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Augusta Bunker Pioneer Schoolteacher and Rancher by Andre Aubuchon
IF, AS MONTESQUIEU believed, climate shapes character and in stitutions, how much stronger the force of geography and history. The influences of these forces can be observed in no better an environment than that of Nantucket, which had to turn to whaling for its survival. For a century, Nantucket was one of the leading whaling ports of the world, and it was Nantucketers who prosecuted the most difficult and demand ing aspects of the industry: Pacific whaling and the pursuit of the sperm whale. The whale fishery in turn required courage. Skilled tradesmen, able seamen, keen businessmen, and proficient masters were all necessary for the success of the enterprise, but without courage whaling was bound to fail. Stories of Nantucket captains keeping mutinous crews at bay with armed pistols, of unbearded Nantucket youths meeting after surviving massacres in the South Pacific, of Nantucket vessels resisting pirates, privateers, and enraged "natives" are common and for good reason: without this courage Nantucket could never have led the world in whaling. If geography encouraged Nantucketers to turn to whaling, it also required Nantucketers to emigrate. The food supply and economic resources of the island have at best always been limited, and, un fortunately, insufficient to maintain an ever-increasing population. Sons and daughters of each successive generation of Nantucketers have been forced to leave the island. Not all have, like some hardy adventurers, established themselves as merchants and mariners in such far flung corners as Hawaii, Australia, or the western ports of South America. Neither have most emigrating Nantucketers shared in the adventure of serving as whaling "colonists" in Nova Scotia in the 1760's and 1780's, Hudson, New York, in the 1780's, Milford Haven, Wales, in the same period, and Dunkirk, France, on the eve of the Revolution of 1789. The experience of most Nantucket emigrants has been a bit more prosaic: solid citizens, they found their way to the offices and counting houses of mercantile Boston and New York, the factories of Providence and New Bedford, the farms of the South and Midwest, and the mines of California. If emigration has not attracted the attention it has deserved from Nantucket's historians, this is especially true of one particular species of
