Historic Nantucket Fall 2019, Vol. 69, No. 4

FALL 2019 VOLUME 69, NO. 4

USS Nantucket 10 | Interactive Exhibits 12 | The Notion of the “Last Indians” 18 Two Nantucket Whalers in the Indian Ocean 28

FALL 2019 | VOLUME 69, NO. 4

Board of Trustees 2019–20 Kelly Williams, President Victoria McManus, Vice President David Worth, Vice President William J. Boardman, Treasurer Friends of the NHA President Sarah Alger, Clerk Nancy Abbey Patricia Anathan Susan Blount Anne Marie Bratton Chip Carver Olivia Charney Wylie Collins Amanda Cross

Fall Hours of Operation

Annabelle Fowlkes

Whaling Museum

Wendy Hudson

Open Daily, Oct 15 – Dec 31, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. NHA is closed Thanksgiving and Christmas Day

Historic Homes

Cam Gammill Graham Goldsmith Carl Jelleme Carla McDonald Franci Neely, Friends of the NHA Vice President Britt Newhouse Kennedy Richardson

(Greater Light, Thomas Macy House, and Hadwen House)

Marla Sanford

Open Friday-Monday, Nov 29 – Dec 31, 11 A.M. – 4 P.M. for Holiday Homes

Janet Sherlund, Trustee Emerita

Research Library

Jason Tilroe

Open Year – Round, Tuesday – Friday, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. Free and Open to the Public

Carter Stewart Melinda Sullivan Phoebe Tudor Finn Wentworth Alisa Wood Ex Officio James Russell, Gosnell Executive Director

Cover: Ruth West Coombs wearing an Indian headdress and dress. Coombs’ ancestry was part African-American and part Wampanoag. She was married to Darius Coombs of the Mashpee Wampanoags. Pictured here, she is in her concert persona Princess Red Feather. She toured New England to promote appreciation of the Wampanoag culture. She died in 1964 and is buried in the Prospect Hill Cemetery on island along with her relatives.

Ruth West Coombs was the grandmother of Darius Coombs, who participated in the NHA’s First Contact Symposium this past summer at the Quaker Meeting House. Photo was a gift of Adele Pitt Ames. PH31-4-4.

HISTORIC NANTUCKET (ISSN 0439-2248) is published by the Nantucket Historical Association, 15 Broad Street, Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Periodical postage paid at Nantucket, MA, and additional entry offices. For information visit nha.org. ©2019 by the Nantucket Historical Association.

Editor: Ashley Santos, Associate Director of Marketing Designer: Amanda Quintin Design all photos by nha staff unless otherwise noted.

From the Helm This issue explores some of the earliest histories of the island. It also describes how supporters and staff are attempting to make these histories more accessible by investing in digital infrastructure. As one example of why digital access is important, and as we look at our world today—from important local to major trans-national concerns—this transcript of a document in the National Archives should draw a smile.

It is a 1763 petition signed by Timothy Folger addressed to Sir Jeffery Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in North America. By way of a preamble, Great Britain’s defeat of France in the Seven Years’ War led to the possibility of new settlements in what we now call the Canadian Maritimes. The whaling industry on Nantucket was expanding at a rapid clip, and more people were coming to the island as a result. As we walked and drove around the island this busy summer, it is amusing to see what Benjamin Franklin and his cousin Folger recommended then.

As Franklin recounts: “The Nantucket Whalers, who are mostly my Relations, wanted a Settlement there [the Island of St. John], their own Island being too full.

At their Request I drew a Petition for them last Year, to General Amherst…”

Fortunately for us their petition was denied. To read the original in full, go to: https://founders.archives. gov/documents/Franklin/01-10-02-0228 To his Excellency Sir Jeffery Amherst, General of all his Majesty’s Forces in America.

The Memorial and Petition of Timothy Folger of the Island of Nantucket in Behalf of himself and many others Inhabitants of the said Island, Humbly Sheweth, That the chief Occupation of the Inhabitants of the said Island, hath ever been the Cod and Whale Fishery in which they now employ above One hundred Sail of Vessels.

That since the Reduction of Canada by his Majesty’s Arms under the Conduct of your Excellency, they have entred the great Gulph (Gulf) of St. Laurence with their Whaling Vessels, and have met with extraordinary Success there in that Fishery.

That they could carry on the same with still greater Advantage to themselves and to the Publick if they had some Settlement in or near the said Gulph, which they might make a Home for themselves and Families, and where the Land would be capable of producing Corn and feeding Cattle for their better Subsistence.

That some of them did the last Summer look into several Harbours and Places round the said Gulph of St. Laurence to see if any could be found suitable for that purpose; and have reported, that the Island of St. Johns, (which was early in the War reduced by your Excellency, and the French Inhabitants removed) is extreamly well situated to carry on the said Fishery, and has all the other Requisites for a comfortable Settlement.

A considerable Number therefore of the Inhabitants of Nantucket, induc’d by these Conveniences, as well as for that they are over populous and greatly straitned for Room in the Island they at present inhabit, would remove to the said Island of St. Johns, if they might be permitted so to do, and could obtain a Grant of Lands there for their Settlement.

And as many of them are desirous of making a Beginning there the ensuing Summer, they humbly pray your Excellency to grant them such Permission; and that you would also appoint Lands for them on the said Island, to be held on such Terms and under such Government as his Majesty in his Wisdom shall hereafter direct, which Terms they have no doubt will be good and encouraging; and that your Excellency would moreover in your Goodness recommend this Settlement to his Majesty that it may as soon as possible obtain the Royal Countenance and Protection.

And your Petitioners, as in Duty bound, shall ever pray, &c.

TIMO. FOLGER in Behalf of the People of Nantucket Thank you for your great support over the course of 2019, and on behalf of all volunteers, interpreters, staff, and trustees, may you have a happy Thanksgiving and a joyous holiday season.

Kelly Williams President

James Russell Gosnell Executive Director

FRIENDS OF THE NHA REPRESENTATIVES The Friends of the NHA seek significant acquisitions for the collections of the NHA, to contribute to the appropriate housing and/ or restoration of those acquisitions, and to provide funds necessary to make such acquisitions and contributions that are both desired by the curatorial staff of the NHA and approved by the Friends.

William J. Boardman Friends of the NHA, President

Bill Boardman is a year-round resident of Nantucket. Bill recently stepped down as Executive Chairman of EFT Analytics, now a Koch Industries company, and continues to serve as an advisor. He has served on the NHA Board from 2010 to 2018 as a trustee and from 2012 to the present as Treasurer.

For the past two years, Bill has returned to the Board as a Friends of the NHA representative and is currently President of the Friends.

Franci Neely Friends of the NHA, Vice President

Franci Neely is a summer resident of Nantucket and spends the balance of the year in Houston, Texas. Franci holds a BA and JD from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former partner at Susman Godfrey, and had a 20-year career in business litigation. She served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2009 to 2017.

This year, Franci has returned to the Board as a Friends of the NHA representative.

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New & Outgoing Trustees INCOMING TRUSTEES Nancy Abbey received her BA in education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MBA from the University of California at Berkeley. She has served on the boards of the Edgewood Center for Children and Families, the Katherine Delmar Burke School, and the Grabhorn Institute, all in San Francisco, where she and her husband, Doug, live when they are not in Nantucket. Following graduate school, she worked as an accountant for Arthur Andersen in the audit and tax departments, before careening into motherhood and volunteerism.

On Nantucket, Mrs. Abbey likes to garden, knit, needlepoint, cook, and explore Nantucket Land Bank and Nantucket Conservation Foundation properties.

Annabelle Fowlkes, a native of Fort Worth, Texas, was introduced to Nantucket by her husband, Gregory, and they love spending summers on island with their children.

Mrs. Fowlkes studied international relations and economics at the Johns Hopkins University, and upon graduation, she worked in business development at Sotheby’s in New York. In 1999, she received an MBA at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where her graduate studies included working with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Mrs. Fowlkes spent three years as director of dealer marketing for Circline, an Internet start-up which pooled the inventory of vetted dealers from around the world and created the first centralized marketplace for fine art and antiques. She then worked for several years with Arader Galleries, which specializes in antique maps and engravings, and is a passionate collector of antique maps of Nantucket. Mrs. Fowlkes is involved in the management of her family’s business in Midland, Texas, and returns there often from her home in New York City. She is also a board member of School Year Abroad and has been involved in a variety of volunteer capacities at both her children’s schools.

Britt Newhouse is the retired chairman of Guy Carpenter & Company, LLC, and a forty-year veteran of the global insurance and reinsurance industry. From 2001 until his appointment to chairman in 2008, he served as the president and CEO of the firm’s Americas operations, where he was responsible for all broking business in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Mr. Newhouse also held the position of eastern region manager and served as the New York branch manager. He serves on both the Education Committee and the Board of Overseers of St. John’s University, School of Risk Management, Insurance and Actuarial Science, and he is also a board member of the Brokers and Reinsurance Markets Association. Mr. Newhouse has a BA in Russian studies from Windham College and is a graduate of the AICPCU/Wharton Advanced Executive Education Program.

INCOMING TRUSTEES

OUTGOING TRUSTEES

Melinda Sullivan was born and raised in the Chicago, Illinois area. She received her BA from Northwestern University and attended Columbia Business School. Mrs. Sullivan has published four group cookbooks and created a nonprofit organization to study and publish in 2009 a three-volume scholarly publication on Du Paquier of Vienna, the second European factory after Meissen to make hard-paste porcelain. She has had leadership roles in many non-profit organizations focused on the decorative arts, including the Mark Twain House, Renbrook School, Art Institute of Chicago, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, and Hartford University Art School. She is currently a trustee at The Frick Collection and the New Britain Museum of America Art, and she also sits on the European Decorative Arts Committee of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Josette Blackmore served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2011 to 2019.

During her tenure, she was Chair of the Development Committee and a member of the Housing & Properties Committee.

Mrs. Blackmore chaired the August Antiques Show in 2006 and helped secure sponsorship for many of the NHA’s summer major fundraising events. A generous supporter of membership, campaigns, events, and annual giving, she also graciously hosted donor events for the NHA in Florida and in Nantucket.

Jason Tilroe is a founder and partner in a boutique specialty investment group based in London with operations in Europe, North America, and South America. He formerly held senior positions as head of global finance businesses, including derivatives, foreign exchange, and capital markets at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. He and his family are life members of the NHA. Mr. Tilroe, who previously served on the NHA’s board from 2010 to 2018, has been instrumental in conceiving and supporting important cross-institutional educational initiatives for the Nantucket’s year-round community.

IN MEMORIAM Julius “Reb” Jensen III Former trustee Reb Jensen passed away at his Nantucket home on October 12, 2019.

Reb demonstrated his deep love of Nantucket by championing land conservation and preservation of island history.

Reb provided leadership as a board and development committee member from 1998 to 2007. During this time the NHA successfully completed a campaign to expand the Whaling Museum and Research Library and build the endowment. Reb and his wife, Daintry, who survives him, generously continued to be involved by hosting donor receptions at their home in Vero Beach, Florida, and broadly supporting all NHA initiatives including planned giving through the Heritage Society.

Superintendent Mike Cozort served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2011 to 2019. During his tenure, he was Clerk of the board and a member of the Executive Committee, Education & Interpretation Committee, Strategic Planning Committee, and Committee on Trustees & Governance. Mr. Cozort played a major role in developing educational collaborations between the NHA and the Nantucket schools. He has generously supported the NHA through annual giving, campaigns, membership, and events.

Will Little served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2011 to 2019, and during this time he was a member of the Housing & Properties Committee.

Throughout his tenure, Mr. Little has been a generous contributor to the NHA’s campaigns, events, membership, and annual giving.

Jay Wilson served on the NHA Board of Trustees from 2003 to 2009 and then returned as the Friends of the NHA representative from 2016 to 2019.

During his tenure, he was a member of the Development Committee, Collections & Exhibitions Committee, Finance Committee, and Investment Committee. He has graciously hosted donor events for the NHA in Florida, and has generously supported the NHA through annual giving, campaigns, membership, and events.

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Creating a Welcoming Campus The NHA recognizes its important role, by virtue of its holdings of significant historical properties, a deep and rich collection pertaining to the island’s past, and a knowledgeable and skilled workforce, as a vital year-round contributor to the island’s economy, culture, and social fabric, and as such will strive to apply its considerable efforts, often in partnership, to achieve these ends.

To better serve the community, we ask you to invest in the NHA’s infrastructure. The Phase 1 goal is to expand our programming capabilities and increase public access to our properties by 33%. The vision for Phase 2 is of a modern wing at the Whaling Museum that will allow for increased presentation capabilities and immersive educational experiences.

OBJECTIVE: Trustees have long debated how the NHA can optimize its portfolio of properties. Located throughout Nantucket’s historic downtown, these buildings can be strung together like a “string of pearls” in a manner that contributes to the public good and allows the NHA to fulfill its mission with maximum effectiveness.

