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The Search for Hero by Diana Brown Now I have arrived at this extensive city called London, but what am I to do here in this great and strange city. I am a stranger, I know no one, I have no ship, I have no clothes fit to wear. I have no money to help myself. I have no friends here or acquaintances. What course now must be steered or taken next for the best for I must have board and lodgings and clothes to make me decent, but who in London, although a great extensive town, is to supply me for nothing...[?] These thoughts were written after an unfortunate voyage my Nantucket great, great grandfather made between 1802 and 1804. William Wilkes Morris was born in Nantucket in 1780, his forebears having come to the island around 1720.1 know little about his early life except that in 1801, he married Priscilla Chase, the daughter of Isaac and Eunice (Brown), in the First Congregational Church. After my mother died in 1975, I acquired a Salem Hepplewhite desk where she had kept some papers relating to her Nantucket ancestors. Among them was a journal I had never read but which contained, I had been told, an account of the great Nantucket fire and a description of a whaling voyage my mother's ancestor had taken in the last century. As a child I remember only looking at the pretty drawings it contained of Nantucket family coats of arms. (My mother had heard it said that, in later years, Morris drove a calash with his own coat of arms on its side.) I was to find that the journal covered his life between 1802 and 1846, the year before he died. There are also sporadic notes, the financial accounts of his navigation school, arts and trade secrets (such as how to prevent flies from sitting on pictures), the dimensions of Royal Navy and merchant ships and many maxims of Benjamin Franklin, his hero and the namesake of his last son, my great grandfather. Not until 1986 did I undertake the task of transcribing his notes which were somewhat difficult to decipher. I did not change the
