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

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  My account of grass rights and Indian-English relations is based largely on Little’s “Sachem Nickanoose of Nantucket and the Grass Contest.” The town’s attempt at a final offer concerning Indians and horses is in MR (January 29, 1673). The Earl of Bellomont’s account of his calling the winter-grass deeds a “circumvention and fraud” is in Starbuck.

  The measures against Gardner and Folger can be followed in MR (March 16; April 14, 1677). The English half-share men were not the only ones displaying disrespect for island authority in June of 1677. Later that same month, the minor sachem Obadiah and several of his men attempted to rescue an Indian who had been sentenced to be whipped. A scuffle broke out in court as Obadiah, “using reviling speeches and speaking opprobrious words against the members of the court,” was ultimately sentenced to be fined three pounds and whipped twenty stripes (MR, June 26, 1677). If the full-share men saw this confrontation as evidence that Gardner was indeed guilty of fomenting insurrection among the Indians, it seems to have been, in reality, more of an isolated incident than part of any organized attempt by the Indians to overthrow English authority. Later that year, Gardner himself, the supposed upholder of Indian interests, was the victim of an Indian break-in. According to court records, Jack Never “went into Captain John Gardner’s house in the middle of the night and took out of Mr. Gardner’s pocket by the bedside five shillings in money and also opened a case and carried away a bottle with one pint of liquor in it.”

  Although Folger was technically imprisoned for more than a year, it is doubtful that he spent the entire time in jail, especially given “the fire” his initial imprisonment had ignited. Documents concerning the 1680 salvaging case against Tristram Coffin are in Hough. See Little’s “Grass Contest” on the town’s attempt in 1682 to reach a compromise solution with the Indians. For more information concerning the Oldest House, see Helen Winslow Chase’s Jethro Coffin House Chronology, 1686–1986 (NHA, 1986).

  The comments concerning Nantucketers being a “band of brothers” were made by Sansom (in NP); Walter Folger’s remarks also appear in NP. Without records of birth defects and mental retardation, the question of inbreeding on Nantucket awaits the analysis of genealogical records by a trained geneticist. For example, in 1682 Elizabeth Starbuck, daughter of Nathaniel and Mary (Coffin) Starbuck married Peter Coffin, Jr., son of Peter and Abigail (Starbuck) Coffin, meaning that the father of the bride was the brother of the groom’s mother, while the mother of the bride was the sister of the groom’s father. According to Lydia Hinchman, by the nineteenth century “nearly all natives of Nantucket were cousins through a common ancestry.” Although Quakerism encouraged a certain insularity (since Friends were expected to marry within the fold), it mandated against the marriage of first cousins. Guba has a chapter about inbreeding on the island, although he makes the mistake of linking Nantucket with the Vineyard, where, as I point out in the text, conditions were very different. The poet and translator Mary Barnard in Nantucket Genesis, The Tale of My Tribe (Portland, 1988) has a good, brief discussion of inbreeding on the island. Matthew Folger’s comments concerning inbreeding are in Starbuck.

  William F. Macy in The Nantucket Scrap Basket defines “Seeing the Look.” There are several mammoth genealogical compilations (such as the Barney [NHA Collection 186] and Pollard [NA] Genealogies) based on information garnered from specific family censuses. There are several versions of Fanning’s poem concerning Nantucket families; for example, in one variation the Gardners are described as “plodding” instead of “plotting”; the version that I have quoted is, according to E. K. Godfrey in Island of Nantucket, What It Was, and What It Is (Boston, 1882), the correct one. Fanning’s poem was written in the midst of what might be termed the Half-Share Revolt II—the bank scandal of the 1790s (see Chapter 14).

  7. The Whaling Legacy of Ichabod Paddock

  The whale jackknifing is described in the Boston News-Letter (October 4, 1744) and is cited in Alexander Starbuck’s definitive History of the American Whale Fishery. What little solid information there is concerning Ichabod Paddock is recorded in Robert Joseph Curfman’s The Paddock Genealogy (Fort Collins, 1977). The transgressions of various Paddocks in the eighteenth century are recorded in the “Quaker Committee Book of Objections” (NHA Collection 35, Box 4, Book 9). As Henry Forman points out in Early Nantucket and Its Whale Houses, the Jethro Coffin House, commonly known as the Oldest House, should be rightly referred to as the Paddock House since Paddocks bought it from the Coffins in 1708 and lived in it from generation to generation until 1840. Paddocks also lived in the house across the street, making Sunset Hill a kind of Paddock family compound.