Phase 1 is a measured investment in existing infrastructure over four years (2018–21).

The result will be a 33% increase in publically accessible spaces, which, when coupled with new programming initiatives, will significantly increase the NHA’s ability to deliver on its primary responsibility as a steward of Nantucket’s history.

Subsequent analysis, plus potential rebalancing of our portfolio, will inform Phase 2 and the most effective use of the strategic acquisition of the 4 Whalers Lane property, which abuts the Whaling Museum. A preferred solution is to maximize the extent of the new construction both in height and in footprint. The programmatic uses need to be determined but could include new galleries to showcase our collections, educational spaces and a dramatic and greatly expanded roof deck. New construction must take into account forecasted sea-level rise.

SUCCESS TO-DATE: Phase 1 Goal: $2,500,000 Donations and pledges: $2.055 million, as of October 2019 (82% of goal)

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Folger-Franklin Memorial Boulder and Bench

CAPITAL CAMPAIGN

THANK YOU The NHA gratefully acknowledges the individuals and organizations who made gifts, grants, and pledges to the Capital Campaign in 2018 through October 2019. $250,000 and above Kelly M. Williams & Andrew J. Forsyth / Williams Legacy Fund Nantucket Community Preservation Committee

Whaling Museum, Discovery Center & Museum Shop

Thomas Macy Warehouse

Macy-Christian House

,

Eleanor Ham Pony Field

Mill Hill

$100,000 - $249,999 Nancy & Doug Abbey Susan Blount & Richard Bard / Susan Blount & Richard Bard Charitable Fund The H.L. Brown, Jr. Family Foundation Anne Delaney & Chip Carver Connie & Tom Cigarran Amanda Cross Diane M. & Paul B. Newhouse $50,000 - $99,999 Shelley & Graham Goldsmith Massachusetts Historical Commission $10,000 - $49,999 Patricia S. & Thomas J. Anathan Susan & Bill Boardman Jennifer & Wylie Collins William, Helen, Thea & Christopher Little Victoria McManus & John McDermott Carla & John McDonald National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Franci Neely Ella W. Prichard Susan & Kennedy Richardson / Kennedy P. Richardson Fund Janet & Rick Sherlund Kim & Finn Wentworth Up to $9,999 Josette Blackmore Martha & Michael Cozort Julie & Cam Gammill Wendy & Randy Hudson Tom Hanlon Landscaping Carl Jelleme Sarah F. Alger & Bruce J. Malenfant Robert Miklos, designLab Nantucket Garden Club Delia & James Russell Michelle Alexander & Carter Stewart

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Campaign Goals for Phase 1 SUMMARY A. Fine Arts and Collection Management Initiatives at the Broad Street Campus and Bartholomew Gosnold Collections Center Goal: Increase our fine arts presentation and collections management capabilities. Unveiled in June 2019, the Williams Forsyth Gallery spearheaded this effort.

The next step is to overhaul infrastructure at the Gosnold Collections Center and digitize our collections.

B. Historic Homes Initiative to showcase our Main Street properties Goal: Create a Historic Homes experience at Hadwen House and Thomas Macy House to showcase the homes, tell the inspiring stories of the island, and highlight the NHA’s extensive decorative arts collections.

Exterior and interior renovations of Hadwen will allow the NHA to present exhibitions at a high caliber and in keeping with museum standards.

C. Expand Family Learning Opportunities in the Discovery Center Goal: Convert the former Museum Shop into a welcoming learning space for our island community. This indoor and outdoor educational space is envisioned as a flex-space serving a variety of audiences on a yearround basis.

D. Create a Gateway Center in the Thomas Macy Warehouse Goal: Repurpose the historic Thomas Macy Warehouse on Straight Wharf to create a Gateway Center that introduces visitors to the island’s rich heritage, while providing an enhanced retail experience and flexible programing space.

PHASE 1 CAMPAIGN DETAILS A. Fine Arts and Collections Management Initiatives at the Broad Street Campus and Bartholomew Gosnold Collections Center Initiative Increase our fine arts presentation and collections management capabilities. Unveiled in June 2019, the Williams Forsyth Gallery spearheaded this effort through renovation and adaptive reuse of the Peter Foulger building. The new gallery has been immediately embraced by the community. Staff offices were relocated to the Research Library. The next step is to protect and care for our collections at the Bartholomew Gosnold Collections Center. Revamping and upgrading physical and digital infrastructure will create a state-of-the-art collections center.

The Peter Foulger Museum’s first floor was reverted back to its original intent as a modern gallery, creating much-needed exhibition space. This created the NHA’s third large premium exhibition space, following the McCausland Gallery and the Scrimshaw Gallery, which opened in 2005.

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CAPITAL CAMPAIGN

Gosnold Center infrastructure needs a major overhaul of 25-year-old climate-control systems to ensure museum-quality environmental conditions. Infrastructural work includes tightening the building envelope. Concurrently a new database system for collections management has been installed and the process of migrating and digitizing tens of thousands of records to a new integrated system is in progress.

Importance The NHA was curtailed in its ability to showcase its fine arts collection by the limited amount of premium exhibition space. As a result, much of the NHA’s fine arts collection remained in storage. The new Williams Forsyth Gallery focuses on the fine arts. Necessary systems upgrades have increased our ability to display the collections and help us to attract loans of important items relevant to our mission.

Constructed in 1994 to house the collections, the Gosnold Center protects 25,000 artifacts. Climate-control systems and storage infrastructure must be overhauled to ensure the collections are preserved long into the future. Old digital platforms must be upgraded to provide maximum public access to the collections.

How will this project help the community?

The new fine arts gallery, with the McCausland Gallery on the second floor, has created a fine arts wing dedicated to showcasing the NHA’s collections while attracting significant loan or traveling collections to secure, climate-controlled spaces, thus enhancing the NHA’s reputation as a world-class venue for exhibitions.

The backbone of the NHA’s mission since 1894 has been to protect and preserve Nantucket’s heritage. The 15,000-square-foot Gosnold Center holds the largest concentration of art and artifacts on the island. Other island non-profit organizations also store their collections in this space. The new database system will allow all collections, including artifacts, manuscripts, and books, to be searched simultaneously and in-depth by scholars and enthusiasts on and off island.

B. Historic Homes Initiative to showcase our Main Street properties Initiative Create a Historic Homes experience at Hadwen House and Thomas Macy House to showcase the homes, tell the inspiring stories of the island, and highlight the NHA’s extensive decorative arts collections. Activate the gardens to provide additional presentation spaces. Exterior and interior renovations at Hadwen will allow the NHA to present exhibitions, offer public programs, and provide ADA-compliant access. Both the first and second floors feature a variety of changing exhibitions. The garden features seasonal exhibitions.

Importance Built in 1846 at the peak of Nantucket’s nineteenth-century prosperity, the Hadwen House is the premier example of Greek Revival architecture on island. Now open to the public, in conjunction with the Thomas Macy House across the street, Hadwen House is key to creating a new Main Street “Historic Homes” experience.

How will this project help the community?

Robust programming and exhibitions at the Hadwen House and Garden are offered in nine new climate-controlled galleries in 5,000 square feet of exhibition space and allow for greater opportunities for collaborations with peer organizations. The spaces have allowed for a focused examination of island-specific stories. Systems and displays in the Thomas Macy House are in the process of being upgraded. nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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C. Expand Family Learning Opportunities in the Discovery Center Initiative Convert the former Museum Shop into a welcoming learning space for our island community. This indoor and outdoor educational space is envisioned as a flex-space serving a variety of audiences on a year-round basis. Space usage is high and frequently the original space was overcrowded. This new space has allowed for a variety of activities to take place simultaneously.

Importance The old Discovery Center, which first opened in 2005, was so popular that demand outgrew the space. By swapping the Discovery Room and the Museum Shop we have gained a 50% increase in size. This allows for more year-round programs and the addition of a new outdoor children’s garden.

How will this project help the community?

Increased demand required more space allocation for children’s activities. The new space allows for concurrent activities to take place year-round, regardless of the weather.

D. Create a Gateway Center in the Thomas Macy Warehouse Initiative Repurpose the historic Thomas Macy Warehouse on Straight Wharf to create a Gateway Center that introduces visitors to the island’s rich heritage, while providing an enhanced retail experience. This building suffers from decades of deferred maintenance. Major investment in infrastructure is required in the short and medium term. Essential renovations are expected to be complete by spring 2021. It is envisioned that the first floor will have welcoming displays that orient visitors to Nantucket’s important place in American history and direct them to historical sites and culture throughout the island. The building will also capitalize on its prominent location in the central retail district and provide opportunities to sell merchandise for the benefit of the NHA. The second floor will introduce visitors to the historical and cultural treasures and stories of the island.

Renovations to the building will be informed by the larger and town-wide conversation on addressing sea level rise.

Heavy infrastructural and utility equipment will be hardened and located to protect against flooding. The warehouse’s historic fabric is brick and mortar construction with heavy timber frames, and is thus durable and flood resistant. A “wet-flood proofing” design approach is preferred to a flood-resistant alternative.

Importance The Thomas Macy Warehouse, built in 1847 on Nantucket’s waterfront following the 1846 Great Fire, is the finest example of Greek Revival industrial construction on the island. Listed as a National Historic Landmark, it is the most historically significant building on Straight Wharf. Complete exterior and interior infrastructure upgrades are required.

How will this project help the community?

A successful renovation will protect this building against the elements for the foreseeable future. It will allow the NHA to work with the community as we present programs, offer retail, and welcome the community and visitors alike on both floors in this unique 3,500-square-foot building.

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1894 Founders Society Through this society, the Board of Trustees recognizes the cumulative giving by individuals who assist with the NHA’s annual operating needs. 1894 Founders Society members contribute toward the annual fund, membership, and fundraising events, as well as to exhibitions and collections, scholarship and educational programs, plus other mission-driven initiatives. This generous support is greatly appreciated and welcomed by the community.

$50,000 and above President’s Circle Anonymous Anne DeLaney & Chip Carver Connie & Tom Cigarran Amanda Cross Kelly Williams & Andrew Forsyth Bonnie & Peter McCausland Phoebe & Bobby Tudor $25,000 to $49,999 Ritchie Battle Maureen & Edward Bousa Mark Gottwald Mary Ann & Paul Judy Jean Doyen de Montaillou & Michael Kovner Helen & William Little Dick Lowry Franci Neely Diane & Britt Newhouse Laura & Bob Reynolds Susan & Kennedy Richardson Joseph Roby Janet & Rick Sherlund Harriet & Warren Stephens Merrielou & Ned Symes Jason Tilroe Kim & Finn Wentworth Susan Zises Green $10,000 to $24,999 Nancy & Doug Abbey Patricia & Thomas Anathan Gale Arnold Mary Randolph Ballinger Susan Blount & Richard Bard Carol & Harold Baxter Pamela & Max Berry Susan & Bill Boardman Anne Marie & Doug Bratton Christy Brown Julie Jensen Bryan & Robert Bryan Laura & Bill Buck Paula & Bob Butler

Laurie & Bob Champion Jenny & Wylie Collins Jennifer & Robert Diamond Deborah & Bruce Duncan Annabelle & Gregory Fowlkes Nan & Chuck Geschke Shelley & Graham Goldsmith Kaaren & Charles Hale Carl Jelleme Ann & Charles Johnson Coco & Arie Kopelman Carolyn & Ian MacKenzie Miriam Mandell Victoria McManus & John McDermott Carla & Jack McDonald Ronay & Richard Menschel Mary & Al Novissimo Ella Prichard Margaret & John Ruttenberg Molly & Patrick Ryan Bonnie Sacerdote Marla & Terry Sanford Denise & Andrew Saul Helen & Chuck Schwab Susan & L. Dennis Shapiro Mary & Don Shockey Kathleen & Robert Stansky Melinda & Paul Sullivan Ann & Peter Taylor Sigrid & Ladd Thorne Louise Turner Stephanie & Jay Wilson Leslie Forbes & David Worth $5,000 to $9,999 Susan Akers Laurel & Clifford Asness Liz McDermott & Ben Barnes Lesley Blanchard Jonathan Blum Patricia Nilles & Hunter Boll Marianna & Chris Brewster Donald Burns Christy & Bill Camp William J. Charlton

Olivia & Felix Charney Mary Davidson Marvin Davidson Lucy & Nat Day John DeCiccio Elizabeth Miller & James Dinan Jennifer & Stephen Dolente Ana & Michael Ericksen Cece & Mack Fowler Karyn Frist Michael Gerstein Andrea & Ted Giletti Maureen & Jim Hackett Barbara & Ed Hajim Margaret & Gregory Hedberg Julia & John Hilton Michelle & Tucker Holland Gloria & Jeffrey Holtman Barbara & Amos Hostetter Wendy Hubbell Wendy & Randy Hudson Susanne & Zenas Hutcheson Daintry & Reb Jensen † Harvey Jones Diane Pitt & Mitch Karlin Jill & Stephen Karp Linda & George Kelly Diane & Art Kelly Adrienne & Dillard Kirby Anne & Todd Knutson Sharon & Frank Lorenzo Karen & Malcolm MacNab Ashley & Jeff McDermott Bobbi McPeak Ann & Craig Muhlhauser Sarah & Jeff Newton Nancy & John Nichols Carter & Chris Norton Shira & Brad Paul Liz & Jeff Peek Candy & William Raveis Sheila & Richard Riggs Maria & George Roach Sharon & Frank Robinson Robin & Mark Rubenstein

Linda Saligman Kathy & John Salmanowitz Burwell & Chip Schorr Garrett Thornburg Liz & Geoff Verney Karen & Chris Watkins Suzy & Jack Welch Alisa & Alastair Wood $3,000 to $4,999 Janet & Sam Bailey Kay & Peter Bernon David Berry Prudy & Bill Crozier Rhonda Eleish Cynthia & John Everets Kathy & H. Crowell Freeman Page & Arthur Gosnell Sabine & Richard Griffin Suzy & Dick Grote Amy & Brett Harsch Ann & Johnny Johnson Kathleen & Ken Kies Diane & David Lilly Mary & Bob McCann Judy & Stephan Newhouse Kathy & Angelo Orciuoli Diana & Jeffrey Owen Kathryn & Roger Penske Ann & Chris Quick Nancy L. Romankiewicz Ellen & David Ross Delia & James Russell Rhonda & Bruce Shear Rev. Georgia Ann Snell Lorraine Snell Carol and Stephen Spinelli Carolyn Thayer & Steve Tuzik Robert Young January 2018 - October 2019 † deceased

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Shown here is her sister-ship USS Freedom.

