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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Ultimately she would become a professor of astronomy at Vassar College, a post she would hold for twenty years. But this part of her life, in which she employed some relatively radical teaching techniques (many of them inherited from her free-thinking father), is beyond the scope of this volume.

  To return to the island of her upbringing (where Maria Mitchell is buried within sight of an observatory owned by the Maria Mitchell Association), it is safe to say that there was probably no other town in nineteenth-century America that could have produced a woman of Maria’s remarkable character and abilities. But perhaps Nantucket’s greatest gift to the young astronomer was that it instilled in her a need to one day venture beyond the confines of her “sea-girt isle.” In the true Nantucket tradition, Maria Mitchell, though a product of a tiny, often ingrown community, had been destined to become a woman of the world.

  CHAPTER 18

  F. C. Sanford, the Mythmaker

  BY THE 1860s AND ’70s, Nantucket’s glory days as the whaling capital of the world were a distant memory. Although efforts had been made to point the economy in a different direction (silk, shoe, and straw-hat manufacturing were all attempted), they were doomed to failure. If it did not involve a harpoon, few on this island of defunct whalemen wanted anything to do with it; in fact, it was said that most Nantucketers displayed a decided “lack of cooperation” whenever these newfangled enterprises were proposed. According to Alexander Starbuck, “It was difficult to lead them into new and strange channels. A people cannot change in a day the habits that have become inbred by two centuries of activity in one direction.”

  Given the island’s remoteness and spectacular summertime climate, it was generally agreed that Nantucket’s only hope was to attract vacationers. As early as 1845, the Inquirer had predicted, “Every day’s experience convinces us that our little island is destined to become the watering place of the country, to which the wealthy, and fashionable, and health-seeking thousands . . . will fly, for relaxation or pleasure during the summer months.” But here, once again, there was resistance from the Nantucketers. For a people who had once fished for the “salt-sea mastodon,” fishing for tourists was a major indignity. As Mary E. Starbuck wrote, “It is not entirely in accordance with our ‘druthers’ that our island has become within a few years a fairly popular summer resort.” For Starbuck it was particularly wrenching to see the old whaling captains—“upright, chivalrous, kindly if humorously tolerant”—subjected to the fatuous scrutiny of summer folk. Wrote Starbuck, “We rise to protest. We are islanders, and our island has an illustrious past.” To see the island degenerate into a carnival show for Coofs was more than any self-respecting Nantucketer could rightly stand. As Alexander Starbuck correctly predicted, only “with the passing of the last of the generations of whalemen” would the island be able to turn successfully to “new enterprises.”

  In the meantime, Nantucket slipped into its darkest and most listless days. By 1870, the island had “not a ship, bark, brig, or vessel of any kind, suggestive of the vast amount of business done in the past.” By 1875 the population had dwindled to just over 3,000 souls (compared with 10,000 at the peak of the island’s prosperity). Beyond the “lethargic old wharves,” where “a few battered and dismantled hulks of whaleships” rotted silently, lay a virtual ghost town. One visitor in the early 1870s wrote, “Here, indeed, was the town, but where were the people?” According to another, “Nantucket now has a ‘body-o’death’ appearance such as few New England towns possess. The houses stand around in faded gentility style—the inhabitants have a dreamy look, as though they live in the memories of the past.” The “idleness” that had been in Crèvecoeur’s day “the most heinous sin that can be committed in Nantucket” had become a way of life. Even Mary E. Starbuck admitted, “we seem quite content to sit still and let things happen.”

  The truly amazing thing was how quickly Nantucket had fallen. Men who had made whaling history in the 1820s, such as Obed Starbuck and George Pollard, were still walking the town’s streets in the 1870s. With little in the present to occupy the attention of contemporary Nantucketers, the focus of the island inevitably turned backward, toward these men and their glorious past. And as each year brought the passing of yet another one of these whaling captains, Nantucket watched its connection to this heritage fade gradually away. Unless something was done about it, Nantucket, once the great “Mother Ship” of the American whale fishery, would be cast adrift, her cable to the past cut forever.

