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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  Obed Macy speaks of the island’s “peaceable settlement” in his History of Nantucket (1835; rpt. Ellinwood, 1985). Alexander Starbuck’s reference to “historical idols” appears in his History of the American Whale Fishery (Waltham, 1878). For a discussion of Nantucket’s cherished image in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see my “ ‘Every Wave Is a Fortune’: Nantucket Island and the Making of an American Icon,” New England Quarterly (September, 1993).

  1. An Island and Its Altar

  Preston Morris in “Interesting Landmarks on Nantucket,” NI (August 19, 1922), speaks of Altar Rock being holy to the Indians. My account of Nantucket’s geological origins owes much to Robert N. Oldale’s Cape Cod and the Islands, The Geologic Story (East Orleans, 1992) and Barbara Blau Chamberlain’s These Fragile Outposts (Garden City, 1964). The comments concerning the lack of stones on the south shore are in “A Journal of Nantucket by Zaccheus Macy—1792” in NP.

  For an analysis of the vegetative history of the island, see Peter W. Dunwiddie’s “Postglacial Vegetation History of Coastal Islands in Southeastern New England,” National Geographic Research (6[2] 1990). The reference to Coatue’s trees comes from the Town Meeting Records in the Town Clerk’s Office of the Nantucket Town Building. Obed Macy speaks of oak trees not only in his History of Nantucket but also in an unpublished volume in the NHA with the heading “Copied from a book of Obed Macy’s writing when he was an old man: ‘If ever my History of Nantucket is republished in a second edition some of the following anecdotes may be found useful.’ ” Portions of these “Anecdotes” have been reprinted in Alexander Starbuck’s The History of Nantucket (1924; rpt. Rutland, 1969). In “Anecdotes,” Macy states, “My ancestors have often told me that from the best information they could obtain, the island was originally covered with woods.” During the Revolutionary War, when Nantucketers were reduced to digging peat for fuel, they discovered, according to Macy in “Anecdotes”: “a hard bottom of sand below the peat” on which were found “many large stumps and roots of trees . . . burnt to charcoal.” Audubon’s letter to his son concerning his trip to Nantucket is in NHA Collection 153, Folder 1.

  For information concerning early Native American culture in the Northeast, see Howard S. Russell’s Indian New England Before the Mayflower (Hanover, 1980). The reference to the island’s sterility comes from St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (New York, 1981). Information concerning the island’s Indians as well as its climate comes from “Notes on Nantucket, by the Reverend James Freeman, August 1st, 1807,” in NP. Also see Elizabeth A. Little’s excellent series of monographs, Nantucket Algonquian Studies #1–12 at the NHA (in which she discusses the lack of evidence for the cultivation of corn by island Indians), as well as M. M. Brenizer’s The Nantucket Indians, Legends and Accounts Before 1659 (Nantucket, 1976). In a personal correspondence (May, 1992), Peter Dunwiddie, an island scientist with the Audubon Society, states that the Indians “simply lacked the numbers, and often, the means to desecrate their environment as badly as we have.” A chip of deer bone found at an archeological dig in Quidnet was dated between A.D. 460 and 155 B.C.; see Little’s “Locus Q-6, Site M52/65, Quidnet, Nantucket,” Massachusetts Archaeological Society Bulletin (45 [1] 1983).

  For the early evolution of Nantucket’s English community, see Henry B. Worth’s indispensable Nantucket Land and Land Owners, HN (1901). The reference to killing dogs is in MR. The snake anecdote appears in Macy’s “Anecdotes.” A 1684 Indian deed (reprinted in Starbuck) mentions “Shawkenes or the snake place.” The reference to the Indian-English trench at Long Pond is in MR.

  The story of Love Paddack and Lily (originally Wesco) Pond appears in Macy’s “Anecdotes”; in May of 1967, after eight inches of rain fell in seven hours, Lily Pond was temporarily refilled; see photos in HN (April, 1968). The loss of Lily Pond may have contributed to the shoaling of Nantucket Harbor. According to Edmund Gardner writing in 1872 (whose information came to him “by tradition from my father”), “after the Lily Pond was tapped, it spoiled the inner harbor for small vessels. . . . The water being drawn off, the land came up”; in NI (May 7, 1910).