USS Nantucket keel-laying The NHA was honored to attend the keel-laying ceremony that officially marked the beginning of construction on Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) 27, USS Nantucket, in Marinette, Wisconsin.

Pauline “Polly” Spencer, who has a home on island, is the ship’s “sponsor”. Her husband, Richard Spencer, is the 76th Secretary of the Navy. The keel-laying ceremony is a ship-building tradition dating back centuries, and today this is manifested by a shipwright welding the initials of the sponsor onto the ship’s keel plate. This plate will be affixed to the ship and will travel with the USS Nantucket throughout its commissioned life.

The launch of the ship will likely take place in spring 2021. Following her sea trials, it is hoped that the USS Nantucket will visit Nantucket that fall for her “commissioning”. Should this happen, it will be a true island-wide occasion to partner, participate, and celebrate this island’s proud naval tradition with the U.S. Navy. Stay tuned for more details.

Remarks by James Russell, NHA Gosnell Executive Director, at the keel-laying of the USS Nantucket on October 9, 2019: “Let me tell you about a small island 30 miles out to sea, that if it were not for the intrepid whalemen who sailed from there, the first momentous events leading up to the American Revolution might not have occurred. We all know about the Boston Tea Party. What you may not know is that two of the three vessels engaged therein were registered, owned, and sailed by Nantucketers.

Some of the Founding Fathers had direct relationships with the island. John Hancock tried his hand in the 10 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

whaling business before going into politics. Benjamin Franklin’s mother was born and lived on the island, and he and his Nantucket cousin first charted the Gulf Stream. Thomas Jefferson spoke highly of the bravery of the whalers and noted their outsized contribution to the nascent U.S. economy. During the Civil War, when President Lincoln assigned each municipality a quota, Nantucketers responded with enthusiasm and significantly exceed theirs.

This island is home to many firsts. The first vessel to fly the Stars & Stripes down the Thames River in London was from here. The first whaling vessels around the

USS NANTUCKET

Horn to Hawaii, and to Japan were Nantucket vessels, too. As Gen. Douglas McArthur leap-frogged across the Pacific in World War II, and purportedly he referenced old whaling maps to chart the atolls and small islands for bases there.

As you lay the keel for this awesome fighting vessel, you build upon a tradition of excellence as then in the 19th century, the island’s singular focus was on building, training and equipping men and material, thus making it a world leader. Other nations looked to Nantucket with awe and envy and will do so again with this Freedom-class littoral combat ship.

The island knows what it is like to send its kin to sea.

The longest whaling voyage was 11 years! We also know tragedy as well, expressed through the saga of the Nantucket ship Essex, when a whale rammed and burst its seams—so make sure you make those welds and rivets hold fast. During the Nantucket whaling epoch, over 1,100 Nantucketers or sailors on Nantucket vessels lost their lives at sea.

Through strength forged by convictions, Nantucketers invited Frederick Douglass to deliver his first public speech on Nantucket, and great leaders, such as noted suffragist Lucretia Mott were born on island. Women played an outsized role early on, for as men went down to the sea in ships, it was women who conducted and excelled in trade and commerce. And today, it is the research arm of the U.S. Navy that leads the way in whale ecology, marine science, and marine mammal protection around our shores and in our oceans.

USS Nantucket (1863-1900). Lithograph by Endicott & Company, New York, published circa the mid-1860s. Courtesy of Charles Moran, 1935.

U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.

The first USS Nantucket was a Passaic-class coastal monitor in the U.S. Navy. The Nantucket was launched 6 December 1862 by Atlantic Iron Works, Boston, Massachusetts. It was assigned to the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. The Nantucket participated in the attack on Confederate forts in Charleston Harbor 7 April 1863. Struck 51 times during the unsuccessful assault on the port, the single-turreted monitor was repaired and returned to Charleston to support Army operations on Morris Island, engaging Fort Wagner 16, 17, 18, and 24 July. Later, she captured the British steamer Jupiter at sea in September. She again challenged the Charleston Harbor forts in May 1864 and thereafter remained on blockade duty through the end of the American Civil War. Many whaling vessels, including the Nantucket whaleship Potomac, were purchased by the U.S. and dubbed “the Stone Fleet” as they were sunk by Union forces in Savannah and Charleston harbors to create blockades of Confederate vessels. Other whaleships, such as the Edward Cary of Nantucket, were destroyed by Confederate raiders near the end of the war. Just under four hundred Nantucket men enlisted in defense of the Union forces, with over 70 losing their lives in the war.

At the NHA, in 1908 and under then-Chairman Alexander Starbuck, there was an unveiling of a Memorial Tablet upon which were inscribed the names of 21 Nantucket men who served under Captain John Paul Jones in the Revolution.

Also on the tablet is a memorial to Nantucketer Lt. Alexander Pinkham, USN, who, in an act of patriotic remembrance, restored the birthplace of Jones at Arbigland, Scotland, in 1831. In this spirit, and remembering the first 1862 monitor class USS Nantucket*, the NHA is pleased and proud to furnish, when requested and ready, artifacts to be displayed on board that honor the island’s long and rich history of patriotic devotion.

Thank you for allowing me to speak briefly about Nantucket here today.”

USS Ranger, later USS Rockport and USS Nantucket (PG-23/IX-18), was a gunboat of the United States Navy. As Nantucket, she operated as a gunboat in the First Naval District during World War I, as well as a training ship for Navy midshipmen. Watercolor on paper in the collection of Max Berry. * Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer noted during his remarks that the first USS Nantucket was a Passaic-class coastal monitor.

Importantly its first engagement was the naval bombardment on Fort Wagner and in support of the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.

nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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The Case for Technology-Based Interactive Exhibits In museums throughout the world, technology-based interactive exhibits are providing education, accessibility, and entertainment beyond traditional object-label displays. But how do we determine an appropriate role for digital interactive exhibits when planning new museum offerings? An internal study group of exhibition professionals at the Smithsonian Institution provided some insight concluding that interactives could deepen the exhibition experience for visitors in the following ways:

• By adding more layers of content to the exhibition; • By allowing visitors varied access points to the exhibition themes; • By engaging multiple senses beyond sight, providing a more immersive experience; • By including humor and emotion; • By offering opportunities for visitor involvement outside the usual boundaries; • And overall, by promoting further engagement with the exhibition subject matter, and thereby broadening the visitor’s understanding and experience, supporting the inclination for visitors to learn more in their own way.

For more than a decade, the NHA has increasingly incorporated these objectives in exhibition development, enhancing the educational value of new exhibitions and deepening the visitor experience in permanent installations. A significant benefit of the use of digital technology to the NHA, an organization with an abundance of properties, objects, and artifacts, yet with limited exhibition space, is the ability to bring to public view far more of the collection than current space physically allows. Today, these digital initiatives have resulted in a substantial offering of over twenty interactive exhibits at the Whaling Museum and throughout the publicly accessible properties, with many more in the planning stages.

Confirming the success of this approach, NHA visitors and staff have enjoyed additional benefits of digital interactive technology.

Vivid and immersive story telling. Any educator will confirm that it’s easy to

1845 Petitions for and against Integrating Nantucket Schools. Delve into opposing positions surrounding the battle to allow people of color to attend Nantucket High School.

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learn through a good story. Daily at the Whaling Museum, NHA interpreters bring to life the gory tale of what it was like to hunt whales with the help of our most popular digital interactive (according to TripAdvisor). Other great stories presented through interactives include how the whale skeleton got into the museum; what it was like to ride on the Nantucket Railroad, ca. 1900; what happened when most of Nantucket Town burned to the ground; and how the Sankaty Lighthouse was moved away from the bluff, to name just a few.

Learning through deep educational content with varied access points.

Digital tools let us add many content layers, allowing visitors to learn and explore randomly, as they are inclined to do. As an outstanding example, we took this approach with the Hadwen & Barney Oil and Candle Factory interactive that lets visitors explore its operation, ca. 1850, understand the economics of the industry, and learn about the owners and the people who worked here.

INTERACTIVES

Exploring fragile objects safely. Through the use of touch screen and

Follow whaling voyages around the world through entries that are transcribed.

zooming technology, visitors can browse and manipulate fragile objects that would only be white-glove accessible with supervision at the NHA Research Library or Gosnold Collections Center. For instance, a selection of logbook entries can be viewed at the Whaling Museum, letting visitors follow whaling voyages, tracing them around the world through logbook entries that are transcribed and can be examined in detail. Aside the logbooks is an interactive of 19th-century whaling grounds maps allowing visitors to zoom in and closely examine whaling activity in different parts of the globe.

Uncovering new information. Sometimes the digital technology used in

Experience a realistic animation of how the oil lever press in the Candle Factory actually worked.

Take a private tour of Greater Light as told by Hanna Monaghan in her own words.

Investigate different whale species and how we can help protect whales today.

the interactives teaches us something new about the objects we’re presenting. A critical component in developing a realistic animation of how the oil lever press in the Candle Factory works was to reconstruct the pieces of the press that were removed over time from the press on display. In making the press animation function as it should, we learned that the existing diagrams and information about how it worked were incorrect from an engineering standpoint. We were able to resolve how the machine actually worked by manipulating the lever press components in the animation development process until they worked as originally designed.

Getting to know the individuals who made Nantucket history. Hearing the personal stories of key figures from Nantucket’s past makes history far more real and compelling. This has understandably become a component of many of the NHA’s digital presentations. Notably, at the Hadwen House, visitors can learn about Nantucket’s “notable women” through stories illustrated from the NHA collections and the embroidered narratives by Susan Boardman. At Greater Light, a hidden gem of an interactive invites visitors to spend some time with the Monaghans through a private tour of this iconic home at the time it was left to the NHA in the 1970s, as told by Hanna Monaghan in her memoir Greater Light on Nantucket and by the islanders who knew her.

Surprisingly, we discovered that Hanna had quite a sense of humor.

Highlighting the effects of history on today’s issues. While whale hunting was essential to the economic success of Nantucket in the 18th and 19th centuries and is a significant part of Nantucket’s history, the negative impact of that practice today on whale and ocean ecology cannot be denied. This led to the development of a new digital interactive focused exclusively on whale ecology, unveiled this summer. In keeping with the NHA’s objective to educate visitors about the status of whales today, the interactive explores a variety of topics about different species, including issues regarding whale entanglement and rescue, the impacts of continued whaling by some countries, and how we can help protect whales today.

Just having fun. While a primary objective of interactives is to increase the

potential of an educational experience, sometimes they’re just fun. For instance, the immersive photo booth in the new Discovery Center lets visitors put themselves into history to tell their own stories and share them with friends. There are always giggles wafting out of the booth.

Discovery Center video kiosk. nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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IMMERSIVE INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE LAUNCH 2020 In 2020, the NHA will launch its first immersive interactive experience, appropriately focused on the island’s important role in the Suffrage Movement. This will be located at Hadwen House.

To learn more and to support these exciting new interactive projects in 2020, please contact Lexi Norton at lexi@nha.org.

The digital interactive development process The creative process in developing a digital exhibit starts much like a physical one. It begins with a good story or educational goal, such as bringing to life the battle to allow people of color to attend Nantucket High School; exploring what was happening on Nantucket during the American Revolution through the eyes of an 18th-century cub reporter; or relating the experiences of people from around the world, in their own words, who came to Nantucket and made it their home.