  Answering this need to fill up the emptiness of the present with the heroic ghosts of a vanished era was Frederick Coleman Sanford, a retired merchant and shipping agent, who lived out the last years of his eventful life not only as president of the Pacific Bank and a gentleman farmer but also as a widely published author. From the memories of his youth and the stories he had been told, he would write a series of fascinating reminiscences about a time when Nantucket was “the Chief in the World!”—a romantic vision of the island that is just as captivating today as it was 100 years ago.

  Listen now to F. C. Sanford as he replaces the preternatural silence of Nantucket’s decaying waterfront with the “multitudinous din” of the 1820s, when more than a thousand workmen hurried down to the waterfront each morning:I love to stand now on the wharves where the huge oil-blackened hulls of the whalers once swung, and recall the scene. Heavy-timbered three-storied warehouses filled the heads of the wharves, beside which half a hundred vessels would lie, discharging or taking in cargo. Overhead were the sail-lofts, with the riggers and sailmakers busy sewing the white canvas or shaping spars. Then there were the blacksmith shops, where the ironwork for the ships and tools used in fishing were made; and the cooper shops, that turned out their hundreds of butts and casks per day, and the huge ropewalks, seven in number, where men spun, walking to and fro, all the cordage used in shipbuilding and for repairs. It was indeed a busy scene.

  The central figures in this drama were, of course, the whaling captains, “knight-errants of the world,” whom Sanford dubbed the “Sea Kings.” There was Captain Edmund Gardner, permanently disfigured by his experience in a sperm whale’s mouth: one hand gone and an “indentation in his head deep enough to hold an egg.” There was Captain Obed Fitch, “a fine, majestic figure over six feet tall,” who could lift up a barrel of water “as easily as an ordinary seaman a bucket.” And there was Captain Benjamin Hussey, his huge head containing “a half-bushel of brains,” whose last voyage would be to the Greenland fishery. As the rugged captain guided his ship through the ice floes, a chunk of ice “crushed against the rudder and threw him over the wheel, breaking his ribs.” Captain Hussey ultimately died of these injuries at the age of eighty years and five months. Challenged Sanford, “If you can show me anything like this I will come down a peg.”

  Although these “large and noble figures” were all revered by Sanford, they were part of a larger, and even nobler social phenomenon: the “most enterprising and dauntless community on the face of the Earth,” whose commercial ambitions extended far beyond the selling of whale oil. For, as Sanford repeatedly pointed out, Nantucket also had ships that sailed to China and India. In fact, as a boy it had been not so much the life of a whaleman as the exotic goods of the Orient—“liquorice, spices of India and Ceylon, and tea-chests covered with strange hieroglyphics”—that had captured his imagination. Nantucketers still talked about the day in December of 1807 (two years before Sanford’s birth) when the Cantonese trader Punqua Wingchong (whom Sanford recorded as “Wing Ling”) and a fellow merchant, both wearing “caps with red buttons upon the top,” arrived in Nantucket on the ship Favorite (Jonathan Paddack, Master) to see the owner Paul Gardner. This was during the days of the Jeffersonian Embargo, and when Gardner failed to act upon Wingchong’s request for a trading permit from Washington, the door was opened for John Jacob Astor in New York, who ultimately cleared (according to Sanford’s not always reliable memory) $500,000 in a single shipment of tea. It was a lesson in the need for decisive action
that the young Sanford would never forget.

  Combining a risk-taker’s boldness with a truly visionary sense of his own destiny, Sanford would one day become the island’s leading merchant, with control over a quarter of the entire Nantucket fleet. Even as the island fell into a precipitous decline, Sanford demonstrated a remarkable talent for turning a “Proffit” (which he always spelled with two f’s for emphasis). By the time of his retirement in the 1850s, he was poised to begin what would become a thirty-five-year project: the redemption of Nantucket’s nearly static present through the evocation of a ceaselessly heroic, ever-glorious past. To this day, it is a vision of the island’s whaling heritage that Nantucketers are loath to part with.

