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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  With prices at an all-time high, the profit to be made by this dangerous trade was huge, and during the summer of 1776 Kezia had a barn built on property she and her husband owned in Quaise, several miles up the harbor from town; by September of the following year—during which her daughter and Fanning were married—a new country estate was built on this same Quaise location, employing five carpenters. Although some Nantucket historians have claimed that there is no evidence Kezia was ever a smuggler, tradition states that this new residence was built with the expressed purpose of carrying on her illegal trade, complete with a beach-side tunnel leading to an underground storage area.

  Indeed, it is difficult to imagine why anyone would even consider building a new and palatial home two years into the Revolution (a time when virtually everyone else on the island was suffering devastating financial reversals), unless the house had a direct relationship to his or her ability to turn a profit. Certainly the location of Kezia’s new home was ideally suited for smuggling, removed as it was from town and yet within the shelter of Coatue. At the thinnest section of this barrier beach (which Kezia, Jr., refers to as “Courteau”), between fourth and fifth point, there was a “haul-over place” where, according to Kezia’s diary, a boat could “put immediately over” to Quaise. Thus, it was possible to reach the Coffins’ Quaise residence without passing near Brant Point.

  Although most local historians have been quick to attribute all talk of secret tunnels and subterranean warehouses to the overwrought imaginings of an off-island novelist, it must be remembered that during the year of its publication, Nantucketers insisted that Miriam Coffin was “faithfully consistent with matters of fact occurrences.” At the close of the nineteenth century, Eliza Mitchell, an ancient Nantucketer who had known the famed Siasconset genealogist and historian Benjamin Franklin Folger, recorded Folger’s claim that he had actually seen Coffin’s tunnel and “storage place” in the early years of the century. According to Folger, “In the center I could stand nearly straight. All was time-worn and very much decayed, but I saw what I needed to convince me [that Kezia Coffin] was a very capable woman but lacking very much in principle.”

  This was, apparently, the feeling of a growing number of Nantucketers as conditions on the island went from bad to worse during the Revolution. Continental and British privateers, known as “shaving mills,” increasingly used the harbor as a battleground, firing upon each other, looting and burning island ships, and generally terrorizing the local populace. Then in the fall of 1779 Kezia Coffin along with Dr. Benjamin Tupper, William Rotch, Timothy Folger, and Samuel Starbuck were accused of treason for assisting the British in ransacking the warehouse of a fellow Nantucketer by the name of Thomas Jenkins.

  It would not be until the following spring that these five, along with fifteen witnesses, were able to travel to Watertown for the trial. In December, what became known as the “Hard Winter” set in. The cold was so severe that ice extended out into the Sound as far as the eye could see, cutting off all contact with the mainland. Food was so scarce that many were reduced to eating sea gulls. Due to the incredible thickness of the ice, fishing was next to impossible, as was digging peat. The cold had one benefit, however. Since the harbor was frozen solid, it was now possible to drive horse-drawn calashes directly to the Coskata section of the island, a normally inaccessible area where there were still some gnarled juniper and oak trees. As many as fifty to sixty calashes began traveling to Coskata on a daily basis, an eighteen-mile round trip past Kezia’s Quaise estate. Undoubtedly the subject of its notorious owner was brought up more than once in the conversations of the wood gatherers.

  Although Kezia and the four others accused of treason were ultimately acquitted of the charges that spring, the trial seems to have marked the beginning of Kezia Coffin’s decline. In October of 1782, she almost drowned in Hyannis Harbor while attempting to board a sloop bound for Nantucket; in March of the following year, her daughter recorded that “my father alias mother” was accused of stealing a vessel from the Continental forces. With Fanning’s power of attorney in hand, Kezia went to New York “to answer to the case.” In April of that year, news of peace reached the island, and Kezia, Jr., ruefully noted, “Everything the Rebels can wish allowed them.” That November her mother finally returned from New York “unsuccessful in laws.” Later in the month, two merchants from Newport successfully sued for 700 pounds that, according to the diarist, “my Mother had taken up to carry on business for that devilish McCauly Company in New York.” The Coffins—like so many loyalists—were bankrupt.