The digital curatorial process incorporates traditional exhibition development methods. Many hours are spent poring over collections and related materials; interviewing experts and participants in the stories; working on educational content, scripting and storyboarding; and accumulating and creating the imagery, video, and audio that support and illustrate the story. The focus is on quality and content, but has the advantage of not having to consider the limitations of physical space.

Once the storyline and content are defined, only then is the best technology to make the exhibit accessible, intuitive, and engaging considered. The latest, most elaborate technology is not always necessary to be effective, although all are considered. The technology should not overwhelm or complicate the story. In fact, the technology

19th Century Whaling Maps Zoom in and closely examine whaling activity in different parts of the globe in the 19th century.

should be transparent to the visitor. Of course, other factors such as space limitations, sound spill, lighting, reliability, and budget also influence the final technology decision.

The final step is the design, merging both graphic and technical, and the execution of that design that will bring the story to life.

This has allowed us to deliver the many hours of content embedded in digital interactives for NHA visitors to explore and enjoy. It would take several days for an NHA visitor to experience all of the stories and information waiting to be uncovered—a very good reason to become an NHA member and visit the museum and properties often!

Al and Mary Novissimo, Novation Media, have been creating and developing interactive digital exhibits for the NHA for over 15 years. Mary is Director of Digital Media at the NHA.

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Digital Initiatives Update

By Amelia Holmes, Associate Director, Research Library

Thanks to the visionary gift of Connie and Tom Cigarran, the NHA will digitize its entire logbook collection. Sara David, our new digitization archivist, will serve as project manager. Concurrently she will develop a transcription program to “translate” (ie: make legible and searchable) all the text information contained in the logbooks.

If you are interested in transcribing a logbook or learning more about the process, please reach out to her at sdavid@nha.org.

Transcription enhances access to the logbook collection by allowing researchers to do full-text searches and textual analyses. Transcription is an exacting and time-consuming process, yet the investment will undoubtedly bring to light new discoveries and insights, while making these historical documents, collected over 125 years, more accessible to all our members.

Meanwhile, the collections catalog migration is well underway. Overseen by Mary and Al Novissimo and myself, staff have migrated tens of thousands of collections records from twenty-year-old cataloging software to the new Eloquent system. Look out for a notice via our e-newsletter when we go live, hopefully by year end. What does this mean for you? Eloquent uses a single query screen to search across collections, leading to a more intuitive exploration of the NHA’s holdings. Additionally, the software allows staff to easily integrate digital materials, including logbooks, photographs, oral history, and audio files.

To drill down deeper, in order to successfully migrate from one system to another, staff had to develop a “metadata crosswalk”, which is jargon for mapping fields of data in the existing system to fields in the new one. This requires deep familiarity with the existing fields as well as a thorough knowledge and understanding of the capabilities of the new system.

Once staff completed the mapping process, the next step was to begin data cleanup, wherein all information was standardized and consolidated. With the data migration now in its final phase, staff are developing protocols and documenting procedures for cataloging and use.

The end goal is to provide consistent and accurate descriptions that will allow both easy searching and appreciation of our collections.

Sara David, NHA Digitization Archivist

Transcription enhances access to the logbook collection by allowing researchers to do full-text searches and textual analyses.

nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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Robert Hellman Collection Acquired by the NHA The NHA acquired a nationally significant collection of whalecraft, art, and historic documents from the family of the late Robert Hellman, island resident and whaling historian.

The 136 pieces in the Hellman acquisition, when coupled with the existing extensive holdings, puts the NHA in the top rank of institutions collecting Yankee whalecraft worldwide.

Nantucket now becomes a required stop for scholars studying the evolution of these important tools of the whaling trade.

A small selection of the 136 items that were acquired by both the NHA and the Friends of the NHA.

first love was herpetology, a field in which he held a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida. In words printed in The Inquirer and Mirror last fall, his family remembered:

Before his death in 2018, Bob devoted many years to gathering and meticulously documenting his own private collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century whaling tools and equipment. The NHA has been working closely with the family over the past year to acquire the items through a generous gift in the form of a discounted price, allowing the NHA to preserve the core of Bob’s life work. Combined with other outright donations of major pieces of scrimshaw and whalecraft over the past decade, the Hellman gifts amount to a remarkable act of philanthropy. Twenty of these items will be presented to the association through the generosity of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association; the balance is being funded by a gift from The H. L. Brown Jr. Family Foundation, supplemented by the partial gift of the Hellman family.

Robert Hellman (1930–2018) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he worked for over forty years in the family electrical contracting business. His 16 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

While working in the contracting industry, [Bob] continued to collect his favorite species until Nina [his wife] put her foot down and said no more snakes and frogs in the house. That’s when he turned his focus to whales . . . . Soon afterward, he spotted his first harpoon. No longer catching animals in the wild, Bob could nonetheless hunt for the tools employed in the historic whale hunt. He studied the history of whaling and deciphered the makers’ marks, ships’ marks and other markings on the gear he collected, much as he had read the markings of reptiles and amphibians.

After retiring to Nantucket in 1997, where Nina had run an antiques business since 1983, Bob filled their Gay Street home with his meticulously curated and ever-growing collection of harpoons, lances, spades, and other items associated with whaling the world over.

Among the objects that he acquired which are now coming to the NHA are rare, marked harpoon irons made by such Nantucket blacksmiths as George Swain Jr. (1791– 1880), Samuel Brown Folger (1795–1864), David Mitchell (d. 1875), Josiah Macy (1805–80), and Charles R. Pad-

AQUISITIONS

dock (1816–99). Louis Temple, the African-American blacksmith from New Bedford who developed the revolutionary toggle iron, is represented by three harpoons, probably used aboard the New Bedford whalers Robert Morrison, Majestic, and Washington. The NHA is also receiving a bow-mounted harpoon gun manufactured

by Mason and Cunningham of New Bedford, one of only three examples of this gun known to survive. These acquisitions will solidify the NHA’s position as one of the world’s leading repositories of tools of the whale hunt.

The NHA is particularly pleased to be able to collect the painted portraits of Rebecca Baxter Bunker (1793–1879) and her husband, Capt. Alexander D. Bunker (1792–1871). Captain Bunker commanded numerous Nantucket whaling voyages before becoming first keeper of Sankaty Head Lighthouse. His journals from his days at the lighthouse entered the NHA collection in 2014 through the generosity of the Friends of the NHA, and the portraits will now complement them thanks, again, to the Friends.

The NHA is also acquiring a variety of manuscripts that Bob collected, including two logbooks, a handwritten account book documenting equipment and rations for a whaling voyage in 1810, an 1847 account ledger for Westgate’s store on Main Street (where Murray’s Liquor Store now is located), and fourteen letters relating to the Nantucket Fishing Company in 1870–71. Chief among the manuscript acquisitions is a set of papers recording Walter Folger Jr.’s observations of Halley’s Comet, written by him on Nantucket on October 22, 1835. These comprise two letters describing the appearance of the comet in the night sky and an analysis of its orbit.

Folger was Nantucket’s greatest polymath in the nineteenth century, working as a clock and instrument maker and lawyer. He was also an astronomer and cousin to Maria Mitchell. Two telescopes he made are in the NHA collection, one of which may be the telescope mentioned in his Halley’s Comet letters.

The Hellman family is developing a website, which will launch in 2020, cataloging Bob’s entire collection and providing links to items held by the various museums. The website will be hosted by the NHA. Members of the Hellman family have long been friends and supporters of the NHA. Bob worked as an interpreter and tour guide at the Whaling Museum for many years and assisted in cataloging the NHA’s whalecraft and scrimshaw collections, while Nina served two terms on the NHA board. Together, Bob and Nina made numerous previous artifact donations to the Whaling Museum collection. With this new acquisition, Bob Hellman’s passion for the history of whaling will live on. Look for the Hellman Collection on display next year at the NHA as well as the new website that will allow visitors to examine the entire Hellman Collection.

NEW ACQUISITION Thank you to Jan and Warren Adelson for their generous donation of The Fisher Girl, Nantucket, 1881, by Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-90). This watercolor painting was loaned this summer for the exhibition Two Hundred Years of American Art on Nantucket in the new Williams Forsyth Gallery before being gifted to the NHA. We are thrilled this important work can remain on display for all visitors to enjoy.

Dennis Miller Bunker was born in New York City to a family of Quaker heritage with ties to Nantucket, where the artist spent his childhood summers.

By 1880 he began to focus on marine subjects, especially stranded boats at low tide, a favorite theme of American artists. Bunker was keenly aware of the market for boat pictures and small beachscapes, and his works sold quickly. The Fisher Girl, Nantucket represents one of the last paintings in his early manner; after his summer on Nantucket in 1881, Bunker went to study in Paris, where he adopted the Impressionist style. Tragically, Bunker died of meningitis at age 29, but during a ten-year career, he had earned a distinguished reputation.

nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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18 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

The Notion of the “Last Indians”

By Frances Karttunen, NHA Research Fellow

In her 2010 book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, Jean M. O’Brien examines nineteenth-century local histories and points out a universal pattern. When speaking of English settlers, the emphasis is on firsts: the first spot where the Pilgrims came ashore, the first person to set foot on Plymouth Rock, the first Thanksgiving, the first wedding, the first English child born, the first English person to die and be buried in New England soil, the first this and the first that. When it comes to the Native peoples, the emphasis is on lasts: the last sachem, the last wigwam, and lists of last Indians.

A literary example is James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans, which concludes with the pronouncement that white men now rule and the time of the Indian is past, never to return.

Ever since the island’s deadly Indian Sickness of 1763– 64, reckonings of Nantucket’s “last Indians” have proliferated. At the entrance to the Nantucket Atheneum, visitors come face to face with the portrait of an elderly man sitting barefoot at a table in his house, surrounded by baskets. His back is to a window through which there is a view of Nantucket Harbor and the skyline of the town. In the last years of his life and for many decades after his death on November 25, 1854, Abram Quary was considered Nantucket’s last Indian.

Because the portrait by Hermine Dassel is well executed and moving, and because it hangs in a very public place, the painting sustained the notion of Abram Quary as Nantucket’s last Indian for more than a century. Then it came to people’s attention that Dorcas Honorable, Abram’s contemporary, had outlived him by about six weeks. An adjustment was made: Abram Quary became the last Nantucket Indian man, and Dorcas became the very last of the last. Born Dorcas Esop, granddaughter of Nantucket Wampanoag preacher and schoolmaster Benjamin Tashama, her survival ex-

tended the “official” date of demise of the Nantucket Wampanoags to January 12, 1855.

Then people began to have doubts. It was said that Abram Quary and Dorcas Honorable both had children through whom their heritage continued. Was this true?

In fact, Abram Quary lost his son, and Dorcas Honorable was childless. But there were others who carried on Wampanoag heritage on Nantucket. Was the notion of “last Indian” valid?

The notion was deeply ingrained. Back in 1790, Zaccheus Macy—Nantucket’s historian of the eighteenth century—wrote, “Now all gone . . . all the Indians excepting old Peter Micah and old Isaac Tashama.” Two years later he revised his list to include four men and sixteen women. In 1807, James Freeman wrote, “At present there are only two Indian men and six Indian women left on the island.” Jacob Barker recalled Peter Micah and Joshua Chegin (both of whom died in 1801) and Dorcas Honorable’s mother, Sarah Tashama (who lived until 1821), as “the only three Indians I remember to have lived at Nantucket during my boyhood.”

Left page: Portrait of Abram Quary (1772-1854), known as the last living male Nantucket Wampanoag. GPN4336b. nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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A census compiled by Obed Macy, Nantucket’s historian of the nineteenth century, lists Sarah Tashama (by her married name of Sarah Esop), Abram Quary and his wife, and five other women, one of them being Abigail Jethro, who survived Sarah Tashama Esop by a year.

Obed Macy considered Abram Quary only marginally an Indian and did not list Dorcas Honorable at all.

From his point of view, the Nantucket Indians came to an end when Abigail Jethro died on January 20, 1822.

In fact, none of these dates or individuals represents an end of Nantucket’s native Wampanoags or the end of Wampanoags on Nantucket. Some people from Nantucket are known to have joined the Wampanoag communities on Martha’s Vineyard and at Mashpee, while individuals and families from the Vineyard and from Mashpee and Herring Pond on Cape Cod have periodically moved to Nantucket.

who was descended from the Nantucket Mingo family of mixed Wampanoag and African descent. The 1922 obituary of Charlotte Tyler Barreau stated, “The island of Nantucket was the birthplace of Mrs. Barreau, and of a long line of ancestors, for she was descended from the Nantucket Indians who originally inhabited the island.”

ZACCHEUS MACY’S AUTHORITY Estimates of how many Wampanoags were resident on Nantucket when the first English settlers arrived in 1659 range from a generally accepted 1,500 to as many as 3,000. The higher number was stated as fact

by Zaccheus Macy, whose writing is a major source of information about the Nantucket Wampanoags. Given that he lived close to them and spoke their language, we should not dismiss his estimate of a population of 3,000 in 1659.

