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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  This was the public side of the Dream, a side the Nantucketers guarded so jealously that when in 1822 an anonymous letter appeared in a Boston paper questioning the religious character of the island inhabitants, an irate Nantucketer responded, “We have a spy amongst us, who, like all other spies, sends abroad his cowardly reports where he thinks they can never be disproved. . . .” This kind of attitude meant that the seamier, less-than-glorious aspects of the whale fishery were rarely, if ever, mentioned. Up until only a few decades ago, there were island historians who claimed that the notorious abuses of the whale fishery (see Chapter 16) were the sole work of the New Bedford whalemen during the so-called Golden Age of Whaling (1830–60) and that the Nantucketers who preceded them in the 1820s were “a superior type of shipmaster,” largely because of their Quaker upbringing.

  Unfortunately, such a view does not fit the facts. Nantucket had its share of brutal and inhumane whaling captains. A “Captain Swain of Nantucket” gained a reputation as a drunken tyrant who delighted in playing mind games with his crew. One of his favorite tricks was to wait until his men had left on shore-leave, then set the ship’s topsails, thus threatening to abandon them “after a long and arduous cruise.” Captain William Worth of the Rambler was reputed to have killed several of his crew members, either through flogging or “harsh, unmanly treatment”; one Nantucketer described him as “a disfigurer of God’s creation, . . . a monster dignified with not a manly virtue.” In 1824, Samuel Comstock, who had received the benefit of the finest Quaker education the island had to offer, led the crew of the Globe in a bloody mutiny. But perhaps even more disturbing to the mothers and fathers of Nantucket were the stories of men such as David Whippey who, after a brief exposure to the drudgery and brutality of the whaling life, willingly joined the “cannibals,” never to return to their native island.

  Even our blessedly “marked man,” Captain Obed Starbuck, was hardly beyond reproach. Just ask Moses E. Morrell, a greenhand from New York who shipped out with Starbuck in 1822 aboard the Hero. In a journal he kept of his voyage, Morrell described how Starbuck refused to pay what he felt was an exorbitant price for wood in the Society Islands, then headed for the frigid waters of Cape Horn “without wood sufficient to cook one meal a day.” On November 28th Morrell wrote, “It is now 40 days since we were deprived of warm breakfasts and suppers. . . . Alas, alas, the day that I came a-whaling. For what profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but in the meantime starveth to death?” Stingy and hard-driving, Starbuck seems to have had an attitude typical of a Nantucket whaling captain in the nineteenth century. Certainly the contrast between Morrell’s lament and Peleg Folger’s references to the surfeit of good food and drink on board a Nantucket whaling sloop in the 1750s and ’60s is dramatic. But as Morrell’s journal also makes clear, there was yet another, far more shocking side to the life of a Nantucket whaleman in the Pacific.

  Midway through the voyage, after 100 days of nonstop whaling, the Hero sailed into the port of “Woahoo” in the Sandwich (now Hawaiian) Islands. Even before the sails were furled, the ship was surrounded by a crowd of swimming native women, known as “Whyhunas,” who were eagerly invited on board. Soon the Hero’s decks were the scene of an all-out orgy, or as Morrell put it, “every man took to himself a rib” for the price of a “check shirt or an old handkerchief.” According to Morrell, who asked that his journal be destroyed after his friend in New York had read it, “A smile or nod by the men was sufficient to win [the women’s] affections and obtain them for the time being as a wife.”

  Needless to say, the logs left by the officers of Nantucket whalers are without any mention of these kinds of scenes. However, the last toast of the Loper banquet, delivered by an African-American crew member and recorded in dialect in the local paper, indicates that by 1830 the whalemen’s debaucheries in the Sandwich Islands were already public knowledge: “To Woahoo—Glad he cant speak no cuckold telltale, den all our captains go by him jus like ship Loper.” For his part, Starbuck seems to have adopted a strategy of silence when it came to reconciling his life as a whaling captain with his life as a husband and father. According to his granddaughter, “Grandfather Starbuck never wanted to talk about his voyage[s].” Instead, Starbuck left the talking to his friends, who cast him as the man “who brought success to everything he put his hand to.”

