18
The Young Boy and the Sea: Ernest Hemingway's Visit to Nantucket Island by Susan F. Beegal University of Massachusetts, Nantucket Field Station THE NAME ERNEST Hemingway is synonymous in American literature with islands, the ocean, and deep-sea fishing. One thinks of Key West, with its rum-runners and smugglers, so prominently featured in To Have and Have Not; of Bimini, where Thomas Hud son and his sons hunt swordfish in Islands in the Stream; and most of all Cuba, where the old fisherman Santiago fights his lonely, losing bat tle with a giant marlin. So ascendant are these Caribbean isles, waters, and monster fish in Hemingway's fiction that few people realize his lifelong romance with the sea began off the coast of New England, on Nantucket Island. Nantucket was the first island Hemingway set foot on, Nantucket Sound the first salt water he sailed on, Nantucket sea bass and mackerel the first marine fish he caught. It was on Nantucket that Hemingway first met an old fisherman with a yarn to spin about catching a swordfish, and his trip to Nantucket that inspired his very first short story. He was eleven years old. Hemingway was born and raised far from the sea in a suburb of Chicago: Oak Park, Illinois. His father, Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hem ingway, was also born in Oak Park, and Ernest's mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, in Chicago. But although a Midwesterner by birth, Grace Hemingway had inherited a love of the sea through her English grand father, Captain Alexander Hancock of the five-masted schooner Elizabeth. When his wife died in 1853, Captain Hancock took his three young children and three hundred passengers bound for the Australia gold rush around Cape Horn to Sydney (2). Captain Hancock disliked Australia, and soon took his children to the United States, where they settled in Dyersville, Iowa (2). Nevertheless, the voyage of the Elizabeth left a lasting impression on Captain Hancock's descendants. His son Benjamin, Grace Hemingway's uncle, would fill the heads of his niece and her children with stories of that dimly remembered cruise, and Captain Hancock's daughter Caroline, Grace's mother, would insist on taking her own children away from Iowa to Nantucket Island, for summers by the sea.