Estimates of how many Wampanoags were resident on Nantucket when the first English settlers arrived in 1659 range from a generally accepted 1,500 to as many as 3,000.

Besides, Nantucket’s Wampanoag heritage lived on through interracial marriages. In 1822, Essex Boston, born into slavery on Nantucket in 1741, son of Boston and Maria—Africans held in slavery by William Swain— joined with his brother, Peter Boston, and black businessman Jeffrey Summons to write that “We hereby certify that there are among the coloured people of this place remains of the Nantucket Indians, and that nearly every family in our village are partly descended from the original inhabitants of this and neighboring places.”

In 1763–64, an epidemic known as the Indian Sickness dealt a coup de grace to a declining Wampanoag population on Nantucket. Zaccheus Macy’s relationship with Nantucket’s Wampanoags spanned the century in which the Indian Sickness took its toll. Great-grandson of English settlers Thomas and Sarah Macy, he was born on Nantucket in 1713, and, like others of his generation, he was said to be fluently bilingual in English and the language spoken by the Nantucket Wampanoags, now known as Wôpanâak (“Wampanoag”).

From this statement, it would appear that some Nantucket Wampanoags had intermarried with people of African heritage on Nantucket, thereby creating a community that was identified as black by Nantucket’s English residents while maintaining its own recollection of partial descent from the island’s Wampanoags. There is further evidence of this community: While on Nantucket Hermine Dassel painted another portrait, titled in some sources as “Nantucket Indian Princess,” which undoubtedly depicts eleven-year-old Isabella Draper,

Although Macy had no formal medical training, he was skilled in herbal medicine—knowledge presumably acquired from Wampanoag practitioners—and served as Nantucket’s bonesetter for many decades. He lived to the age of 84, and, in taking stock of his long life, he estimated that he had set about seventy-five bones a year well into the 1790s. He did not charge the injured people he treated. His personal wealth, which he used to acquire a great deal of land, derived from both sheep and whales. He possessed enough shares in the

20 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

THE NOTION OF THE “LAST INDIANS”

When the epidemic struck, Macy is said to have looked out for the stricken Wampanoags by having his own sheep slaughtered and personally carrying mutton soup each day to Miacomet for the sick there. Fellow Quaker Richard Mitchell did him one better and carried food directly into the houses and wetus of the sick and the dying. Many years later, Christopher Starbuck recalled with some uncertainty that “some Negroes went among the sick Indians and did not have the sickness.”

If Zaccheus Macy’s population estimate was accurate, then the number of Wampanoags on Nantucket in 1659 was about the same as the number of year-round residents of Nantucket in 1950. But the people of Wampanoag heritage living on Nantucket in the twentieth century, the West and Coombs families, had their roots on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, where Wampanoag communities still survive today at Aquinnah and Mashpee. Why does Nantucket differ from the Vineyard and the Cape in having no discernible continuity of Wampanoag presence to the present?

A POPULATION UNDER DURESS

Portrait of Dorcas Honorable (c. 1770-1855), known as the last living female Nantucket Wampanoag. GPN4321.

island’s commons to support a large number of sheep, and over the years he also owned shares in seventeen whaling vessels. One of the ways he obtained virtually free labor in the whaleboats was through the Nantucket court. He was frequently present at trials, sometimes suing Wampanoags for debt or accusing them of theft.

Whether the suit was his own or someone else’s, he would pay Wampanoags’ fines for them in exchange for their bound service to him. In 1760, he acquired the indenture of Jonathan Tony, who had been convicted of theft and sentenced to twenty-five years of service. Four years later Tony fell victim to the Indian Sickness, and Macy lost his long-term investment.

Even before the Indian Sickness, Nantucket’s indigenous population had fallen from possibly as many as Zaccheus Macy’s 3,000 to just 358. On the eve of the epidemic, perhaps only one tenth as many Wampanoags resided on Nantucket as had a century earlier. The factors that had reduced them by possibly ninety percent were several.

Among them was loss of young men who went whaling. Isaac Coffin, judge of probate, made a list of deaths on Nantucket to the close of the 1700s. In the period 1722–56, there are entries for whaleboats lost with all hands “in the shoals” and “awhaling to the southard.”

Approximately twenty of those lost were local Wampanoag men in the prime of life. Typically Coffin’s record lists Nantucket-born Englishmen by name and fills out the rest of the deaths under the categories “strangers,” “blacks,” and “Indians.” But for 1755 Coffin records that, “Ebenezer Corduda was the Great Indian Justice.

He was lost with Peter Bunker in the year 1755 and his son James Corduda was lost with him at the same time.”

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Even though the English selectmen prohibited sale of liquor to Wampanoags, there was consumption of rum on Nantucket by English and Wampanoags alike. Between 1708 and 1757, forty-six Wampanoag individuals were brought to court for theft of alcohol (as much as 14 gallons in one haul), and an equal number appeared in court in cases involving illegal purchase of alcohol.

Wampanoag men were convicted of public drunkenness. In 1736, Ben Jusap was tried for invading an English home at night and terrorizing the family, his defense being that he was drunk at the time and could not account for his actions.

Alcohol poisoning had negative consequences for health and fertility. A case in point was Patience Nosson, tried in 1734 for beating Susanna Corane nearly to death after they left the meeting house together.

Wampanoag witnesses described Patience as sitting down to suckle her infant after knocking Susanna senseless. Her defense in court was that she was drunk at the time and could remember nothing.

There was also hunger. Because of the introduction of livestock and fencing, the Wampanoags no longer had easy access to the wild-growing foods on which they had formerly subsisted. Their right to whale and seal meat was also in contention. There is scant evidence for deer or rabbits on the island in the 1700s, so most hunting was seasonal for migratory birds. For meat, some turned to sheep rustling. Between 1720 and 1759, twenty-four individuals were convicted of stealing and killing sheep or receiving meat from the poached animals. Another twenty individuals were convicted of stealing pork, mutton, grain, molasses, and sugar.

While outright taking of others’ property was a proactive response to unmet need in the English-dominated economy, debt was the stealthy enemy of the Wampanoags. Account books record the exchange of goods and labor for imported items that had become necessities: boards, nails, fencing material, fishing gear, and sugar. Every item on each side of the ledger had a money value stated in English pounds, shillings, and pence. When the balance tipped far into debt (accrued over a period of as many as eighteen years in one case), the debtor was summoned to court. Between 1715 and 1759, over sixty Wampanoags found themselves in court over debts. Rarely was a Wampanoag able to pre-

22 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

Ruth West Coombs wearing an Indian headdress and dress. Coombs’ ancestry was part African-American and part Wampanoag. She was married to Darius Coombs of the Mashpee Wampanoags. Pictured here, she is in her concert persona Princess Red Feather. She toured New England to promote appreciation of the Wampanoag culture. She died in 1964 and is buried in the Prospect Hill Cemetery on island along with her relatives. Ruth West Coombs was the grandmother of Darius Coombs, who participated in the NHA’s First Contact Symposium this past summer at the Quaker Meeting House. Photo was a gift of Adele Pitt Ames. PH31-4-4.

vail in this situation, and just as rarely did anyone have money to pay off what was owed. The only commodity available to clear one’s debt was labor. The English traded in these “Indian debts” and bequeathed them to their heirs.

Debt descended to the debtors’ heirs as well. When Ephraim sought a cash loan from Richard Macy in 1717, it was written into their agreement that the consequence of failure to repay the loan in two months’

THE NOTION OF THE “LAST INDIANS”

time would be the binding of Ephraim’s son Jacob to Macy for “whaling and fishing on this shore.” From this short-term loan, it eventually came about that two of Ephraim’s sons ended up fishing out on the shoals for Macy until they reached the age of 21.

The English court, being of a practical turn of mind, sentenced Wampanoags convicted of theft, vandalism, and assault to long terms of bound labor. In the early days, however, they had punished offenses with severe whipping and branding; between 1713 and 1729, seven Wampanoag men were sentenced to being branded on the forehead for breaking and entering. As to execu-

Sometime around 1715, the rapidly rising English settler population passed the rapidly declining Wampanoag population.

tions, between 1665, when, according to a document in the Nantucket Registry of Deeds, “the Endians ware hanged on Nantucket,” and 1769, the year of the last hanging, every person who went to death on the gallows outside the Newtown Gate was a Wampanoag. In addition to the anonymous “Endians” who died in 1665, the names and the dates of ten executions are recorded.

The hangman, Sam Humphrey, was also a Wampanoag.

Malnutrition, alcoholism, public humiliation, incarceration, departure of young men for months on end to the whaling grounds from which some never returned, and culling of men through execution brought reproduction among Nantucket’s Wampanoags nearly to a standstill.

Sometime around 1715, the rapidly rising English settler population passed the rapidly declining Wampanoag population. The English outnumbered the Wampanoags on-island. Nantucket was no longer a good place for Wampanoags to live, and some families moved away.

EPIDEMIC AND AFTERMATH Then came the Indian Sickness, killing 222 Wampanoags on Nantucket. From the list of victims of the epidemic, it appears that about two thirds of those who died were women and children. When it was over, only between 136 and 148 Nantucket Wampanoags remained. The Indian Sickness also spread to the Wampanoag communities on Martha’s Vineyard, where fifty-two people were infected and twenty-nine died, and to Mashpee, where four or five died.

Five years later, Nathan Quibby murdered his Wampanoag shipmates Peleg Titus, Isaac Jeffrey, and John Charles and went to his own death on the gallows outside the Newtown Gate. By 1792 Zaccheus Macy reckoned that there were only twenty adult Wampanoags still living on Nantucket. There were also at least two children who had been born in the 1770s: Dorcas Esop and Abram Quary.

NEW GUINEA CHRONOLOGY There is, however, the 1822 statement from Essex and Peter Boston and Jeffrey Summons of Nantucket’s New Guinea community that nearly every family there had some Wampanoag heritage.

When the epidemic burned itself out, Nantucket’s black population was estimated at only 50, outnumbered nearly three-to-one by the Wampanoag survivors of the epidemic. Marriage records show that Benjamin Tashama, who had been widowed in the epidemic, married a black woman named Jenny Richards. They lived in a house in New Guinea that eventually passed to Benjamin’s daughter Sarah, who survived the epidemic that carried off her mother. Upon Sarah’s death the house passed to her daughter Dorcas Esop, who—after four or five marriages—ended up as Dorcas Honorable. “Tashma’s House” appears on an 1821 map in the Nantucket Registry of Deeds.

In the 1700s, slavery was a living institution on the island. Despite Quaker opposition to lifelong involuntary servitude, there are records of at least 32 African individuals held in slavery by English Nantucketers in the

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et’s community of color was forming a neighborhood, one of mixed Wampanoag and African heritage.

In the 1790s, the Proprietors of the Common and Undivided Land laid out pieces of land “near Newtown” for Thomas Gardner, a “Negro man”; Daniel Gardner, “mulatto”; James Dyer, “Indian man”; and Jeffrey Summons, “black man”. All four men had purchased rights to common and undivided land from the same white man, Matthew Worth. Daniel Gardner already had a dwelling house on the land before the proprietors set it off for him. During the 1790s, Sampson Dyer, brother of James, bought a dwelling house in the area. In 1799, Jeffrey Summons purchased additional interests in the area from a consortium of white proprietors.

In that same year Isaac Coffin made a list of the streets of Nantucket in which he described two black communities on the south side of town: Allentown along Angola Street and New Guinea at the present Five Corners intersection.

Marker for the burial ground of the victims of the 1763-64 “Indian Sickness” epidemic. Photographed by Allen Reinhard.

1700s. In 1775, two years after the Prince Boston case that is often said to have ended slavery on the island, Quaker Benjamin Coffin finally freed Rose and her sons Benjamin and Bristol. Slavery was abolished throughout Massachusetts in 1783.

As enslaved Africans on Nantucket gained their freedom, they acquired land along the south edge of town, within the area known as Newtown. Their “village,” as Essex Boston and the others described it, came into being in the Five Corners area, a locus within Newtown. It was variously known as New Guinea, Negro Town, Negro Village, and Negro Hill.

An expansion of the black population was underway.

The 1790 Nantucket census lists 18 black households, a number of them headed by men who are known to have once been enslaved. The census does not indicate where they resided or for how long they had been there, but through trades and consolidation, Nantuck-

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There appears to be a gap of a decade or a generation between the cessation of the Indian Sickness and the inception of a concentrated black community on the south edge of town. Consequently, we cannot simply say that the survivors of the epidemic moved from Miacomet to nearby New Guinea, since it appears that New Guinea did not yet exist in 1764.