  I am indebted to Helen Winslow Chase for pointing out the impact of losing Lily Pond on Love Paddack’s father. John W. McCalley writes insightfully about Nantucket’s water-power problem and its impact on sheep-raising in Nantucket, Yesterday and Today (New York, 1981). Even as late as 1770, the proprietors were still casting about in search of new sources of water power, ordering “a dam to be made at Shawkemo to see if we can raise a head of water in order to place a fulling mill” (Proprietors’ Book I, Nantucket Registry of Deeds).

  According to a story in NI (October 29, 1822), a family of runaway slaves hid from the authorities in the “vaults” of the peat-diggers. Alcon Chadwick describes the old peat beds as wet swamps in “Reminiscences of Old Podpis [the original spelling of what is now Polpis],” HN (1922); he also gives a detailed description of how the peat was prepared and dried in “Peat Houses” resembling slatted corn cribs.

  Obed Macy gives the corn statistics in his History; Crèvecoeur’s remarks concerning sheep fertilization come from the French version of his Letters; this translation appears in NP. According to a visitor quoted in NI (October 15, 1831), “The sheep that was ‘bred and born’ on Smith’s Point, will in a very few hours, although it is eight miles from the place of shearing, find the way to his native soil, and the resident of Siasconset may be seen wending his way thitherward, with an assiduity that forbids his stopping for refreshment. A few years since, when a fence was erected around the town, and the sheep that had lived in the town as well as the rest were excluded, the obstinacy of this habit was so inveterate that the town sheep came to the fence and persisted in staying there, until numbers actually died of starvation.”

  Emerson’s account of the island’s outlying areas appears in his collected Letters, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York, 1939); Thoreau recorded his observations in his Journals, ed. Francis H. Allen (New York, 1962).

  For an account of the town’s growth, see J. Christopher Land and Kate Stout’s Building with Nantucket in Mind (Nantucket, 1992). The Bocochico Lots were named, according to Obed Macy (in “Anecdotes”), for “a Dutch vessel cast away at the east end of the Island.” The description of what the town looked like from the harbor is in Joseph Sansom’s “A Description of Nantucket,” which first appeared in 1811 and is in NP.

  Whale oil was not the only thing that stank in and around Nantucket Harbor; there was also the inevitable water pollution. In 1801 Josiah Quincy stayed at a boarding house along the waterfront that “was accompanied by a considerable dock effluvia” (in NP). According to an observer writing in the Hampshire Gazette in 1825, “The sand is so deep that [the calashes] pass through the streets without making the least noise” (in NP). Joseph Sansom made the observations concerning the town’s “tranquility” in 1811. “Town sheep” are discussed in a letter to the editor in NI (August 27, 1831).

  Phebe Folger’s watercolors appear in an article by Katherine Seeler in HN (October, 1966). In an article in NI (November 7, 1825), a visitor remarked, “A singular taste exists among the people in the color of paint on their houses. The chameleon in its most changing moments never exhibited such variety. Every possible shade from the jet black to the white may be seen.”

  The reference to how close to town most Nantucketers kept is from William Coffin’s 1793 letter in NHA Collection 150, Folder 78. An account of the two lost boys (one of whom died) is in the Nantucket Journal (September 14, 1827).

  Daniel Webster’s reference to Nantucket as an “Unknown City” is cited in Emil F. Guba’s Nantucket Odyssey (Waltham, 1965). The list of businesses comes from G. W. Jones’s “Nantucket’s Busy Days 150 Years Ago,” HN (April, 1981). Edouard Stackpole in Rambling through the Streets and Lanes of Nantucket (Nantucket, 1951) describes the different sections of town in the nineteenth century.

  Articles concerning the dangerous darkness of Nantucket’s str
eets are in NI (October 18, 1828, and October 3, 1829). See Michael Hugo-Brunt’s “An Historical Survey of the Physical Development of Nantucket: A Brief Narrative History and Documentary Source Material,” an unpublished study sponsored by Cornell University in 1969 (at the NHA), for the nuts-and-bolts of the town’s development—health care, sewer systems, etc. The reference to “drunkenness and debauchery” appears in Wanderings and Adventures of Reuben Delano (Boston, 1846).