  On December 27th, the sheriff and several men arrived at the Coffins’ house on Center Street, but Kezia, who had just turned sixty, refused to leave her chair, forcing them to carry her, chair and all, out into the street. Her husband put up no resistance, however, as the sheriff and his men remained in the house “sitting around the front room fire”—much to the anger of Kezia’s daughter, who wrote:No family, I am certain was ever treated as ours are and have been. I would not wish to enjoy one six pence of my father’s estate if he owes money, but to have things taken hold of and torn away in the manner they are, is more than flesh and blood can or ought to bear. I am fearful that my beloved parents will lie in the street, although I believe it is the wish of many, but grant their wishes may be abortive!

  Just how ugly things had become among the once mighty Nantucket whale merchants is indicated by the venom the diarist directed toward Timothy Folger, a fellow Tory who had also been accused of treason: “O! that Demon of a Timothy Folger, he was the first cause of all our trouble. I pray that I may seek vengeance all the days of my life.”

  But the backstabbing did not stop there. A year later, in 1784, Kezia sailed for Halifax, Nova Scotia, in hopes of getting restitution from the British government for her losses during the war. A year later she was still in Halifax, penniless and in debtor’s prison, without “chair, table, nor other furniture in her cell.” Although Timothy Folger and Paul Starbuck were also in Nova Scotia (see Chapter 13), they did not lift a finger to help their island “cousin.” In fact, according to Kezia, Jr., “It was by Folger’s and Starbuck’s means she was imprisoned, they telling all the lies they could invent to her prejudice.”

  A woman in a man’s world, Kezia was outside the “old boy” network that would sustain the likes of William Rotch and Timothy Folger after the conclusion of the Revolution. Just as much of New England had watched Nantucket’s colonial rise with a mixture of envy and contempt and then taken a wicked delight in its catastrophic fall during the Revolution, so had it been “the wish of many” on Nantucket that this uncompromising female get her just deserts. Instead of the questionable legality of her trade practices, Kezia’s true crime, as far as the Nantucketers were concerned, was being a woman. In Miriam Coffin Hart echoes the island’s verdict when he has Miriam’s husband issue this final chastisement to his over-reaching spouse: “Get thee gone to thy kitchen, where it is fitting thou should’st preside:—Go—go to thy kitchen, woman, and do thou never meddle with men’s affairs more!”

  If, as Crèvecoeur pointed out, the whale fishery had given Nantucket wives added responsibilities and “ripened their judgment,” there was another part of their job description: never be “turbulent, of high temper, and difficult to be ruled.” To act as Kezia had done was to run the risk, in Crèvecoeur’s words, of “subverting the principles of their society by altering its ancient rules.” Instead of acting as a dutiful spouse in a provincial backwater, Kezia had led her life as a wheeler-dealer at the center of a vast and truly cosmopolitan commercial network. Unfortunately the times, and her gender, were not on her side.

  Although Hart’s Miriam Coffin returns to her kitchen, the real Kezia seems to have remained unrepentant to the very end. After her sufferings in Nova Scotia, Kezia eventually returned to Nantucket but never gave up hope of receiving some form of redress, instructing her son-in-law, “I want thee to keep this in court as long as I live.” Tradition has it that she insis
ted on wearing black as a public expression of her grief over the outcome of the Revolution. And, contrary to another tradition, she proved surprisingly successful in court, winning several decisions against islanders who had taken control of her property, both in Quaise and in town, after her husband’s death.

  In March of 1798, she went to court in the afternoon before returning to her rented house on Main Street. About dusk she marched up the front stairs in her usual, purposeful manner and then apparently suffered a stroke and fell backwards down the staircase. After remaining in a coma for several days, she died, almost exactly a decade after her husband. Eight months later, Phineas Fanning would follow her to the grave, leaving his wife five months pregnant.