  The merman and mermaid anecdotes appear in B. A. Botkin’s A Treasury of New England Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the Yankee People (New York, 1947). The Ichabod Paddock legend is recorded by Jeremiah Digges in Cape Cod Pilot (Provincetown, 1937); an excellent children’s story based on this account is Anne Malcolmson’s Captain Ichabod Paddock, Whaler of Nantucket (New York, 1970).

  Macy describes the islanders’ first encounter with a whale in his History . The reference to whales around the Mayflower is cited in Edouard A. Stackpole’s The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635–1835 (Philadelphia, 1953). The reference to Gardners, Indians, and whales is in MR, as is the reference to James Lopar. Zaccheus Macy is the one who claimed Ichabod Paddock introduced the Nantucketers to the art of whaling; there is no mention of him in town records, which is not surprising, considering the fact that (unlike his brothers) he seems to have maintained his connections with the mainland.

  Elizabeth Little mentions the change in tax law associated with the island’s jurisdictional change in “The Indian Contribution to AlongShore Whaling at Nantucket,” Nantucket Algonquian Studies #8 (NHA, 1981). The reference to whaleboats and Coatue cedar is in MR. Is the “green pasture” anecdote in Macy’s History a kind of folk-tale pun on the name of the island’s first professional whaleman—Paddock, which means “a small pasture”?

  Little makes the estimate regarding the number of Indians and English involved in the whale fishery in “Along-Shore Whaling.” Macy’s account of Indian-English cooperation in the fishery is in his “Anecdotes.” Little speaks of the relative earnings of an Indian whaleman in “Nantucket Whaling in the Early 18th Century,” Papers of the Nineteenth Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa, 1988). Vickers’s very different account of Indian earnings in the eighteenth century is in “The First Whalemen of Nantucket.”

  For an authoritative account of the genesis of the American whaleboat, see Willits D. Ansel’s The Whaleboat (Mystic, 1978). The sketch in the Proprietors’ Book was used by Forman in his architectural analysis of Siasconset. The account of saving the whale comes from Macy’s History . In “Along-Shore Whaling” (in which she also mentions the irony of the term “saving the whale”), Little speaks of the development of the lay system and its similarities to the way in which Indians divided up drift whales; but as Marcus Rediker in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge, 1987) points out, the “share system” for the payment of seamen (used by eighteenth-century pirates and privateers) dated back to the Middle Ages.

  Z. Macy (in NP) speaks of the remarkable safety record of Nantucket’s shore fishery. O. Macy’s reference to weather conditions in the eighteenth century is in his “Anecdotes.” The worth of a whale to the oarsman of a whaleboat is estimated by Daniel Vickers in “The First Whalemen of Nantucket.” The data concerning 1726 is in Macy’s “Anecdotes”; he speaks of the first sperm whale in his History. Samuel W. Bryant in The Sea and the States (New York, 1967) describes Hussey’s historic harpooning of a sperm whale; although by tradition it was Christopher Hussey who killed this whale, genealogical records indicate that his first name must have been Sylvanus, Bachelor, Daniel, or George (sons of Stephen, the original Quaker) who were all between the ages of eighteen and thirty in
1712. The switch to half-shares is described in Vickers’s “Maritime Labor in Colonial Massachusetts,” Ph.D. Dissertation (Princeton, 1981), and Byers. The statistics concerning the growth of the Nantucket whale fishery were provided by the Congregational minister, the Rev. Mr. Shaw, in NP. Macy’s story concerning the shooting of a whale by an Indian is in his “Anecdotes.” Z. Macy’s anecdote concerning Indian-English whalers caught in a storm is in NP. In 1791 Walter Folger spoke of the use of Wampanoag phrases by Nantucket children (in NP). The description of Nantucket whalemen as “free Indians” appeared in the New York Enquirer and was reprinted in NI (February 14, 1829).

