An old Indian legend in New England stated that the god Moshup was trying to sleep one night but his moccasins were filled with sand and so he took them off and threw them into the middle of Cape Cod forming the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with their beautiful, sandy beaches. Another legend says that Moshup knocked ashes from his pipe and formed the islands that way. Geologists believe they formed during the last Ice Age.
Nantucket itself was discovered first probably by the Wampanoag tribe although no one knows when. The Vikings may have sailed close enough to see it in the 11th century. By 1602, an English ship out of Falmouth called the Concord captained by Bartholomew Gosnold mentioned sighting the island but not land there. Gosnold landed on Martha’s Vineyard instead. Two years later, another Englishman named George Waymouth charted Nantucket’s position but did not land there. For the next four decades. Nantucket remained unexplored by whites. In 1641, Thomas Mayhew purchased Nantucket for ₤40 from two English noblemen who held conflicting deeds and decided to sell the land and split the money. Mayhew also got the Elizabeth Islands thrown into the deal. He wanted to distribute the land under a manorial system as in England. The many Indians should be brought about via conversion to Christianity.
Nantucket Island. I lived here through part of 1996. A lot of rich vacationers now go there “to summer.” There are some very beautiful, very expensive-looking houses there. Cold as the pit of Dante’s hell in the winter though.
In 1659, a Yankee planter from Boston named Tristram Coffin bought Nantucket from Mayhew. Coffin and eight other buyers want to get out of Puritan-controlled
Massachusetts and decided to live on the island. The nine buyers were Tristram Coffin, Thomas Macy, Christopher Hussey, Richard Swayne, Thomas Barnard, Peter Coffin, Stephen Greenleafe, John Swayne and William Pike. The cost was ₤30 and two beaver hats. Macy, a Baptist, fled the mainland in 1659 for harboring two Quakers from the Puritans who then hung them. Macy arrived on the island in an open boat along with his wife, five children, a 12-year-old boy named Isaac Coleman and a friend named Edward Starbuck.
To get craftsmen, farmers, businessmen and the like to come to Nantucket, each of the owners were granted a share of their own and another to bring in an outsider who could help the island develop an economy. Each proprietor took his extra share and halved it and gave each half to a junior partner. In all, there were 27 original shareholders. One of the half-shares was given to a man amed Peter Folger who was originally from Norfolk, England and had worked for Thomas Mayhew as a surveyor. He had done missionary work for Mayhew working to convert and educate the Nantucket Indians and became fluent in their language making him further valuable as an interpreter. He was married to Mary Morrill who was a former-indentured servant and may also have been from England. He had once been jailed as a court clerk for siding with workers and farmers in disputes against wealthy landowners and he urged that whites treat Indians fairly and with dignity. The Folgers moved permanently to Nantucket in 1663 after Peter was granted his half-share and worked there as a surveyor, interpreter, clerk, miller and schoolteacher. He and Mary had a daughter named Abiah in 1667. Abiah married an English immigrant named Josiah Franklin, a Puritan, in 1689. Abiah took up Puritanism, which the mostly Baptist Nantucketers had come to the island to escape, and moved to Boston with her husband. Their eighth child was born on Milk Street in 1706 and was named Benjamin. Little needs to be said about Benjamin Franklin except that his Puritan upbringing filled him with a disdain for kings and bishops and colored much of his outlook on life as an English colonist. His father’s admiration for the Indians likewise influenced him to adopt the Iroquois Confederacy’s constitution as the model for the nation.
Although considered the foremost Founding Father in the struggle for American independence, one of Franklin’s son, William (illegitimate), was the last colonial governor of New Jersey and a staunch loyalist and was already imprisoned for his loyalist leanings when the Declaration of Independence was signed. The differences between both men were irreconcilable.
Another of Peter Folger’s descendants was James Athearn Folger. He was born on the island in 1835 but left it at the age of 14 along with his brothers. They wanted to go to California and prospect for gold. They sailed on a ship to the Isthmus of Panama then rafted and hiked their way across the isthmus (there was no canal yet). Then they managed to catch another ship going to San Francisco and arrived there in 1850. He decided not to follow his brothers to the gold fields and stayed in the city. Ten years later, he founded the J. A. Folger Coffee Company known today simply as Folgers Coffee.
1898 Folger’s ad. Folger’s is now part of Smucker’s.
The island’s main product at this time were woolen goods which were in great demand due to the hellacious New England winters. Nantucket became known for its weaving and spinning. In 1699, however, the Wool Act went into effect which banned the sale of wool between the colonies and a new island industry was needed. Whaling was already being considered as Obed Macy makes clear when he wrote: “In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed; there—pointing to the sea—is a green pasture where our children’s grand-children will go for bread.”
Long Island had done some whaling starting the 1640s bagging the so-called right whale (or Greenland whale). These were generally beached whales that washed up on the shore and the Long Islanders took turns stripping off their flesh and bone and collecting their blubber and oil. Nantucketers did the same starting about 1672 when men would man high spars to look as far out to sea as possible for whale. If he spotted one, he alerted the men below who dispatched a boat to chase it down, harpoon it and drag it back to the beach.