  Unfortunately, even a man of Starbuck’s mythic stature proved to be only human when in 1843 he came out of retirement for one last voyage as captain of the Zone. By this time the whaling grounds that had once served him so well—most notably the “Japan Ground”—had become over-fished. After a voyage of three years, he returned home with 1,226 barrels of oil, half of what he had taken in the Loper in a single year. And then, to add a disturbing end note to this disturbingly anti-climactic voyage, Starbuck arrived on November 10, 1846, to find his home port in ashes, the victim of the Great Fire.

  Perhaps on that bleak November day Starbuck thought back to a very different homecoming: that summer Sunday in 1821 when he returned as commanding officer and saviour of his first ship, the Hero; a day when, as fate would have it, another young captain returned to Nantucket but with a very different tale to tell. Many years later, an islander would remember:We can never forget the Sunday, August 5th, 1821, the day the ship Two Brothers was announced in sight from the watch tower, for she had Captain Pollard as a passenger. In looking back to that day, with all its excitements, for there were full fifteen hundred people upon our wharves, we remember the interest manifested by our citizens for these afflicted men of the sea, suffering . . . as none had in any of our long career of whaling life. The same day . . . the ship Hero, Capt. Obed Starbuck, arrived without her captain, James Russell, who had been killed by the Spaniards. . . . This was of course adding to our excitements of the hour.

  From the “excitements” of this hour, Obed Starbuck and George Pollard went on to become the respective golden boy and dark man of the Nantucket whale fishery. With Starbuck as its standard-bearer, yet haunted by Pollard’s sad and terrifying example, an island pursued its destiny.

  CHAPTER 16

  Absalom Boston and Abram Quary: “Of Color” on the Grey Lady

  THEIR PORTRAITS could not be more different. The first, painted around 1820, shows a prosperous sailing master: confident, substantial, with two gold earrings giving his otherwise formal appearance an exotic flavor of the sea. This is Absalom Boston, one of Nantucket’s most prominent African-American citizens in the nineteenth century, a man so at ease with himself and his world that the only thing distinguishing him from a typical Nantucket whaling captain is the color of his skin.

  The second portrait, painted in 1851, shows an elderly man sitting beside a basket of huckleberries. With his long, thinning hair neatly combed and his hands clasped politely in his lap, he has the dignified, somewhat threadbare grace of a banished courtier. Through the window behind him you can see the town of Nantucket in the distance: the church spires and a veritable forest of masts. When compared to the robust self-confidence of the Boston portrait, this is a marginal man: his narrow face sad and contemplative, his bare feet the only real indication of who he is: Abram Quary, the last Native American to practice traditional ways on Nantucket.

  But for all their apparent differences, Boston and Quary shared a common ancestry. Quary, according to a variety of sources, was a “half-breed”; Boston, revered today as the island’s “first African-American whaling captain,” was also the son of a Nantucket Indian by the name of Thankful Micah. But while Boston chose to participate in Nantucket’s whaling economy, Quary retired to a two-room shack in Shimmo on what is still called today Abram’s Point. There he made baskets and ship models, and at one point threatened to shoot a party of trinket gatherers who were digging up the Indian burial grounds near his home. When asked about his younger days (it was rumored that his father was Nathan Quibby, a notorious Indian hanged for the murder of a white man), his “already decided taciturnity [would] run into obstinacy” and h
e would refuse to speak. Two years after sitting for his portrait, his health had so declined that he was persuaded to move to the town’s almshouse where he died a year later at the age of eighty-three. There is a photograph of him in extreme old age, perhaps taken in front of the almshouse, in which he appears to be setting forth on a fishing expedition, a long wooden rod in his hand, his lean body hunched and frail.