  John Woolman’s reference to the Nantucket Bar appears in his Journals, reprinted in NP. A story in NI (February 27, 1841) mentions the clay basis of the Nantucket Bar. Samuel Adams Drake in Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast (New York, 1875) makes the reference to the pitch pines. Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., former Director of the University of Massachusetts Nantucket Field Station, provides a detailed scientific analysis of the past, present, and future of the island’s heathlands in “Human Land Use History and Nantucket’s Coastal Heaths: Origin, Development, Loss, and Conservation,” an unpublished manuscript. The 1891 Committee on Sanitation Report is cited in Hugo-Brunt. The reference to Easy Street as “The Dump” is from Merle E. Turner’s “Nantucket Streets and Lanes,” HN (1929). In a personal communication (August, 1993), Tiffney provides this analysis of the island’s erosion rate: “Much of the south shore loses about 15 feet/year. Increase that by times three (45 feet) to bring it in line with the 3X increase in sea level expected over the next 100 years, then divide that into the average width of the island (about 18,000 feet), and I get 400 years.”

  2. Native Origins: Maushop, Roqua, Wonoma, and Autopscot

  My account of the various Indian myths relies heavily on Brenizer’s The Nantucket Indians, Legends and Accounts Before 1659 (from which the myths of Roqua and Wonoma and Autopscot come), as well as James Freeman’s 1807 “Notes on Nantucket” and the writings of Zaccheus Macy, both in NP. Crèvecoeur also talks about “ancient” customs of the Nantucket Indians. Edward Byers in The Nation of Nantucket, Society and Politics in an Early American Commercial Center, 1660–1820 (Boston, 1987) speaks of the high density of Nantucket’s Native American population prior to the arrival of the English. Elizabeth Little’s “Indian Politics on Nantucket,” Papers of the Thirteenth Algonquian Conference (Carleton University, 1982), analyzes many of these myths with reference to known records. Dr. Little’s work on Nantucket Indians is unmatched for its scope and scholarly rigor, and I am indebted to her in this and other chapters concerning the island’s Native Americans. For a guide to the many articles she and others have written on this subject, see her “Bibliography for Historic and Prehistoric Nantucket Indian Studies,” Nantucket Algonquian Studies #8 (NHA, 1990).

  Little and John Pretola in “Nantucket: An Archaeological Record from the Far Island,” Bulletin of the Archaeological Study of Connecticut (51, 1988), discuss the effects of the island’s remoteness on Indian culture. Obed Macy speaks of Gosnold’s sighting Nantucket on his way to Virginia; unfortunately, there is no historic evidence that Gosnold ever even saw Nantucket Island. Several years later George Weymouth did see the white cliffs of Sankaty Head but did not land on the island. See Captain John Lacouture’s “The Voyage of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602 to Cape Cod and the Vineyard,” HN (July, 1987). For an account of the Pilgrims’ haphazard voyaging around the Cape, see Bradford’s History “of Plimouth Plantation” (Boston, 1898).

  In “Sachem Nickanoose of Nantucket and the Grass Contest,” Little recounts the tradition concerning the Massachusetts seal. Paul Dudley made a report concerning the New England whale fishery to the Royal Philosophical Society of London in 1725; his description of the sweat houses comes from a clipping dated 1724 in the “Indian” Folder at the NA. Throughout this chapter I have also depended on Russell’s Indian New England Before the Mayflower, which contains an interesting account of the role of the sexes in Indian culture.

  In his “Anecdotes,” Macy tells the tale of an Indian boy’s capture during an attack in the Madaket section of the island and the revenge he ultimately exacted at a much later date. Russell describes the often elaborate burial techniques of many New England Indians, in which the head of the dead person was directed to the “Happy Hunting Ground” to the southwest, while the body was surrounded by objects that would prove useful in the hereafter. Little has found no evidence of ceremonial Indian burials on Nantucket; however, white Nantucketers of the nineteenth century are known to have repeatedly “pilfered” Indian graves in Shimmo and Miacomet and may have been responsible for the lack of artifacts. If, as Little points out, the myth of Wonoma and Autopscot is actually the myth of Askammapoo and Spotso, then Nickanoose—not Wauwinet (who was Nickanoose’s son)—is a better candidate for the eastern sachem in the tale. See Russell for an account of the plants used by the Indians for healing. Sansom (in NP) mentions the dependence of Nantucket doctors on “the simples which were used by the Indian natives.”

  The Indian burial ground in Miacomet is not far from the site of the annual sheep shearing in the nineteenth century. NI (June 18, 1842) reported that many of these graves had been repeatedly violated by amateur phrenologists in search of skulls. Most recently the burial ground was unwittingly disturbed by a backhoe breaking ground for an affordable housing project; see Little’s “History of the Town of Miacomet,” Nantucket Algonquian Studies #12 (NHA, 1988).