  In the novel Lila (New York, 1991), Robert M. Pirsig argues that the “cultural values of America” come from the “assimilation of Indian values”: “The early frontiersmen such as the ‘Mountain Men’ deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source, or if they did, denied it and credited it to their own hard work and isolation.” In many ways the Nantucket whalemen’s interaction with island Indians anticipated the process Pirsig describes. Indeed, as I imply later (Chapter 15), the Nantucketer might be termed America’s first “Marlboro Man”: Instead of the cowboy’s six-shooter and horse, the Nantucketer had a harpoon and whaleboat; and before the buffalo, there was the whale.

  8. Mary Starbuck, High Priestess of the Company Store

  For information concerning Quakerism in New England, see Arthur J. Worrall’s Quakers in the Colonial Northeast (Hanover, 1980); H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic The Kingdom of God in America (Chicago, 1937) offers penetrating insights into the theological similarities between Quakerism and Puritanism. The reference to Quakerism’s relationship to business is from another important work, Frederick B. Tolles’s Quakers and the Atlantic Culture (New York, 1960). Byers also has a good chapter on the rise of Quakerism on Nantucket.

  Nathaniel Starbuck’s “mark” appears on a will and codicil from 1716/17 in Nantucket Probate Records, vol. 1; his run-in with the law is recorded in MR. The tradition concerning Mary’s reference to her husband when expressing her opinions in town meetings is in Gardner’s The Coffin Family. For a detailed analysis of Starbuck’s account book, which emphasizes the potential “benefits of the English economic system” to the island’s Indians, see Elizabeth Little and Marie Sussek’s “Index to Mary Starbuck’s Account Book with the Indians,” Nantucket Algonquian Studies #5 (NHA, 1981).

  According to a story in NI (June 10, 1843), Nathaniel Starbuck, Jr., once pointed to Waqutaquaib Pond and said to his grandson, “In this pond, through blind zeal, Peter Folger dipped my mother. . . .” Throughout this chapter I have drawn upon the published accounts of the Quaker ministers Thomas Story, Thomas Chalkley, and John Richardson—all reprinted in Starbuck. It must be remembered that these accounts were originally published after Nantucket had become a well-known Quaker success story, suggesting that a retrospective attempt to magnify the role each individual minister played in bringing Quakerism to the island may be informing these narratives.

  Given the fact that Stephen Hussey’s father Christopher is reported to have been “eaten by cannibals” on the coast of Florida (not to mention the eventual fate of the crew of the Essex in the nineteenth century), Hussey’s conversation with the Quaker minister about gnawing flesh takes on a weirdly ironic dimension. The house that Story describes being raised that day in 1704 would become known as the Swain-Sevolle-Smith dwelling and would remain a famous Nantucket landmark until it was tragically burned at the beginning of the twentieth century; see Forman, who also cites the Probate Record’s reference to Swain’s still house, which was left to his wife.

  In his “Anecdotes,” Macy tells the story of the arrival of the French privateer in 1695. Besides the story concerning Swain’s loss of his money, Macy also tells about how the privateer threatened to disrupt a Hussey marriage celebration (Macy mistakenly says it was Stephen’s wedding, when it must have been his eldest daughter’s)—an event that seems to have resembled Swain’s house-raising in that Indians and rum were also involved.

  The progress of Stephen Hussey’s eventual disownment can be traced in the “Quaker Committee Book of Objections” at the NHA. For a profile of Nathaniel Starbuck, Jr., and his dual role as clerk of both the town and the Friends Meeting, see Robert Leach’s three-part series, “Nantucket’s First Man of Wealth,” in NI (November 9–23, 1966). See Starbuck and Byers for the specifics of Quakerism’s growth on the island. Byers speaks of the importance of the Macy-Starbuck alliance while also citing Fothergill concerning the attractions of Quakerism from an economic point of view.

  That Crèvecoeur may have exaggerated the decorum of the Nantucket waterfront is suggested by a 1764 letter to the Browns of Rhode Island from grog shopkeeper Mary Pinkham requesting “what is due in New England rum at the first opportunity [as] I expect the whaling men every day and I must have some to welcome them” (cited in Byers). The account of watching “First Day” from a ship anchored off the bar appears in William Root Bliss, Quaint Nantucket. Several copies of Mary Starbuck’s letter are at the NA.