  Whereas Quary remained faithful to the Native American side of his ancestry, thus isolating himself from the mainstream of nineteenth-century Nantucket, Absalom Boston identified himself wholeheartedly with the African-American side of his heritage. Unlike the situation of the Indians, conditions had been steadily improving for Nantucket’s blacks, especially given the fact that they had first come to the island as slaves. Although the Nantucket Friends would eventually develop a nation-wide reputation for abolitionism, the island’s first practicing Quaker, Stephen Hussey, was also one of its foremost slaveholders. In a will made up in 1716, he left “to my wife my Negro woman Sarah; to my son Silvanus the Negro boy Mark; and to my daughter, Theodate, my Negro girl Dorothy.”

  Boston’s father, Seneca, a weaver, had been owned by William Swain, whose heirs were forced to free him when a 1773 court case resulted in the virtual elimination of slavery on the island. By this time, the Nantucket Friends had long since committed themselves to abolitionism, their position eloquently argued by the carpenter Elihu Coleman in the pamphlet “A Testimony Against the Anti-Christian Practice of Making Slaves of Men,” published in 1733. In the years prior to the Revolution, it was the wealthy Quaker whaling merchant William Rotch who insured the freedom of Nantucket’s remaining slaves by threatening to hire the noted Boston lawyer John Adams if the Swains did not agree to free Absalom’s uncle, Prince Boston.

  From 1770 to 1790, Absalom’s father and uncles purchased land in the vicinity of what is now known as Five Corners at the intersection of Pleasant and West York Streets. As early as 1723, Africa, a black weaver, had purchased land in this part of town, then known as the West Monomoy shares, and as the Indian settlement in Miacomet began to disband in the aftermath of the 1763 plague, many Native Americans, their numbers bolstered, according to Crèvecoeur, by “removals” from the Vineyard, began to gravitate in this direction, ultimately becoming part of a community known as “New Guinea.”

  While the Nantucket Quakers had done their best to insulate themselves from the rest of the world, here was a community where a different attitude prevailed. Indeed, when viewed from the perspective of today’s multicultural society, New Guinea, not the “Quaker Utopia” to the north, was the island’s truly exemplary community. With its own stores, school, church, and graveyard, this was a place where Nantucket’s men and women “of color” operated in a microcosm of extraordinary diversity that was knit together by family bonds which in the case of Absalom Boston extended back three generations.

  Adding to New Guinea’s mix of Native and African Americans was the arrival in the 1760s of Portuguese from the Cape Verde and Azores Islands as Nantucket whalers began to expand their operations to the west coast of Africa. Just as the Bostons were one of Nantucket’s leading black families, the Williamses were an early Portuguese clan, and throughout the eighteenth century the two families would not only employ one another but also intermarry. By 1820, there were 274 people (approximately four percent of the island’s population) who called New Guinea home.

  Although members of the Quaker hierarchy on the island were against slavery, this did not mean that they thought of the residents of New Guinea as their equals. For those whose ships required cheap and bountiful labor, the growth of the black community was a matter of business rather than the result of lofty social ideals. With the dramatic decrease in the Indian population, they needed an alternative labor source, and the blacks were it. According to a visitor to Nantucket writing in 1807:The Indians having disappeared, Negroes are now substituted in their place. Seamen of color are more submissive than the whites; but as they are more addicted to frolicking, it is difficult to get them aboard the ship, when it is about to sail, and to keep them aboard, after it has arrived. The Negroes, though they are to be prized for their habits of obedience, are not as intelligent as the Indians.

  There is evidence, however, that the expected “obedience” was not always forthcoming. During the summer of 1775, Abraham Williams of Sandwich wrote to Colonel Nathaniel Freeman in Watertown concerning “some particulars I have heard about Nantucket.” First on his list was a “considerable riot and affray there between the Negroes and Portuguese on the one side and the inhabitants on the other; in consequence whereof many of our Indians and mulattoes are come off.” Of interest is that four different terms (Negro, Portuguese, Indian, and mulatto) are used to describe those involved “on the one side” of the disturbance, corroborating Daniel Vickers’s observation that blacks, Indians, and Portuguese “came to be regarded by their English employers as a single, undifferentiated, subordinate caste.” Also of interest is that the incident prompted a large number of them to leave the island, suggesting that at this stage, Nantucket was more of a way station than a home for seamen of color.