  Like most Nantucket boys, Sanford went to sea at the age of fourteen, shipping out with Captain Joseph Barney on the Equator. But when he returned home from the Sandwich Islands at the age of seventeen, he discovered that his father had died, requiring that he remain on island with his mother. So he took up the trade of watch repair, quite a comedown for a Nantucketer with the sea in his blood. As if to announce to the world that he would one day prevail, Sanford had a remarkable set of business cards printed up. Emblazoned across a magnificently drawn ship are the words “Never Despair,” as an idealized woman sits upon a shore-side rock, her finger pointed toward the motto. Bordering this scene are the words “All Kinds of Watches and Clocks Repaired. By Frederick C. Sanford, Nantucket, Massachusetts.” Here was displayed a talent for self-promotion and hype that would serve both Sanford and his island extremely well in the years to come.

  By 1830, the twenty-one-year-old Sanford had become a partner in the business of “Easton and Sanford” situated next door to the Manufacture and Mechanics Bank on Main Street, where the Hub is now located. Sanford’s store specialized in upscale goods: “fine cutlery; gold and silver watches; gilt and fancy goods; silver spoons; jewelry, watch trimmings, etc.” But Sanford, whose father had come from a long line of traders and merchants in Newport, had not entirely left the whaling business. Like many a Nantucket merchant, he also invested and traded in whale oil. Just down the street from Easton and Sanford was the “House of Lords,” at one time the counting house of Zenas Coffin, where owners and shipping agents met every business day at 11:00 (while the captains convened at the Rotch Counting House) to find out the latest news.

  Capitalizing on the contacts made here, he invested in several whaleships, two of which, the Charles Carroll and Lexington , were built at a local shipyard on Brant Point. Gradually, Sanford’s wheeling and dealing in whalers had become so profitable that he withdrew from his partnership with Easton to concentrate on trading. By this time, the Panic of 1837 had set in, which was, according to William C. Macy, “one of those financial revulsions, which, in addition to immediate disaster to many of our merchants, entailed upon the town and its people, a series of misfortunes . . . which continued their havoc through many years thereafter.” Amid these grim economic times, Sanford, keeping true to his motto, “Never Despair,” forged ahead. While other owners put up their ships for sale, Sanford bought two ships “on the wing,” and both of them would return with what were described as “glorious results.”

  Contributing to the glory of these results was the fact that Sanford utilized his ships not only as whalers but also as trading vessels. By this time he had established a profitable link with James R. Clendon in the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, a popular gathering point for whalers through which as many as seventy-five ships passed in a single week. Sanford would typically load his outgoing whalers with tobacco, shoes, and cigars for the Bay of Islands, thus insuring a profit margin beyond what he received from the whaling side of the voyage.

  Sanford apparently had a very close relationship with Clendon, who became the Bay of Island’s first U.S. consul as a result of Sanford’s efforts. In fact, in 1838 he set out as a passenger on one of his newly acquired ships, the Rambler, for a ten-month “voyage around the world.” First stop was the Bay of Islands where Sanford “hoisted the first American ensign upon that island.” As we have seen, according to at least one historian, Clendon presided over the “worst” port in the Pacific, a place where corruption and abuse of the native population, the Maoris, ran rampant (see Chapter 16). Since these conditions only enhanced his ability to profit from the Bay of Islands, Sanford (who dismissed the Maoris as “cannibals”) does not seem to have taken much notice.

  More than anyone else of his generation on Nantucket, Sanford was a driven man. Whereas his noble Quaker predecessor William Rotch (whom Sanford greatly admired) had claimed that he accumulated his enormous wealth “while thinking all the time of the life hereafter,” Sanford had a more personal motivation: righting a wrong against his beloved mother, Peggy. It went something like this: Even before Frederick was born, his mother and father moved from Newport to Nantucket so that Peggy could tend to her failing mother, who eventually died. When her father remarried, Peggy’s loyalty to her mother seems to have gone unappreciated, with the ancestral home (which had been promised to her) going to her siblings. From that day forward, Frederick determined that he would set things straight. One day he would buy back not only the Barnabas Coleman House but the entire block on which it stood (where the Town Building and police department are now located).