  9. Richard Macy, the Master Builder

  Most of this account is based on “A Short Memorial of Richard Macy, Grandfather of Obed Macy” in Macy’s “Anecdotes.” The wheatstacking anecdote comes from the Macy Genealogy. The best discussion of Nantucket’s early architecture is in Forman, who also discusses the island’s mills. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, Straight Wharf was not the first wharf on Nantucket. According to town records, in 1716 Joseph Coffin was granted the right to build “a wharf at the old landing forty feet wide.” My description of the construction of Straight Wharf is based on a HABS account quoted in “A Waterfront History, Nantucket, 1870–1970,” an unpublished study compiled by Martha R. Boynton for Sherburne Associates in 1974 (“Harbor” green-dot file, NHA). Macy’s wharf would prove to be remarkably durable. In fact, when the wharf was rebuilt in the twentieth century, the original logs were extracted from the mud in an excellent state of preservation and were subsequently used to fill in marshy areas in the neighborhood of the Creeks near Marine Lumber (personal communication with Albert F. Egan, Jr.—February, 1993). The references to patrolling the wharf are in the record of Town Meetings, 1696–1783, in the Town Clerk’s Office.

  Another important structure built during this period was the first lighthouse on Brant Point in 1746. By the time of the Revolution, there were a total of four mills built along the ridge of what was then known as the Popsquatchet Hills. The single mill that remains today, known as the “Old Mill,” was constructed in 1746 by Nathan Wilbur, a Nantucket sailor who based its octagonal design on the mills he had seen in Holland. According to tradition, this mill was hit by a cannon ball (which reportedly passed completely through it, narrowly missing the miller’s head) during the Revolution.

  In Macy’s daybook are the following dimensions for a whaleboat: “The beginning of the head from the end of the keel: to the first bend—3’8˝; to the next bend—3’3˝; to the next bend—5’3˝; to the next bend—3’5˝; then to the end of the keel—4’1˝.” As Little points out, this adds up to 19’8˝ which corresponds very closely to another contemporary account of the whaleboats being about 20’. In their later form in the nineteenth century, the whaleboat would approach 30’. In the 1750s, Richard’s son Zaccheus provided 78 whaleboats to James Otis “for King’s service for raids on Canada” (in Byers).

  The court case involving Zaccheus and Richard Macy and the Indian Panjame is in Book I of the Superior Court Records. For an account of bookkeeping barter as it applied to Nantucket, see Little’s “Nantucket Whaling in the Early Eighteenth Century.” Lydia Hinchman’s description of the Macys as a “close corporation” is in The Early Settlers of Nantucket. An account of the exchange between Macy and his son Caleb comes from William F. Macy’s The Nantucket Scrap Basket.

 
In his old age, Richard Macy appears to have been part of an island-wide phenomenon; after his visit to the island in the 1770s, Crèvecoeur claimed, “You will hardly find anywhere a community . . . exhibiting so many green old men who show their advanced age by the maturity of their wisdom rather than by the wrinkles of their faces. . . .” Richard’s apology to the Friends Meeting appears in the “Quaker Committee Book of Objections.” The Elihu Bunker letter is in NHA Collection 3, Folder 33; Richard Macy’s deeds and wills are in NHA Collection 96, Folder 35.

  10. Of God, Indians, and Getting By: The Hireling, Timothy White

  Although Congregationalists and Presbyterians shared the same beliefs, in terms of governance the Nantucket church was Congregational; the island’s Quakers, however, often referred to them as Presbyterians. Helen Winslow Chase’s “First Congregational Church and Old North Vestry,” a 19-page memorandum written for the Church, provides a chronology and history of Congregationalism on the island. In 1764 the original meeting house near No-Bottom Pond was moved to Beacon Hill overlooking Center Street and Nantucket Harbor where it became known as the Old North Vestry; in 1795 what would become a famed tower was built on the south side of the vestry, providing an excellent view of the town and harbor; in 1800 a bell was hung in the tower; and in 1834 the vestry was moved back on the lot to accommodate a much bigger church building. Danforth’s description of Nantucket as a godless “frontier” is cited in Byers.