by Walter Weston Folger

24

N a n t u c k et's N a t t y

By Edwin M. Hall

IF, IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, a literate person were asked who Nantucket's best-known fictional whaleman was, he would obviously name Melville's Captain Ahab. In the preceding century, however, the choice would have required more thought. In those days James Fenimore Cooper's fame rode high and Herman Melville's fairly low; our literate friend might well have named Long Tom Coffin of Cooper's The Pilot.

Admittedly, Long Tom is in the Revolutionary navy throughout the book, or at least until his death. But he is a whaleman nevertheless. He has served in whalers; he carries a harpoon with him; and, during the story, he actually harpoons and kills a whale from one of his ship's boats. (In case Melville addicts are wondering. Long Tom didn't need a lance on this occasion, but he had rigged one, using a bayonet.) 1

Long Tom had been born at sea, as his mother's ship was crossing Nantucket Shoals.2 He stood almost six feet six 3 and was about fifty years old.4 He "often prayed,....standing, and in silence."5 When he was amused, there was a "paroxysm of his low, spiritless laughter," 6 a quiet sort of laugh which he shared with Cooper's more famous hero, Natty Bumppo or Leather-Stocking.

It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that this Nantucketer, who has a larger-than-life aura about him, was, to a considerable extent, the original of Natty Bumppo (also known as Leather-Stocking, Hawkeye, the Trapper, the Pathfinder, and Deerslayer).

Chronologically, I must admit, Natty appeared first. He is in Cooper's third novel, The Pioneers. Long Tom is in Cooper's fourth novel.

Nevertheless, I submit two pieces of evidence. The first is in James Russell Lowell's "Fable for Critics." After making fun of Cooper's characters, Lowell concedes;

He has drawn you one character, though, that is new, One wildflower he's plucked that is wet with the dew Of this fresh Western world, and, the thing not to mince, He's done naught but copy it ill ever since.

NANTUCKET'S NATTY

His Indians, with proper respect be it said, Are just Natty Bumppo daubed over with red, And his very Long Toms are the same useful Nat Rigged up in duck pants and a sou'wester hat (Though once in a Coffin, a good chance was found To have slipped the old fellow away underground).

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The second piece of evidence is from Carl Van Doren's article on Cooper in the Dictionary of American Biography:

The Pioneers (1823) owes more of its continued fame to its connection with the Leather-Stocking series than to its individual merits. Cooper had not yet imagined Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook to the plane of romantic elevation on which they were subsequently to move. He regarded them as picturesque figures rather than as universal symbols...The Leather-Stocking Tales... re veal the unfolding character of Natty Bumppo without serious discrepancies, though The Pioneers remains the weakest link in the chain...The later novels in the series did more than transcribe; they transmuted.

Now, if we accept the statements of both Lowell and Van Doren, the implication is clear: that Long Tom is the first successful "transmutation" of the character that later became Natty Bumppo. Therefore Natty had Nantucket origins. Q.E.D.

The fact is rather ironic because Cooper tended to dislike New England, probably because of his expulsion from Yale.

For a forceful and effective ending, this is where the article should stop. But one embarrassing question demands an answer. How much did Cooper know about Nantucket? The answer is probably very little.

He did know something about Nantucketfamily names. When one of the girls in the story is startled at Long Tom's last name, he says, "Ay, Coffin....'tis a solemn word, but it's a word that passes over the shoals, among the islands, and along the cape, oftener than any other. My father was a Coffin, and my mother was a Joy; and the two names can count more flukes than all the rest in the island together; though the Worths, and the Gar'ners, and the Swaines, dart better harpoons, and set truer lances, than any men who come from the weatherside of the Atlantic."7

26 HISTORIC NANTUCKET

Did he ever set foot on the island? Probably not* although he and his close friend, the future Rear Admiral William Branford Shubrick, talked about making such a trip in 1823 before the book was published. (It actually came out in January, 1824).8 At some time late in 1823 Cooper visited Shubrick in Charlestown, Massachusetts.9 Just possibly they went to Nantucket at that time.

Nevertheless, Nantucket can be proud of Long Tom. A critic wrote of Cooper, "He knows the sea and he knows the men... .Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type."10 That critic, a former sea-captain,was named Joseph Conrad.

*But neither had Melville when he wrote Moby-Dick.

Footnotes

1. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot'. A Tale of the Sea (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1865), p. 214.

2.Ibid., p. 209

3. Ibid., p. 19

4.Ibid., p. 272

5.Ibid., p. 330.

6. Ibid., p. 309

7. Ibid., p. 298

8. James F. Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, 6 v. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960-1968) I, 104-105, footnotes 1 and 7

9.Beard, Cooper to Shubrick, c. 30 January 1824,1, 109-112

10. Joseph Conrad, "Tales of the Sea," in Notes on Life and Letters (London and Toronto! Dent, 1949), pp. 55-56