  Inevitably, however, as the fishery began to stabilize after the shocks of the Revolution and the War of 1812, New Guinea began to acquire the look and feel of a settled community. Besides a group of houses and gardens, as well as pasture land, there was the African Baptist Church, erected in 1825. As it had been for the Indians in the previous century, this meeting house, which still stands at the corner of York and Pleasant Streets, was an important focal point for the community. Besides housing regular church services, the building was used as a school and may have been made available to the noted Native American author and itinerant minister William Apess, who came to the island in the late 1820s, “preaching the word wherever door was opened.” Although Obed Macy commented that, like the Indians before them, the island’s African Americans’ “inebriety and want of economy kept them poor,” by the 1830s New Guinea had reached the point that its residents considered it a “pleasant and healthy” village.

  Throughout this period, Absalom Boston emerged as one of New Guinea’s leading citizens. Although the town of Nantucket was a strictly segregated community (the Friends, despite their opposition to slavery, steadfastly refused to accept blacks into their Society), Boston enjoyed a very different environment while on board a Nantucket whaler, particularly in the early days of his career. The rigid discipline of shipboard life tended to treat each member of the crew in terms of his rank rather than his background. In the midst of a howling gale, a captain depended on the quality of his crew, not their skin color, and if a black seaman fulfilled his duties, he generally earned the same amount as his white counterpart. In fact, in the years after the Revolution, at least one all-black whaling ship may have sailed from Nantucket. In a tattered collection of letters and verse at the Nantucket Atheneum is recorded “The Arrivals of the Brazil Whalemen in the year 1788.” Almost all the captains listed are from Nantucket’s leading families; however, at the bottom of the list, recorded as arriving on the fifth of July, is a ship that has no specific captain named; instead it is referred to as “The Guine[a] Men.”

  Beginning around 1800, Absalom’s career as a “Black Man Mariner” enabled him to put away enough money to allow him to obtain a license to run a public inn in 1820. Two years later, at the age of thirty-seven, he helped organize and finance an all-black whaling voyage on the Industry. Also serving as captain, Boston and his African-American crew departed from Nantucket in May of 1822. Unfortunately, the voyage proved to be a financial disaster. Six months later the Industry returned with only seventy barrels of oil, requiring that the ship be auctioned off. From that time forward, Boston seems to have remained on island, opening a store while buying and selling land in and around New Guinea.

  According to the Nantucket abolitionist and women’s rights activist Anna Gardner, Boston was employed at one time by her grandfather, Francis G. Macy, “to do outd
oor work,” and because of his contact with the Macy household, he became “quite domesticated,” i.e., educated. Boston was one of the island’s first subscribers to William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery paper The Liberator and frequently visited Gardner’s mother to discuss the issues of the day.

  By 1830, his stature in New Guinea had reached the point that when the Loper and its nearly all-black crew returned in record time, Boston and his friend Samuel Harris were the ones who directed what would become not only the celebration of a voyage but an expression of the pride and aspirations of their community. In a series of “volunteer toasts” (recorded in dubious dialect in the Inquirer), Boston raised his glass and proclaimed, “To Misser General Lafayette—He freed de poor Frenchmen—hope he come 200 years ago and free poor darky to de South.” After a burst of shouts and applause, he continued, “To Peoples of Color—May de enemy of our celebration and of African freedom, hab ’ternal itch and no benefit of scratch so long as he lib.” And finally, “To City of Boston—Where seed ob liberty come from—Washington plant him, Lafayette till him, may African reap him.” In this last toast to his namesake, Boston made it clear that as far as the country’s African Americans were concerned, the full benefits of the American Revolution were yet to be realized.