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NANTUCKET
ISLAND, MASSACHUSETTS HISTORY
"What wonder,
then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the
sea
for a livelihood!... Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the
Nantucketer's.
For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires. "
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The history of Nantucket as
discovered by the first off islander begins when Captain
Bartholomew Gosnold an English Mariner chartered the “elbow of sand-“
and discovered it
in 1602. Approximately 1,500 Native
Americans
populated the Island and
began the interest in pursuing
whales at first just from the
shore.
The white man’s approach to
Nantucket came around 1641 when Lord Sterling
sold the island to
Thomas Mayhew in 1641, subsequently Mayhew broke the the
Nantucket
enterprise into 27 shares, the holders of which became the first
white residents
of Nantucket.
Wars, disease and plain bad luck lead
to the demise of the Native American
ending with the
death of the
last man with Indian blood, a half breed, in 1854.
Quakers. Whaling Industry. By this time the two most
important events
in the history of Nantucket, the
coming of
Quakerism and the pursuit of
the sperm whale to the western oceans
had
gone into
decline.
The whaling industry had prospered through
the
18th century
with the interruption
of the good times
during the
Revolutionary War and its resulting
loss of ships causing
huge
monetary losses to the island economy.
Recovery of the
whaling
industry after the
war of 1812 began the platinum age of whaling.
This second
prosperous period for
Nantucket ended with a combination
of events, the great fire
of 1846, the discovery
of gold in
California in 1849, an easy trip for men used to
spending two years
before
the mast and the discovery outside of Boston of a method
to
refine the oil coming out
of the earth in Pennsylvania.
Whale oil
lamps and sperm candles were now a thing of
the past. But the great
gift of the whaling days, Nantucket’s neighborhood’s and the
assets
represented in the fine homes built during the 1830’s were intact,
and the money
to improve or change them into something modern was
non-existent as the population disappeared there was no demand for
new houses when old ones could be had for the asking or a small
price. By 1870 the only activity at the docks was the beginnings of
the
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