  For the Coffins and Fannings—as was true for many others throughout Nantucket and the rest of colonial America—the War for Independence was as much the end as it was the beginning of a way of life. No matter how hard the Nantucketers eventually worked to re-create their pre-Revolutionary prosperity, it would never be quite the same.

  CHAPTER 13

  The “Removals”: From Jethro Coffin to William Rotch

  NANTUCKET ISLAND and its whaling life were not for everyone. Although the island’s economy continued to grow throughout the first seventy-five years of the eighteenth century, Nantucket lost as many people as it kept. Of course, this was happening all over New England as individuals and families headed west, south, and even north in search of new opportunities. But there was something different about the way Nantucketers went about the business of “moving on.”

  Having grown up on a tiny island where most of the inhabitants not only were related by birth but also shared the same profession and religious beliefs, Nantucketers had a common bond that few other communities in America could match. When opportunities presented themselves on the mainland or things got so bad on the island that they decided to leave, Nantucketers tended to relocate in groups. Crèvecoeur compared their migration pattern to bees moving “in regular and connected swarms.”

  Certainly the Quakers’ distinction between themselves and the “world’s people” encouraged a certain insularity. But it also had to do with their place of birth, where for more than a century Nantucketers had been nurturing a sense of themselves as a distinct culture, especially when it came to the neighboring Cape and islands. They not only had a unique accent (a Nantucketer said “bah” [for bar] while a Vineyarder said “baer”), they also considered themselves more refined and cosmopolitan, an inevitable result of the national and international scope of the whale fishery. For example, Kezia Coffin Fanning’s diary has this entry: “One Allen of the Vineyard dined here. Very polite for the Vineyard.” The derogatory term of “Coof,” which ultimately came to describe anyone unlucky enough to be born off island, was originally applied to Cape Codders.

  Given this sense of themselves as a people apart, it is not surprising that when Nantucketers found themselves in a new location and among a different people, they remained fiercely protective of their traditional way of life, a clannishness that sometimes manifested itself in curious ways. Writing from Philadelphia in 1789, Benjamin Franklin commented on his experience with two Nantucket “cousins”: “They are wonderfully shy. But I admire their honest plainness of speech. About a year ago I invited two of them to dine with me. Their answer was, that they would, if they could not do better. I suppose they did better, for I never saw them afterwards. . . .”

  Although the Revolution would prompt many Nantucketers to leave their home, the island had already been sending out its swarms for quite some time. Take, for example, Jethro and Mary Coffin, the couple whose marriage in 1686 helped to heal the injuries inflicted by the Half-Share Revolt. After living in the “Oldest House” for more than twenty years, Jethro and Mary sold out and moved to what is now known as Mendon, Massachusetts. In 1708, the year of their “removal,” Jethro was forty-five; Mary was thirty-eight; their six surviving children had all been born on Nantucket, where whaling was just beginning to take off. Accompanying them were several other Nantucket families, including that of John Gardner, eldest son of the famous leader of the Revolt. Why were these upstanding members of the community willing to begin it all over again in an undeveloped backwater?

  Family connections were partly responsible. Jethro’s father Peter Coffin (eldest son to Tristram) had been awarded the land back in 1672 for delivering a shipload of masts to the British government, and in 1713 he deeded the grant to Jethro. Just as the original settlement of Nantucket had provided Peter with a market for his lumber, market forces seem to have determined the relocation of Jethro to Mendon, where many of the resources that were either unavailable or in short supply on Nantucket existed in abundance. In the many swamps in the area grew the white cedar needed for whaleboats; there were also rivers to power sawmills; iron ore with which to forge whaling equipment; and a direct water route to transport the goods back to the island. In short, Coffin and his cohorts became “peripheral suppliers,” providing materials that were custom-made for the fledgling whale fishery.