ZACCHEUS MACY’S AQUISITIONS In November 1764, several months after the Indian Sickness ended, Zaccheus Macy exchanged some of his land for land “below the ropewalks [where Prospect Hill Cemetery now is] and part on the south side of the Proprietors fence to the southward.” Land that Josiah Barker sold to Edward Cary, who in turn sold it in 1774 to Cato, a man formerly enslaved by Cary, was bounded on the north by Zaccheus Macy’s land. In 1797, when Macy made his will, he still held land “adjoining that of Negro Cato” as well as land in the Miacomet area. Land that Tobias Boston purchased in 1772 had also previously belonged to Zaccheus Macy.

Why did Macy acquire land in this area? Macy traded some of his own land elsewhere on the island for land specifically where Wampanoags had lived and had so recently died. Were survivors of the epidemic still liv-

THE NOTION OF THE “LAST INDIANS”

ing on what now became Zaccheus Macy’s land? Was he somehow providing for or exploiting the surviving Wampanoags? Or was the land an investment from which he anticipated a profit by selling it off to members of a burgeoning free black community?

RECLASSIFICATION Multiple factors account for the decline of the Wampanoag population from well over a hundred survivors in 1764 to at most twenty individuals just twenty-seven years later. In addition to mortality and outmigration to Aquinnah and Mashpee, there is evidence of white reclassification of remaining Wampanoags as “coloured” or “black.” Joshua Chegin, Sarah Tashama Esop, and Abram Quary were all classified as black in the 1800 census, as were Joseph Quary and Nimrod Quamins.

Although James Dyer is identified as “Indian” in two different documents, his brother Sampson Dyer is identified as “black.”

Despite sharing a surname with a known Nantucket Wampanoag family, Thankfull Micah never seems to be listed as a Wampanoag. Her marriage to Seneca Boston came very early in her life, so it is unlikely she was a black woman who had acquired the surname Micah by a previous marriage. Apparently, she was deemed black because she was married to a formerly enslaved man and resided in New Guinea.

In the 1810 census, Dorcas Honorable was classified as black, although her mother and Abram Quary were not.

Quary was considered black in the 1830 census, but not in 1840. And so it went. After the Indian Sickness, there was no longer a sense of the existence of a Wampanoag community, and Wampanoag individuals were often classified together with people of African heritage, Pacific Islanders, and people from India, Java, and Suriname as “people of colour,” and people of color, in turn, were often simply classified as “black.”

OTHER WAMPANOAGS According to the 1822 statement by the Bostons and Jeffrey Summons, most of New Guinea’s families were “partly descended from the original inhabitants of this

and neighboring places.” Among Mashpee Wampanoags who married into the Nantucket black community, we know of Rhoda Jolly, who married Peter Boston in 1795, and Martha Dartmouth, who was Jeffrey Summons’s second wife. Where James and Sampson Dyer came from or what their ambiguous heritage really was remains uncertain. They married two “black” sisters named Allen who came to Nantucket from Newport, Rhode Island. Absalom Boston’s sons Oliver and Thomas, whose grandmother was Thankfull Micah, were both enrolled in the Dartmouth tribe through their mother Hannah (Cook) Boston of Westport, Massachusetts. Their cousin Benajah gave an interview in 1916 claiming to be a “full-blooded Indian” with much less (if any) reason beyond it being in some sense preferable by 1916 to be considered an “Indian” than to be considered a “Negro.”

Late in the 1800s, the West family, with descent from Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoags at both Aquinnah and Chapaquiddick, moved to Nantucket. When Ruth West married Mashpee Wampanoag Darius Coombs in 1916, not only did he relocate to Nantucket, so did his brother and sister-in-law Otis and Myrtle Coombs. The couples are interred together in a family plot in Nantucket’s Prospect Hill Cemetery, but Darius Coombs of Mashpee, grandson of Darius and Ruth, is today Director of Wampanoag and Algonkian Interpretive Training, Research, and Community Recruitment at Plimoth Plantation.

Hence, not only in 1822, but ever since, it has been true that some of Nantucket’s residents have been “descended from the original inhabitants of neighboring places,” even when there have been no descendants of Nantucket’s original Wampanoag community living on the island.

THE SECOND DECLINE The New Guinea families in whom were said to reside “the remains of the Nantucket Indians” dwindled away in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Tuberculosis began to run through New Guinea, killing young and old. The Great Fire of 1846 destroyed Nantucket’s water-

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front and business district, putting black coopers, boat builders, rope makers, and barbers out of work. The California Gold Rush siphoned off Nantucket men both white and black, and whaling moved away from Nantucket to the deep-water port of New Bedford. Able-bodied men still resident on Nantucket in the 1860s enlisted in record numbers in the Union army and navy. Twenty-odd young black Nantucketers who enlisted survived the war, but not all the veterans returned to the island.

From a peak of 576 in 1840, the non-white population of Nantucket plunged to 342 in 1850, 126 in 1860, 87 in 1870, 71 in 1880, and 45 in 1895. Single men and young families abandoned the island, leaving behind the elderly and some women to care for them.

From collapse, Nantucket’s economy only slowly recovered as summer tourism took the place of whaling just as New Guinea’s residents were rapidly declining in number. Gradually their places were taken by Cape Verdean families who came to Nantucket to work the large commercial cranberry bog that was developed after 1900 and by African-American domestic workers who traveled to Nantucket with summer families, bought houses on the island, and stayed on. There are no known descendants of the original New Guinea community, reservoir of Wampanoag and African heritage, living on Nantucket today.

FORGOTTEN INSULT The 1822 term “remains of the Indians” referred to living descendants. There is the other sense of “remains,” however. The remains of the victims of the Indian Sickness were not left to rest in peace. According to Obed Macy, the English “assisted in burying the dead. This care was taken by the authority of the town.” Neither the town records nor the proprietors’ records make mention of any such action, however. Nonetheless, when several of the graves were accidentally opened in 1987, the dead were found to have been individually buried in wooden coffins lined up in rows, implying that the Wampanoag survivors had some help with the burials.

Their burial place next to Surfside Road was not respected. In the 1830s, the phrenology craze, rooted in 1790s Vienna, reached Nantucket. Undergoing a phrenological “reading” of one’s head became something of a party game, but public examination of skulls carried

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more cachet. Available skulls were inevitably those of individuals with no one to object on their behalf— criminals, the indigent, and aboriginal peoples, whose graves were looted in the name of science.

This is what occurred in Nantucket. Soon after the Nantucket Atheneum opened, it booked a phrenological lecture series. The Reverend Henry F. Edes delivered the inaugural address at the Atheneum in January 1838.

That spring his brother Richard’s fiancée visited the island to meet the Edes family, and in April she wrote a letter to her mother. After a long day’s outing, she reported, “We were engaged to go to a Phren’l society this evening, but I was too tired and stupid, so the gentlemen went without us. R. just came in from there to get two skulls (which he found Saturday afternoon in exhuming from the Indian burying place) to carry back.”

By 1846, the burial place of the victims of the Indian Sickness had been so thoroughly mined by phrenological enthusiasts and other collectors that Charles Dyer wrote in his diary, “One mile from town is the old Indian burial where many graves have been dug over to get the skulls. Some of the other bones are left in the ground but too much decayed to be worth bringing away.” The looters had, however, missed a few skulls after all, and it was one of those whose emergence in December 1987 led to the recognition and protection of what was left of the burial site.

EPILOGUE The notion of the “last Indian,” as embodied in James Earle Fraser’s much-reproduced equestrian statue “end of the Trail” that has been an oppressive presence in the lives of generations of Native people. They can hardly perceive it as anything but a sentimentalized version of the notion that the only good Indian is a dead Indian.

This is explicit in an 1890 Nantucket newspaper article about the discovery of a list of the victims of the Indian Sickness. Contrasting the romanticism of the late nineteenth century with the attitude of Nantucketers past, the writer remarked, “very likely there is more sentiment lavished on Indians of today, out upon the Western Plains, than the great grand-parents of the present Islander bestowed upon his [sic] dirty, thriftless and thieving Indian neighbor.” This could have been drawn nearly verbatim from Joseph Hart’s 1834 novel in which

THE NOTION OF THE “LAST INDIANS”

his character Peleg Folger characterizes Nantucket’s Wampanoags as “a poor, spiritless, thieving race and abominably treacherous withal.”

Hart’s novel was flattering to white Nantucketers. As soon as it was published, during the lifetimes of Abram Quary and Dorcas Honorable, Nantucketers took to the novel, and from the first they confused Nantucket history with Hart’s fiction.

Rooted in the observed fact of precipitous population crashes wherever and whenever indigenous peoples encountered the disease burden carried by Europeans (of which Nantucket’s Indian Sickness was a remarkably delayed example), the belief that all indigenous peoples would inevitably go to oblivion went unchallenged for a long time. Sometimes the inevitable did not seem to be approaching with sufficient dispatch, and measures were proposed to hurry along the process. The iconic case is the 1763 exchange of correspondence between Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, and Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was in charge of the Ohio frontier. It was suggested that smallpox would be an effective ally against disaffected tribes. Amherst encouraged Bouquet to use every means at his disposal, including blankets, to “extirpate this exorable race.” Yet in the end the effort came to almost nothing. Smallpox was too dangerous—too likely to turn on the person trying to wield it as a weapon—to be added to the arsenal of instruments of extirpation.

Despite assertions that Nantucket’s Indian Sickness was smallpox manipulated to rid the island of Wampanoags, the symptoms manifested in its victims and the pattern of its diffusion rule out any such possibility.

During the 1700s Nantucketers were greatly concerned about the consequences should smallpox get loose on the island. Cases and suspected cases arriving by ship were rigorously isolated, and, despite opposition to inoculation by the dominant Religious Society of Friends, Nantucketers—non-Quakers and Quakers alike—submitted to inoculation and quarantine in the interest of keeping the island free of smallpox.

VISIT NHA.ORG/WHATS-ON/ SYMPOSIUMS/

Presented in partnership with Plimoth Plantation, view videos from the NHA’s “First Contact-Indigenous Peoples and the First English Settlers” Symposium held this past summer.

Featuring speaker Darius Coombs, a Wampanoag educator from Plimoth Plantation, whose grandmother Ruth West Coombs is featured on the cover of this issue.

In light of all that has passed before and since, however, Wampanoags today remain understandably skeptical.

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Two Nantucket Whalers in the Indian Ocean

By Dr. Jane Hooper, NHA Verney Fellow

The Asia and the Alliance departed Nantucket in September 1791 and came to anchor at the southern tip of Africa four months later. From there, the two ships would sail into the Indian Ocean, plying waters that were rapidly becoming part of the insatiable quest for whale oil that occupied so many in the newly independent United States. By the close of the eighteenth century, whale populations were dwindling in the Atlantic. Americans, including those on board the two whalers, were traveling farther from their natal shores in search of prey. As some of the first U.S. whalers to enter the Indian Ocean, the sailors on the Asia and the Alliance were only minor participants in American efforts to carve out a place for their nation on the global stage, but their words and actions speak to their active participation in this project. The archives of the Nantucket Historical Association contain copies of two ship logs, one kept on board the Asia (MSS 220-335) and the other on the Alliance (MSS 220-reel 62). These sources, recorded by sailors on board the vessels, trace their travels through the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The words reveal the writers’ curiosity about the foreign lands they encountered and how they understood their place as Americans in the world.

Captains Bartlett Coffin (on the Alliance) and Elijah Coffin (on the Asia) likely had some doubts about the success of this endeavor, which helps to explain why they sailed together for the entirety of their voyages, but they also ambitiously chose to visit a wide variety of locations in the ocean. The itineraries followed by the two vessels would anticipate the variety of places Americans would visit in coming decades: the isolated islands of Amsterdam and Kerguelen far to the south as well as the inhabited shores of Mauritius, Madagascar, and East Africa. These destinations would all be crucial zones of trade, provisioning, and hunting for later Americans in the ocean. The experiences of those on board the Alliance and Asia would foreshadow both the vast environmental impact of Western voyaging on the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean as well as future conflicts over resources throughout the region.

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After leaving Nantucket and spending a few weeks in the Canary Islands to refuel, the ships pressed onward to southern Africa. Throughout their time in the Atlantic, the sailors searched, usually in vain, for whales.

Whaleships tended to frequent isolated portions of the ocean where they would spend weeks or months circling the same patches of water, straining their eyes for the sight of a whale spout. During such periods, their only companions were the twenty (or fewer) men on board their ships. It must have been a relief when the Asia and the Alliance came to anchor at the Cape in January 1792. While their ships lay in Table Bay, the crews got to work replenishing supplies and their captains went ashore to learn more about the ocean to their east. Both log keepers, Andrew Pinkham and Silvanus (Sylvanus) Crosby, found the port city “verry beautifull” and enjoyed seeing both the “folks and

TWO NANTUCKET WHALERS

This 1846 painting, attributed to George Marshall, of the later ship Alpha shows it passing St. Paul’s Isle in the Indian Ocean, relatively close to the Kerguelan Islands, where the Asia and Alliance anchored in 1792–1793 (1992.389.1).

fashions” of Cape Town. While the port was crowded with a variety of European merchants, the whalemen lost little time in finding their own countrymen and, more specifically, those from their own island home.