When the whales stopped swimming so close to the land, the Nantucketers built small sloops with a whaleboat that could be lowered into the water to chase down a whale. They might be out for week just to catch one whale. When they did, they flensed it in the water—peeling off the blubber in a long continuous piece like an orange rind—and collected the blubber in casks which were stowed below. They had enough room for one whale and would then sail home. The casks were unloaded and taken to a tryworks to be “tried out.” Trying out blubber involved slicing it very thin and then heating on the tryworks until it melted into oil. The oil was then poured into casks and stored.
A whale blubber trying station in Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts.
The Nantucketers went after right whales until 1712 when Captain Christopher Hussey’s ship was blown off-course and he came upon a pod of sperm whales (or spermaceti or parmaceti). These whales were not known to Nantucketers before then but Hussey and his men bagged one and towed it back to the island. Upon stripping off the blubber, the Nantucketers discovered the sperm whale was loaded with fine oil—far better and more plentiful than that of the right whale. In the whale’s “forehead” area or case, was harvested an oil so fine it hardened on contact with air and had to be heated before it could be collected in casks. This case oil could lubricate the most delicate and intricate machinery and clockworks like nothing previously discovered. From that time on, Nantucketers would hunt only spermaceti.
Head and case of a sperm whale.
Spermaceti in the Atlantic were rare as it was and then deserted it completely for the Pacific and the Nantucketers were forced to follow them by sailing around Cape Horn at the tip of South America. A long, hazardous journey. The ships now had to be floating processing stations, the option of hauling the whale shore no longer available. It had to be done at sea as quickly as possible.
The ships were large and had to have a tryworks built into it. Harpooning still had to be done from smaller whaleboats deployed from the ship. When the harpoon struck, it was attached to a very long coil of rope in a metal tub that passed around a loggerhead—a cylinder post that was mounted in the keel so it would not snap off. As the whale ran with the harpoon iron in him, the rope paid out very quickly and needed to offer resistance to the whale to tire him out. So the rope passed around the loggerhead a couple of turns. Yet the whale ran so fast that a man had to stand over the loggerhead and dump water on it to keep the ropes from catching fire. The rope was going so fast that it was extremely dangerous to touch it. If it had a kink in it, it could tear off a man’s arm, leg or head—frequent occurrences—or a man would try to step over the rope and get yanked overboard in a split second and there would be nothing that could be done for him other than praying for a quick death. Usually only a greenhorn tried to step over the rope and to promptly get smacked and chewed out by someone more experienced. Only an experienced whaleman could coil the rope in the tub. It had to be done right or people could lose life or limb. Even with the line paying out at smoking speed, the whaleboat was pulled along at a good clip and this little jaunt was called a Nantucket sleighride.
Old salt coiling the rope in a tub.
The rope was attached to the harpoon iron which had to be hurled into the whale’s blubber. Each harpooner was also a steersman having both an iron and an oar rudder. If the whale worked its way around the boat, the steersman in back now picked up his iron and became the harpooner while the harpooner up front now picked up his oar and became the steersman. That way the boat wasted no time having to get turned around.
Often the boat capsized and men drowned but sometimes they’d get back in but would lose the whale. After the whale exhausted itself, it would float listlessly on the water but this was the most dangerous part of the venture. The boats had to paddle up carefully and the pikeneer would drive a long pike through the whale’s heart. Trying to drag a live whale back to the ship to be flensed was suicide. It had to be dead and this was the only way to ensure that it was. Then came the thrashing as the whale went into its death flurry. This animal that could be 70 tons or more of power and fury would thrash maniacally in the water making an enormous ruckus that often capsized boats. This was made even more dangerous because the whale’s blood and thrashings would attract sharks. One slap of the tail could fill a boat with water instantly or smash one to pieces killing all hands. Many whalemen lost their lives during the random death flurry of the whale which they said was even worse than its most deliberate assaults.
Now the whale was towed back to the ship, lashed to the side and a man was lowered on a rope with a cutting tool and he began to cut the blubber from the corpse. The
bloodletting was tremendous and sharks would come by the dozens to feast so they had to work fast. The slower they went, the more of the whale went to the sharks. If the man on the rope wasn’t careful, he’d loose a leg or a foot to a shark or be bitten in half. A winch with a hook pulled the blubber off in a continuous piece as the man on the rope sliced it free and it was lowered onto the deck where hands sectioned it into pieces and carried them to the tryworks—a big brick oven with huge pots that held the blubber. A fire was roaring in the brickwork and the blubber would melt and the oil collected. The entire deck would be covered in blood as would the hands. Melville described it as a scene from hell. This was also usually done at night because the smoke from the tryworks attracted pirates if done during the day. The oil was put in casks which were then stowed in the hold. Only when the hold was filled, which took 3 to 4 years, did the ship go back to homeport.
Oil casks unloaded on the pier.
The hazards were great and hours were long. One spent weeks and weeks just floating waiting for a whale to happen by. Many men went crazy from the monotony. Mutinies were not uncommon especially if the captain or mates were sadistic or enjoyed doling out harsh punishments for minor offenses. Desertion was a huge problem for the whale fleet. Once the crew caught sight of the beautiful tropical islands with the flowers and fruit and the gorgeous island women, they often jumped ship. This was so common that once a whaleman got homesick, he could enlist on the next whaler going his way with no questions asked and this wasn’t just for Nantucket but was international. Melville himself jumped ship, not once, but several times. He was kept by some natives on an island and had to escape. He signed up on an Australian whaler but the first mate was such a prick that he and several other men led a mutiny for which they were put off the ship. Melville joined the Navy in Honolulu in order to get back to New England.