  The Mendonites had more than just a commercial tie to the island. Their social and family life still revolved around their place of origin. Marriages tended to be either among themselves or with Nantucketers. And when in 1726 they lost their leader, Jethro Coffin, in a “Great Sickness,” the pull of their original home proved too strong, and the community disbanded, with most of the Coffins and Gardners returning that same year to Nantucket.

  This was a pattern that would repeat itself more than once. In 1761, in response to an invitation from the British government, forty-eight families (thirty-five from Nantucket and thirteen from Cape Cod) set sail for Nova Scotia’s Cape Sable in Barrington township. As soon as they arrived in Nova Scotia, the Nantucketers took steps to insure the integrity of their community. A “dividing line” was drawn across the settlement, with all Nantucketers to the south and the Cape Codders to the north. Although perfectly proficient at hunting whales, the Nantucketers—from an island where the largest wild animal was the Norway rat—had no experience hunting game, and many of them nearly starved to death during their first winter on Cape Sable, in part because they “knew little of woodcraft,” according to a local doctor. The next spring, ten families returned to the island. Although the community reached a high of 376 people in 1767, the settlement began to collapse in the next decade as family after family returned to Nantucket.

  About this same time, yet another “swarm” headed out from Nantucket, but in an entirely different direction—south, to New Garden (now Guilford), North Carolina, in today’s Greensboro area. Rather than the British government, it appears that the Quakers were the original promoters of this new settlement, with no less than five North Carolinian ministers preaching on the island in the years prior to the first migration. Just how organized this initial removal was is indicated by an entry in Peleg Folger’s journal:28th of the 4th mo. 1771. This day embarked in order to settle in New Garden in North Carolina: John Macy and his family, Reuben Bunker, Jr., and his family, Daniel Worth and his family, Libri Coffin and his family, Gayer Starbuck and his family. Passengers in order to view the country: David Macy, William Coffin, Daniel Gardner, William Barnard, Stephen Macy, and Jethro Gardner. Prince Gardner, Master; Reuben Barnard, Mate.

  Crèvecoeur arrived on the island a year or so after this first boatload of emigrants had left (in fact, it may have been an earlier visit to New Garden that first inspired him to travel to Nantucket). According to Crèvecoeur, in 1766 the Nantucketers purchased a large tract of land within forty miles of the “spring heads” of the Deep River in North Carolina where “the richness of the soil, etc., made them cheerfully quit an island on which there was no longer any room for them.” It may not have been just a matter of space. With the threat of revolution looming ever larger, many of these Nantucketers undoubtedly recognized that an island was no place to be in the middle of a war.

  Unlike the earlier migration to Nova Scotia, this Nantucket outpost flourished,
largely because of the preexisting support system of Quakerism. The procedure was this: When a Nantucketer decided to relocate, he or she first obtained official certification for “removal” from the Nantucket Meeting—a document that attested to his or her good financial as well as spiritual standing in the community—for presentation to the meeting in New Garden. From 1771 to 1775 there were forty-one certificates recorded from Nantucket. Nantucketers removing to New Garden were thus assured that no matter how different their lives as inland farmers were going to be, there was at least one constant they could count on.

  One analysis of Quaker records from this region in North Carolina found more than 600 people of Nantucket birth or lineage, a breakdown of which shows a remarkably representative cross-section of Nantucket first families: 175 Macys, 104 Coffins, 66 Starbucks, 65 Swains, 55 Gardners, 39 Worths, 36 Husseys, 25 Barnards, 18 Bunkers, and 1 Folger. In 1773, New Garden–transplants William and Phebe Stanton wrote to Phebe’s father, Zaccheus Macy on Nantucket. After talking about the scarcity of salt and iron; the low price of molasses, flour, and wood; the productivity of their farm; and the progress of the three children born since their removal, they wrote: “Our children remember their love to their grandfather & grandmother & their relations & folks of Nantucket every day & them that was born here talk of Nantucket as much as them that was born there and frequently talk of going there to see grandfather and grandmother.”