Pinkham watched a group of American captains, all “Nantucket men,” standing solemnly at the grave of a Baltimore woman. She had been traveling to Mauritius with her family but sadly passed away before reaching her destination. The funeral at the Cape was a reminder of the dangers of life at sea as well as a testament to the U.S. mariners’ ability to identify with their national community abroad.

After the Asia and the Alliance left the Cape, they sailed beyond Madagascar and, after a month at sea, arrived at the volcanic islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul in the

southern Indian Ocean. The two islands, home to stark high peaks created by lava, jutted out of a vast and empty expanse of ocean. These isolated locales would seem unusual destinations for two Nantucket ships, but their captains were likely enticed by recent rumors of whales congregating offshore. When the Asia and the Alliance arrived at St. Paul on March 14, 1792, they discovered a “brig from Bengal” was already at anchor. They also learned that most of the ship’s sailors were Americans and were commanded by an American captain named Smith. The men were busy loading all the seal skins they had collected over the last eleven months, which they likely intended to trade for goods in the Far East.

Pinkham noted that these hunters had obtained 18,000 skins, while Crosby recorded the number as “15 thou-

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sand.” Either way, the sealers had managed to gain a sizable haul for relatively little labor, as it was bloody but not particularly challenging work to club the seals that sheltered on the island. The Nantucket men again appreciated this chance encounter with other Americans. The sealers exchanged provisions with those on board the Asia and Alliance. The whaling crews went on shore for grass to feed their livestock and to catch fish. The sailors of the Asia and Alliance also joined in the hunt for furs, grabbing skins they could use to keep themselves warm during the months they would spend in the southern Indian Ocean.

By 1836, upwards of three hundred men, many of them American, were reportedly visiting the two islands annually.

These sealers were not the first, nor the last, to visit the islands; within decades, the seal population was so depleted on St. Paul that Westerners were forced to move their operations to other Indian Ocean islands. Amsterdam and St. Paul also would become important destinations for merchants in search of provisions en route to Asia. By 1836, upwards of three hundred men, many of them American, were reportedly visiting the two islands annually. Along with these visitors came permanent non-human residents, ranging in size from rats to cattle, that were deposited both intentionally and accidentally. The cattle were voracious grazers and they would, along with imported sheep and goats, clear the grass that had coated the hillsides of Amsterdam. The islands also likely suffered deforestation from unmanaged fires set by visitors. The cumulative impact was catastrophic. By the close of the twentieth century, several species of endemic birds were extinct, and the most prominent inhabitants were the feral cattle that roamed Amsterdam.

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While these extinctions were in the future, the process of environmental destruction was already underway in 1792 when the Nantucket whalers witnessed American sealers placing thousands of seal skins on board their ship.

After this brief stop and a fruitless search for whales, the two ships continued into the eastern Indian Ocean and toward the “New Holland” whaling grounds off the coast of Australia. The whalers had more success hunting near Australia and the islands of Southeast Asia over the next few months. Brief stops for food punctuated the long weeks the crew spent at sea catching whales. The men wandered ashore on several tropical beaches in search of coconuts, wood, water, and tortoises to sustain their whaling efforts. When they did encounter people, such as those on “Princess Island” (near Java), the islanders were vaguely threatening, which encouraged the captains to stick with unpopulated tropical islands for refueling their vessels. The sailors would never have imagined that U.S. whaling activities in the eastern Indian Ocean would transform coastal settlements in Australia into a series of provisioning stations only a few decades later.

Five months after entering the Indian Ocean, the men enjoyed their first glimpse of the mountains of Mauritius, or Isle of France, as it was known to Americans. The ships anchored in the main port of Port Louis on July 27, 1792. Mauritius was home to a French colonial presence and the support of Western financial, medical, and police services on the island encouraged the captains to return to the island two more times during their cruise in the ocean. The men of the Asia and the Alliance were warmly greeted by countrymen who had arrived on the half a dozen U.S. vessels already in port. Their crews were busy loading provisions so the ships could continue their voyages to “Bengall,” Calcutta, and Canton. American merchants, taking advantage of the disruption created by European conflict

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This first page from the log of the ship Asia, keeper Sylvanus Crosby, shows the range the vessel traveled during its nearly two-and-a-halfyear voyage (MS220 Log 335).

Time in port, however, was not positive for all the men on board the Asia and the Alliance. When the ships returned to Mauritius in October after a brief whaling cruise, a doctor from the shore forcibly “nockolated [inoculated]” the sailors against smallpox which was raging on the island. The crew who experienced this medical treatment were incapacitated for several weeks as their already weak bodies struggled to recover. Those who had previously survived the virus enjoyed shore leave while at anchor, but their experiences were not uniformly positive either. Some of the sailors tried to prolong their time on Mauritius by escaping and finding employment elsewhere. One sailor named James Robinson had inexplicably managed to remove all his clothing from the vessel without anyone noticing before making his escape. When another sailor named John Griffin ran away, the “gard” on shore captured him when he attempted to board another ship in search of employment, and Griffin was placed in a French prison for the duration of their time in harbor. Robinson, by contrast, was never recovered, and the captain of the Alliance had to ship (hire) a Bostonian by the name of Isaac Colman, likely a runaway from a departed vessel.

throughout the 1790s, were heavily involved in the trafficking of Asian goods to the north Atlantic; Mauritius provided a handy half-way point for these ships crossing the Indian Ocean, and the ocean’s islands provided ready sources for seal pelts to use in trade. The Nantucket captains were invited to dine on board several American ships where they no doubt learned more of the lands and people of the Indian Ocean.

After their time in Port Louis, it seems that at least some of the whalemen were ready to return to sea and whaling. Although many Americans were charmed with Port Louis, Pinkham did not share their views. Upon their departure, Pinkham mentioned that he did not regret leaving the port, “the dirtyest hole that ever I saw or heard of.” His complaints were focused on the “the slothful French” colonists. Some of his complaints were pragmatic; while Port Louis offered Western-style eating establishments and bars, it also provided opportunities for sailors to imbibe alcohol and engage in immoral activities. By the time the ships returned to Mauritius for a third time in 1793, venereal disease was

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This map was published to coincide with the publicity over Captain James Cook’s circumnavigations and is one of the best maps to show his three voyages in great detail (MS1000 No. 38).

threatening the lives of several crew members. The sailors were drinking heavily and attempting to escape the ship with increasing frequency. Taking his final leave from the island, Pinkham “left without regret a set of people who will not stick at a lye [sic.].” This distaste for the French, in stark contrast to the compliments he paid to his fellow Americans, reveals the extent of his nationalist sentiments only years after independence.

When they left Mauritius for the first time in August 1792, the Asia and the Alliance sailed for five days to Île Sainte Marie, a small island off the east coast of Madagascar. The captains of the Asia and the Alliance likely learned of the opportunities for whaling from the French on Mauritius who had recently attempted to set up a whaling station in the region. The crew of the Asia and the Alliance were pleased to discover the waters full of “great numbers of humpbacks,” as French reports had promised. Between the months of July and October, pregnant humpback whales were known to enter the shallow waters of eastern Madagascar. Before they gave birth, the whales could be “wild” (or challenging to kill), but after they had their offspring, the mothers would be easier to hunt as they had to linger in the bay

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until their young grew sufficiently strong for the open ocean. For several weeks, the boats of the Asia and the Alliance circled the waters near Sainte Marie killing cows and their calves, even though they typically only processed the cows for their oil. One can only imagine the reaction of the islanders who likely observed both the constant fires on board the Nantucket whalers as they processed the whale flesh into oil as well as the bodies of newborn whale calves washing up on their shores.

The whalemen on board the Asia and the Alliance initially enjoyed a warm welcome from the inhabitants of Sainte Marie who boarded the whaleships in search of gifts and alcohol. Given this amicable interaction, it was a surprise when the islanders suddenly threatened to attack the Americans. A few days after the visit, the islanders amassed on the shore near the ships and began firing their guns. They then boarded canoes and began rapidly paddling toward the vessels at anchor, blowing conch shells and firing their guns. The crews quickly beat an escape from Madagascar as the sounds of shots rang out behind them. Crosby later thanked “the kind hand of providance [sic.]” for their salvation.

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It is difficult to uncover the exact circumstances behind this seemingly unprovoked attack, but throughout the 1790s, several large canoe raids led by Malagasy were observed in the Comoros and East Africa. Europeans described fleets of canoes, with perhaps thirty armed men on each, paddling from eastern Madagascar to be joined by more soldiers off northwestern Madagascar.

The men continued to the Comorian archipelago and the shores of East Africa where they would seize food and hold captives for ransom. These attacks reoccurred almost annually and passing Portuguese merchants were occasionally targeted. The sailors of the Asia and the Alliance had observed a similarly coordinated attack, and Pinkham was correct in noting that the Nantucket whalers were extremely lucky to escape. Given this and other negative interactions experienced by Americans in eastern Madagascar, it is unsurprising

that when American merchants and whalers returned to Madagascar in larger numbers in the 1820s and 1830s, they frequented the west coast of the island.

After the Asia and the Alliance had escaped from Madagascar, they returned to Mauritius for supplies before venturing back into the southern Indian Ocean. They departed with a small schooner, the Hunter, purchased in Port Louis to assist them in the shallow waters of their destination. The three ships sailed to the appropriately named sub-Antarctic island of Desolation (or, more officially, Kerguelen) Island for elephant seals which the captain hoped could be processed into oil.

The Nantucket whalers were following a route charted by the famous Captain James Cook less than a decade earlier. On December 18, 1792, Pinkham recorded the Alliance’s arrival at Christmas Harbor which had been depicted by Cook as a peaceful shelter for visit-

The Voyage of the Asia and the Alliance 1791-1793

Dr. Hooper’s map showing the range of voyage for the Alliance and Asia.

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ing ships. While he used Cook’s name for their first stop in Kerguelen, the crew did not receive as gentle of a welcome in the bay as Cook’s narrative had promised. Upon their arrival, the weather was so bad that they could not set foot on the island for several days. Challenges continued to haunt the crew for the weeks they remained in the “roaring forties,” an area of strong winds and rough waves that stretched across the southern latitudes of the Indian Ocean. The whalers dealt with months of “horrifying cold” and the “greatest abundance” of hail and snow. The crew was miserable and, to make matters worse, the captain of the Asia was

The whalers dealt with months of “horrifying cold” and the “greatest abundance” of hail and snow. The crew was miserable and, to make matters worse, the captain of the Asia was dying.

dying. On January 31, 1793, Captain Bartlett Coffin was struck with strong pains in his stomach, and on February 9 he died in “great agony,” according to Crosby. The next day, the crew carried their captain ashore and buried him “in a deasent manner,” although it must have been challenging to dig a grave in the frozen ground.

The visit could not be viewed as a success. During their time circling Kerguelen, the crew was forced to supplement salted provisions with fowl and sea lions which were found on shore in limited quantities. The crew killed dozens of elephant seals daily during the two and half months they spent near the islands, boiling their flesh to produce oil that was later sold for much lower prices than whale oil. They found few fur seals. It was brutal and monotonous work. Despite these challenges, 1

the Americans would be followed by the British and American sealers who would flock to the island throughout the nineteenth century. Following years of hunting, Western sealers would eradicate the population of fur seals on the Kerguelen island chain. The riches promised to those who proved hardy enough to survive proved enough temptation for Westerners to come, repeatedly, to this distant portion of the ocean in search of profits, no matter how desolate the island was.

After leaving Kerguelen, the Alliance and the Asia returned one last time to Mauritius in April 1793, where they sold the schooner, and embarked on a final whaling attempt off East Africa. Upon arriving in “Deligua” [Delagoa] Bay in June, the Nantucket whalemen discovered twelve other whale ships circling the region, including several hailing from Nantucket. These large numbers were not unusual; historians Rhys Richards and Thierry Du Pasquier have identified at least forty American, twenty-seven French, and fifty-three British vessels as whaling in Delagoa Bay between 1785 and 1805.1 A large portion of the crews on board these U.S. and French ships hailed from Nantucket. Having been at sea for several years, the crews of the Asia and the Alliance were at a real disadvantage compared to their countrymen. Several of the sailors were so sick with venereal disease that they ingested mercury in an attempt to cure themselves, while others buried their limbs in the sands of African beaches in the same hope. The ships did not have great luck whaling off southeast Africa for which they blamed the large number of other whalers operating in the region. These whaleships not only stressed supplies at sea but also the resources on a land where food was limited. In later years, Americans would have a firmer foothold in the region, as U.S. merchants set up trading posts along the East African coast, namely on Zanzibar island where they would monopolize commerce for a time. In 1793, however, the East

Rhys Richards and Thierry du Pasquier, “Bay Whaling off Southern Africa, c. 1785–1805,” South African Journal of Marine Science 8, no. 1 (June 1, 1989): 233.