  3. Thomas Macy’s Great Escape

  Perhaps no event in the history of the island (outside its whaling heritage) has received more attention through the years than the voyage of Thomas Macy and his family to Nantucket, where they established the first permanent English settlement in 1659. In his very popular poem “The Exiles” (first published in 1840), the Quaker poet John Green-leaf Whittier transformed the story of Macy’s journey into an Indiana Jones–style escape sequence, with Macy barely eluding the clutches of a Puritan sheriff and minister before setting off for Nantucket in the name of religious freedom. Although we know precious little factual information about Macy’s voyage to Nantucket, we do know that Whittier inevitably simplified and misrepresented what actually happened in order to make a better story of it. Unfortunately, Whittier’s account has taken on a life of its own, with otherwise dependable historians such as Samuel Eliot Morrison in The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Boston, 1921) relying on it as historically correct. This chapter is an attempt to retell the story in the context of what we know about the facts without completely gutting the traditions of their narrative impact.

  Obed Macy in his History refers to the Macys’ vessel as an open boat. For an account of the incredible fecundity of New England coastal waters in the seventeenth century (and the havoc Nantucketers and others wreaked on not only whales and fish but also seals and birds), see Farley Mowat’s Sea of Slaughter (Boston, 1984). Most accounts of Macy’s journey have him sailing all the way around Cape Cod. Throughout the seventeenth century, however, it was common for small vessels to sail through a passage across the Cape that eventually became known as “Jeremiah’s Gutter”; see Chamberlain, These Fragile Outposts. Emil Guba in Nantucket Odyssey refers to Daggett as acting as a pilot for Macy from the Vineyard to Nantucket while Zaccheus Macy (in NP) refers to a Daggett who spent that first winter with the Macys as a “boarder” for “the sake of gunning.” Both Guba and Edouard Stackpole in Life Saving Nantucket (Nantucket, 1972) agree that the Macys did not sail directly to Nantucket (as Obed Macy maintains) but (in Stackpole’s words) “actually chose the more logical route by way of Martha’s Vineyard.”

  Concerning the Daggetts, records in the Edgartown Town Hall from 1658–9 have many references to the dispute between the Daggetts and the town; for example, one entry speaks of four people being selected (two by the town and two by Daggett) to choose “an umpire to settle the Controversy”; see also Charles Edward Banks, History of Martha’s Vineyard, vol. 2 (Boston, 1911). My account of the tradition concerning the storm and Macy’s words to his wife (which would have her “going below” in an open boat, leading one commentator
to suggest that he may have actually told her to go “somewhere else”) comes from Silvanus J. Macy, Genealogy of the Macy Family (Albany, 1868).

  Thomas Macy’s land grant to start his sawmill in Salisbury gave him use of all available wood except for the oak trees, which the grant designated as being used to make canoes. Could an Indian-style dugout canoe have been the “open boat” Macy sailed to Nantucket? It would have meant the literal fulfillment of Roqua’s prediction, with Macy not only arriving in a storm but also in a canoe. Joseph Merrill’s History of Amesbury (Haverhill, 1880) provides valuable information concerning Macy’s life at Salisbury.

  In the Edgartown Town Records is this entry: “The request of Peter Foulger granted Touching the Laying Down of his Creed By the Major Part of the Freeman acted and voted the same. 4th Oct. 59.” Interestingly, the Edgartown records also include Thomas Mayhew’s deed of Tuckernuck Island to Tristram Coffin and sons; the deed is dated October 10, 1659. The text of the early Nantucket land deeds with Mayhew and the Indians is reprinted in Lydia S. Hinchman, Early Settlers of Nantucket (Philadelphia, 1901). Although James Coffin’s arrival on the island with the Macy party cannot be documented by a specific primary source, tradition tells us he was there.

  Henry Forman’s Early Nantucket and Its Whale Houses (1966; rpt. Nantucket, 1991) contains a sketch of “Uncle Black’s Cave, Tuckernuck Is., 1829” that Forman describes as a “probable type of seventeenth and eighteenth century dug-out on Nantucket.” The account of Starbuck and Macy’s encounter with the Indian pow-wow comes from Sansom in NP. According to what is probably an apocryphal article in NI (November 12, 1831), Macy and Starbuck agreed prior to landing on Nantucket that Starbuck would fake insanity so as to prevent the Indians (who were thought to be wary of the mentally infirm) from attacking them. Freeman (in NP) speaks of the Indians’ early relations with the English, especially their interest in firearms.