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The Other Nantucket by Theodore C. Wyman THERE HAVE BEEN many islands in my life, Nantucket, Little John, Monhegan, Grand Manan and the West Indies. Then there were Cocos Island, the Galapagos Islands and many others, including one of the Hebrides. Some of them I have known more than well and with some there has just been the pleasure of a few short visits. And now we come to a little island whose name is known, but no one seems to know how it happened to receive that name. It is the island of Nantucket off the coast of Grand Manan Island. As so often happens when you begin to wonder about something, there begins what I think of as armchair detective work, and there are times when information can be found. Then there are other times when, although some information can be found, it is hard to find a definite answer about what is of interest to you. It all started on my first visit to Grand Manan in 1967 when I received the impression that, if there could be fog at only one place in the world at any given time, the chances are that it would be in the Bay of Fundy. And that is what I ran into as I waited on the pier at Black's Harbor, a fog so heavy that the little ship to the island could not be seen until it was a few feet from the dock. It was a private world of swirling grey mist all the way to Grand Manan, but a bright and cheerful world within the ship. And there on a chart against a forward bulkhead I saw that one of the little islands just off the coast of Grand Manan was named Nantucket Island. I had lived on Nantucket off Cape Cod for many years before the war, so the name of the little island caught my attention and started the wonder as to how it had received that name. I did have a chance to go ashore there for a few hours while on a sail around Grand Manan in a lobster boat and tried at that time as well as during another visit to Grand Manan in 1970 to find out how the island had been named Nan tucket. I tried, but had no success at the time and I suppose that what I wondered about was of no great importance, yet it was of interest to me. Time passed as it always does and the search was continued in 1972 after I received the January issue of Historic Nantucket. In it was a story about the Nantucket Colony at Dartmouth, Nova Scotia who had settled in an area that included Grand Manan and the little islands around it. So I wrote to Edouard Stackpole as I assumed that someone who had come from Nantucket, probably before the Revolution, may
