The whaling captains on the island brought their ship’s chronometers to William Mitchell to be “rated” (calibrated), and it was not long before Maria was able to perform the service, making observations with a sextant from the backyard of the family house on Vestal Street.

  Although he dabbled in various business ventures associated with the whale fishery, William Mitchell was most interested in other things. One of Nantucket’s foremost educators, he ran several schools on the island until he accepted a job as cas
hier at the Pacific Bank. The position not only provided a steady source of income, which the perpetually cash-strapped Mitchells sorely needed, but also gave them housing in the living quarters on the bank’s second floor. Here, in a large room overlooking Main Street, which William called the “Hall,” the Mitchells would gather among their chronometers and books. On the bank’s roof they constructed a cupola-like observation booth for “sweeping the skies.”

  The Mitchells were part of a long line of primarily self-taught “scholars” on Nantucket that dated back to the illustrious Peter Folger. In the tradition of their forebear Benjamin Franklin—whose mother was, after all, a Nantucket Folger—the family had produced accomplished writers (à la “Uncle Pillick”) as well as amazingly proficient experimental scientists. Walter Folger is said to have locked himself in his room until he came up with the secret to manufacturing spermaceti candles. His son, Walter, Jr., continued the scientific tradition, to the point that his wife is reputed to have said to a neighbor, “Why, sometimes I almost wish he didn’t know any more than thy husband.”

  Maria seems to have been deeply impressed by this short, eccentric Benjamin Franklin look-alike, who published widely on “the dismal science of mathematics” while devising a clock that besides telling the time (from second to century) displayed the phases of the moon and tides, as well as the position of the sun. When she was not visiting Folger’s fascinating, book-crammed home on Pleasant Street, Maria spent time with another role model, the elderly and mathematical Phoebe Folger, who, according to Maria, “taught navigation to her husband, and he became, in consequence, the captain of a ship.”

  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.”