  Accumulating the wherewithal to make this purchase would take more than fourteen years, during which time his mother moved to Indiana to live with Frederick’s two older brothers and their families. When Sanford left for his voyage around the world in 1838, it appears that his own wife and children also moved to Indiana. Sanford himself spent at least some time in the Midwest, as four of his children were ultimately born in Indiana. During this period, the man who would eventually become one of Nantucket’s biggest boosters seems to have had a less than firm attachment to his native island.

  By 1846 the only thing between Sanford and his ancestral house on Nantucket was Sally Coleman’s one-third interest in the property, giving her the right to inhabit the house for as long as she lived. Then came the Great Fire. While other Nantucketers were wiped out by the conflagration, Sanford’s dreams were ultimately realized because of it. With the old house in ashes, Sanford now had the opportunity to rebuild. So on this fire-blackened blank slate, Sanford constructed the home of his dreams, hiring his uncle, Frederick Brown Coleman, architect of the Methodist church and Nantucket Atheneum, to design a building with which he might announce to the world that Peggy Coleman Sanford had finally gotten her due. With a noble, pillared entrance and a grand central staircase, the home stood beside what is now a memorial for war veterans at the corner of Federal and Broad Streets. Behind the main house was an elaborate garden as well as a stable and a residence for Sanford’s “hired man.”

  But if Sanford had finally “arrived” on Nantucket, he was also about to leave. On January 16, 1849, he wrote a hurried, almost panicked letter to Captain David Bunker in command of Sanford’s favorite ship, the Lexington, then in port in South America:There has sprung up a new business—viz. the “California Gold Fever.” Every ship is taken from the business of whaling as fast as they come in, to go to California. The Aurora sailed last week with passengers from here, Seth Swain, Master, and 100 ships from other ports. . . . All things look black here for us. Not a bright place in the horizon. . . . I talk some of going to California myself, so don’t be surprised, but you keep clear of there by all means, or you will not have a crew to bring you out.

  By 1849 it had become clear, to Sanford at least, that the end of the line had been reached for Nantucket. It was not the rise of petroleum that killed Nantucket (whaling would be carried on in New Bedford and California for another fifty years), it was the sandbar at its harbor mouth. As the ships got bigger, the bar that had simply been a nuisance in the old days became a major obstacle to prosperity, requiring that ships regularly go to Edgartown to off-load their oil—an expensive and time-consuming process. In 1828 a half-hearted attempt was made to dredge a channel, but it only filled in
again; then in 1842 Peter Folger Ewer designed and built two 135-foot “camels”—forming a floating drydock—to carry the whaleships over the bar. Contrary to what some have insisted, these mammoth water wings proved remarkably successful. For example, forty-five out of the fifty-seven ships that crossed the Nantucket Bar in 1845 made use of the camels.

  But as Sanford would recognize late in life, “commercial affairs always centralize themselves,” meaning that New Bedford, with its deep port and access to the railroad system, was destined to take over Nantucket’s portion of the whaling business. The age-old conservatism of the Nantucketers also hastened their decline. While whalemen in the rival port of Sag Harbor on Long Island moved from the sperm to the bowhead whale in the North Pacific, and thus pioneered a new and profitable era in the fishery, “it was difficult,” according to William C. Macy, “for the people of the island to relinquish their old hunting ground.”

  As he hints in his letter to Captain Bunker, Sanford—along with many other Nantucketers—had decided by 1849 that it was time to head west. With the help of his life-long friend, R. B. Forbes (whom he first met during his one and only whaling voyage as a teenager), Sanford secured a position as the representative in San Francisco for A. A. Low Brothers. The magnificent clipper ships of this New York–based shipping firm were the envy of the world, carrying tea and other China goods to America in record time. For Sanford, who had always been fascinated with the Orient, this was the culmination of yet another early dream, and he would later call his five years in San Francisco “the pleasantest” of his life.