Historic Nantucket, July 1980, Vol. 28 No. 1

George A. Grant — Whaleman First Curator of the Whaling Museum THE MAN WHO brought William F. Macy's dream of a Nantucket Whaling Museum to a reality was a man eminently qualified for such an assignment—George A. Grant—whaleman. Here was a Nantucketer who had lived in the full tradition of the whaling industry. Born on October 28, 1857, on the Island of Upolo, in the Samoan or Navigator group in the South Seas, (where his mother had been placed ashore for the event by her husband, Captain Charles Grant), the first sounds he heard were the surgings of the sea on the coral reefs near the hut where he was born. Three weeks later, "wrapped in banana leaves", as he so often described the incident, he was taken aboard his father's ship, the Mohawk, of Nantucket, held proudly in his mother's arms.

Fiction, with all its beguiling, would not be quite equal to the re­ counting of the story of his parents, Captain Charles Grant and his wife, Nancy. Captain Grant was one of the greatest whaling masters out of Nantucket or any port in the 19th century. Mrs. Grant spent thirty-two years at sea aboard whaleships with her husband. The couple's three children were born in the far Pacific Ocean. Charles, the eldest of the three, was born in 1850 on the famous Pitcairn Island; her daughter, Ella, was bom at the Bay of Islands in 1855; and, as recounted, George A. was born in 1857 at Upolo Island.

Following Captain Grant's arrival in the Samoan group to recover his wife and baby son, the Mohawk continued her regular cruisings for whales before finally re-crossing the Pacific to round Cape Horn, homeward bound. Fitting out at Nantucket for another voyage never materialized, as the owners sold the ship to New York. But Captain Grant's reputation was well known and he was offered the command of the New Bedford whaleship Japan, and sailed on May 31, 1859, for the Pacific Ocean.

But Mrs. Grant found her life ashore on Nantucket, with her children, so completely unlike her years at sea with her husband, that she determined to join the Japan. Taking the youngest child, George, she s a i l e d f r o m N e w Y o r k t o M e l b o u r n e , A u s t r a l i a , o n t h e s h i p B e l l e of T h e West. She had received a letter from Captain Grant telling her he in­ tended to be at the Bay of Islands in a certain month in 1860, and here the family was reunited. News that the Civil War had broken out was learned several months after the Fort Sumter incident, when the Japan was cruising in the South Pacific.