34 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

TWO NANTUCKET WHALERS

Scan of a miniature portrait of Andrew Pinkham (1767–1840), keeper of the log for Alliance’s 1791–1794 voyage (SC692).

African communities were not prepared to deal with this onrush of demands from visiting whalers.

In a quest for provisions and firewood, the U.S. captains directed their ships to enter the “English River” of Delagoa Bay where they anchored near a small Portuguese outpost. While in the river, a Dutch privateer sailed into the bay and blockaded their exit. Fortunately for the Nantucket whalemen, the privateer had already seized two other vessels, the Penn (or William Penn) and Greyhound, as “vessels of their French enemy,” and the Dutch lacked the manpower to take any more prizes. The American captains beat a hasty retreat from the Indian Ocean. After this disappointing ending to their trip, the two whale ships returned to the Atlantic, making a brief stop at Saint Helena Island for supplies.

As they neared the United States, the ships halted in the Caribbean where the whalers sold some oil and queried about the safety of shipping lanes for their return voyage to New England. Their stores depleted and having lost one captain, the two ships slowly made their way back to Nantucket, although neither log keeper wrote of the last leg of this journey.

After completing the long and dangerous voyage, neither Andrew Pinkham nor Silvanus Crosby seems to have ever returned to the Indian Ocean.

Records held in the Nantucket Historical Association archives reveal that Pinkham was later a captain on board a Pacific whaler, the President, in 1797 and 1799. On his second voyage, the ship was seized by privateers near Gibraltar; he was eventually released after several months of imprisonment. There is no evidence in the NHA collections that Crosby

ever returned to sea; as he was already in his forties when the Asia departed in 1791, it seems likely that Crosby was content to remain on Nantucket after his return.

The experiences of those onboard the Asia and the Alliance suggest both opportunity as well as hardship awaiting the many Americans, including Nantucket men, who would dare to sail into the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century. By 1850, more than 1,500 merchant and whaling ships would depart from U.S. ports and enter the western Indian Ocean. While fewer New England vessels sailed directly from Nantucket, numerous men born on the island set sail on other ships as captains and sailors. American merchants rushed into a variety of Indian Ocean ports, including those on Mauritius, in western Madagascar, and along East Africa where they established bustling commercial networks. Nineteenth-century U.S. whale ships would become regular visitors to isolated islands such as Amsterdam or those of the Seychelles. Travel in the ocean would remain challenging, but as supply stations became more numerous and information about the geography of the ocean was gathered, voyages proceeded more rapidly and were more productive. The earlier visits of two Nantucket whaleships provide us with an invaluable snapshot of a region transforming under the pressures of global trade. Environmental changes, initially noted by Crosby and Pinkham, would accelerate while conflicts over resources in the ocean increased as Westerners attempted to possess many of the lands that were visited by the Asia and the Alliance.

nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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NHA Publications For more information or to purchase an NHA publication, please call (508) 228-1894, ext. 138, or visit nantucketmusuemshop.org

AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 21 A Thousand Leagues of Blue: The Whaling Voyages of Charles and Susan Veeder of Nantucket

By Betsy Tyler This beautifully illustrated, 256-page hardcover publication is the true story of the trials and tribulations of a family enmeshed in the whaling industry and the ensuing drama and destruction wrought by this brutal pursuit.

Limited Edition: $250; Hardcover: $35

NOW AVAILABLE IN THE NHA MUSEUM SHOP

COMING MAY 2020

Scrimshaw on Nantucket: The Collection of the Nantucket Historical Association by Dr. Stuart M. Frank features more than 800 scrimshaw artifacts from the NHA’s world-class collection, newly photographed in stunning detail by island photographer Jeff Allen.

From NHA Research Fellow Barbara Ann White, Disturber of Tradition: A Portrait of Anna Gardner traces the history of an abolitionist, suffragist, and champion of equal education. Gardner’s contributions include her successful efforts to help integrate Nantucket public schools before the Civil War and her courageous work in freedmen’s schools during and after the Civil War.

Limited Edition: $250; Hardcover: $65 Under Sun, Stars and Sails by Marsha Hall Brown is the story of a 19th-century family’s real-life adventures at sea during two whaling voyages. This intimate account tells a unique story of Nantucket whaling master, Captain Joseph Marshall and his wife, Malvina Pinkham Marshall.

This publication was supported by the NHA. Hardcover: $30 36 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

Educational Programs thrive in the new Discovery Center Thanks to the long-term support from The Community Foundation for Nantucket’s ReMain Nantucket Fund, Nantucket Golf Club, M.S. Worthington Foundation, Cape Cod 5, and many private donors, the NHA can present a robust and interconnected series of winter programming serving our year-round community. The ability to broaden the scope is in part because of the decision to relocate and increase the size of the Discovery Center. Repeating are successful programs such as high school internships, “Museum in My School” classroom teaching, school vacation week activities, free school visits, free admission for the community and our popular lecture series. Developing programs include an after-school teen “Drop-In” Space and the NHA’s “We All Speak Moby Dick” multicultural reading event.

HIGH SCHOOL INTERNSHIPS

CAREER TO SCHOOL

After-school paid mentorships catering to 10-12 students.

January – April, 2 hours X 2 days X 10 weeks

Working with the NHS, seniors will work in the museum 4 days per week. They will identify a project of merit and apply themselves to research, design, and execution.

Each year, the interns work on a collaborative project. This year, the group will “produce” the community event “We All Speak Moby-Dick” providing students with skills that will ready them for college and career. Additionally, students are mentored in public speaking, financial awareness, and museum and curatorial affairs, while working in a professional milieu. Students are paid a stipend, which is supported in part by an endowed gift from Kathryn Salmanowitz.

AFTER-SCHOOL TEEN (HOMEWORK) SPACE The Discovery Center is offered as an alternative location to do homework and study.

January – June, 2:30-5:30P.M.

VACATION WEEK PROGRAMS February and April are designed for family learning This NHA staple continues with a free week of children’s programming in the Discovery Center in February and April.

New in 2020 will be a revamped Discovery Center with more interactive programs and play spaces.

FREE LECTURES in the Discovery Center February to May This is an opportunity for island residents to listen to and engage in a range of interesting topics.

This popular lecture series continues with free lectures on a variety of topics.

Students have expressed interest in a drop-in center/homework space. The expansion of the Discovery Center provides an opportunity to launch a pilot program whereby teens can congregate in a safe and educational environment this winter.

multicultural reading

“MUSEUM IN MY SCHOOL”

Select passages are read in eight different languages.

Appropriate for all ages.

Classroom activities that touch every student K-5th grade.

September – April We are incredibly fortunate to be invited into the classrooms of every K-5th grade class. This important touchpoint is highly treasured as we impart age-appropriate content. The program has expanded with increased hours plus each program module has been updated to meet curriculum standards.

In addition, students visit the museum and historic sites.

There is nothing more satisfying than getting a wave from a 3rd-grader in the frozen food aisle at the grocery store!

ENRICHMENT CLUSTERS, GRADES 3-5 February – April

“WE ALL SPEAK MOBY-DICK”

March 28 This community event celebrates the diversity on the island with different communities reading the same passages from Moby-Dick in eight languages, all in different galleries around the museum. Readers of all ages participate. Last year was a tremendous success and we expect that this has all the ingredients to build over time. Our high school interns will work in tandem with our committee of community leaders to ensure another successful year!

FREE ADMISSION to the Whaling Museum for the island community repeats.

February – April

This 8-week program focuses on a specific area within the NHA. Limited to no more than 9 students, they self-select a project, and work with NHA educators to learn and present. nha.org | Nantucket Historical Association

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MEMBERSHIP

Member Stories SHARE YOUR NHA STORY Do you have a memorable tale to tell? Contact Lexi Norton at lexi@nha.org

ANNE AND JACK WARNER “We joined the NHA the same year we bought our first home on the island back in 1982. One of the great joys of Nantucket is our truly unique historical legacy, so we were eager to learn all that we could through the NHA’s programs and resources.

We soon discovered that the NHA offered us far more than its wonderful museum, tours, and historic homes. Through the NHA, we met dozens of fascinating and well-informed islanders with indepth knowledge and stories to tell. We made new friends and in recent years have made the NHA a key part of our social lives, attending concerts, lectures, rooftop events, and more.

Beyond all of that, our even greater gratitude goes to the NHA’s Research Library and staff. In writing his historical narrative Tom Never’s Ghost, Jack spent countless hours in the library, exploring the NHA photo collection and gathering never-before-published information on the eastern quarter of the island. Libby Oldham, Ralph Henke, and so many others shared their great expertise and encouragement.

If anyone asks, ‘should I join and support the NHA?’ we tell them that if you really want to be part of this special place, you absolutely must do so!”

— Anne and Jack Warner

NORMA BURTON “After retiring from jobs in New Jersey, Bob and I spent almost ten years sharing time in Montclair, New Hampshire, and in Nantucket. The year we spent nine months on island, we decided to sell the Montclair house and make Nantucket our home. Although we kept busy with many activities—sailing, biking, scalloping, and family visits—I found that I wanted to contribute a bit more to the community.

The Whaling Museum intrigued me, and I applied as a volunteer. I don’t remember the first assignments I had, but I do know that I read one ship’s logbook and noted the items required to be put into the computer.

The ship had developed a leak, and many pages were devoted to how often the pump worked to drain the bilge. I copied many crew lists, first by hand, as they were so large I had them laid out on a big table and then typed them into the computer. Eventually, I moved to the Research Library on Fair Street and had many diverse and interesting tasks. It was always a pleasure to walk in and be greeted by Libby Oldham— such a wonderful woman. I no longer volunteer, but the Whaling Museum is an important part of Nantucket for us and for all of our family.”

— Norma Burton

38 Historic Nantucket | Fall 2019

The Nantucket Historical Association presents

nantucket by design save the dates: July 30 – August 1, 2020 presenting sponsor

“ We are looking forward to building on the amazing success of Nantucket by Design by introducing new themes, speakers, and events that celebrate Nantucket’s unique impact on design.”

— Kelly Williams, Nantucket by Design Chair 2020

Follow us @NantucketbyDesign #NANTUCKETBYDESIGN

Shop at the Museum this holiday season and support the NHA NHA members receive 10% off every purchase

Gift NHA exclusives, reproduction scrimshaw, NHA publications, nautical children’s toys, locally made whale carvings, and more.

Open Daily, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. 13 Broad Street | 508-228-1894, ext. 138 | nantucketmuseumshop.org

Spend this Holiday Season with the NHA FESTIVAL OF WREATHS Preview Party, Tuesday, November 26 | 5:30 – 7:30 P.M. Wednesday, November 27 – Sunday, December 1 | Open to the Public

Festival of Wreaths 2018-19 Chairs David Handy and Donald Dallaire

The 21st annual Festival of Wreaths at the Whaling Museum will commence with a Preview Party on November 26, where guests bid on their favorite wreaths to benefit the NHA’s year-round outreach efforts. More than 90 hand-crafted wreaths made by members of the Nantucket community are on display during the week of Thanksgiving.

Closed Thursday, November 28, Thanksgiving Day Visit NHA.org for hours

FESTIVAL OF TREES Preview Party, Thursday, December 5 | 6 – 8 P.M. December 6 – 31 | Open to the Public The Festival of Trees Preview Party is the most highly anticipated event of the Nantucket holiday season, and the 26th anniversary of this celebration is sure to be no exception.

Featuring nearly 100 trees designed with a combination of island ingenuity and holiday spirit, this stunning display transforms the Whaling Museum for the month of December.

Festival of Trees 2019 Chairs Neil and Lauren Marttila

The NHA is grateful for the lead sponsorship of Marine Home Center along with support from many local businesses.

Closed December 25, Christmas Day

HOLIDAY HOMES Friday – Monday, Nov 29 – Dec 30 | 11 A.M. – 4 P.M. | Open to the Public For the 2nd annual year, take part in the excitement of touring three upper Main Street historic homes, beautifully decorated for the holiday season. The NHA will showcase the Hadwen House, Thomas Macy House, and Greater Light with festive holiday trimmings.

Closed December 25, Christmas Day

HOLIDAY MAGIC Saturday, December 14, 5 P.M. – 8 P.M. | Free for Children and $5 for Adults This family event features holiday carols, seasonal treats, and child-friendly crafts in the Whaling Museum amid the festive atmosphere of the Festival of Trees. This community event is free for all children and NHA members and just $5 for nonmember adults.

PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT NANTUCKET, MA AND ADDITIONAL ENTRY OFFICES

P.O. BOX 1016, NANTUCKET, MA 02554–1016

Celebrating

125 YEARS of the

Nantucket Historical Association

Preserving and interpreting the history of Nantucket through its programs, collections, and properties, in order to promote the island’s significance and foster an appreciation of it among all audiences.

Economic Impact To provide value for over 100,000 visitors annually, the NHA manages a $6 million operating budget of which 70% is reinvested by supporting 30 year-round staff, 50 seasonal staff, and over 100 on-island contractors.