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Currents of Migration oil Nantucket
1760 - 1780 BY GEORGE ROGERS TAYLOR
THE PATTERN of migration to and from the island of Nan tucket in the late Colonial Period departs from the familiar New England model. The over-all view is that of a rapidly multiplying people engaged in cultivating a thin and soon-exhausted soil who provided the pressure for a persistent exodus which surged westward from the coastal and rural towns of southeastern New England into western Connecticut and Massachusetts, across the border into New York and Pennsylvania, and northward into New Hampshire and Vermont. On the other hand, the infertile soil of Nantucket never held out to settlers the hope of rich harvests promised by the river valleys and forest-clad hills of the mainland. In 1791 Thomas Jefferson described the island of Nantucket as "a sand bar fif teen miles long, and three broad."1 The pulling power of Nan tucket lay in its preeminence as the leading whaling center in the colonies. Voyaging for whales and the related mercantile, servicing, and processing operations provided almost the only employment. Especially in the ten years just before the Revolu tion, whaling attracted an increasing flow of immigrants to Nan tucket. Leading island authorities testify to the unprecedented expansion of the industry. Obed Macy reported that whaling in the American Colonies in the period 1770-1775 "increased to an extent hitherto unparalleled."2 And Alexander Starbuck de clared that whaling in the colonies in 1774 was "in the full tide of success."3 Nantucket, possessing roughly half of the industry in the British Colonies, shared richly in this growth. A remarkable acceleration in Nantucket's population growth during the ten years before the Revolution reflects the contem porary boom in whaling. From 1726 to 1764 the average decennial increase had been a little over 575 persons. Then during the ten years ending in 1774 the number of inhabitants rose 1352 to total 4545.4 This increase of more than forty per cent in ten years on this isolated stretch of sand constituted a small scale population explosion. In the colony of Massachusetts when the war began, only Boston with 16,000 people and Salem with 5,337 were larger. Nantucket's sister island, Martha's Vineyard, though more than twice her size and with several harbors as good or better than that of Sherburne (later Nantucket Town), could claim a population of little more than half that of Nantucket. In the years preceding the Revolution, when whaling was becoming so prosperous and Nantucket's population growing so rapidly, a considerable conntermovement from the island set
