Historic Nantucket, Fall 1977, Vol. 25 No. 2

"Last Scene of All": The Author of Miriam Coffin in the Canary Islands

By A. Stuart Pitt THE ULTIMATE NANTUCKET novel is Miriam Coffin by Joseph Coleman Hart, first published in 1834. Melville's Moby-Dick, not in­ conceivably the Great American Novel, towers over it, of course, but despite its wry little chapter XIV "Nantucket" and its Nantucket characters, the great book is only launched from the island. But Miriam Coffin is about Nantucket: its people, its history, its houses, its set­ tlements, its beaches, its customs, its lore.

Hart's opening chapter establishes this focus and concentration: "...that little and peculiar world... is the abode of much wealth and in­ telligence; and...we have constituted it the principal scene of our story."

Perhaps there is no other place in the wide world of similar size and population, possessing so few intrinsic attractions, which has produced, under so many disadvantages, such an industrious and enterprising people as Nantucket. Though it is said to be literally sterile in the spontaneous gifts of nature, yet it is rife in the physical and intellectual vigour of manhood.

For more than a century the islanders have exhibited the curious and unique spectacle of a thrifty community, bound together by a common interest as well as by a relative tie of consanguinity; — primitive though not altogether puritanic in their manners,... — reaping harvests where they„have not sown, and fishing up competency for their families from the unappropriated natural wealth in the depths of the sea.

Calling them, admiringly, "an amphibious race. . .half quaker-half sailor" he describes them further as "a bold and hardy race of men;—in danger, cool, collected and ad­ venturous;—seldom or never indulging in the vices or evil propensities of the common sailor, but possessing all his generous and manly qualities, tempered with correct notions of economy and of the true obligations of society," while their women are "modest, virtuous, and agreeable, and thrive with a commendable industry at home."