The islanders in Elizabeth Coffin' s painting of nearly JOO years ago are a hardy breed ready to go scalloping or seaweed gathering, as here, or to ship out in one of the schooners in the background- like their successors today. Courtesy Na ntucket Historical Association.
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM OF HISTORY by Peter Stanford class of merchant aristocrats th rough the whale fi shery, using Dipping and nodding to the rising chop, the big schooner burst their natural harbors and experienced people to good advaninto sight between rainsqualls, a curl of white water rolling away tage. At first people in the New World caught whales off the ir from her kni fe-sharp bows. Aboard the ferry from Woods Hole, beaches . With the invention of the fl oatin g tryworks in the people looked up from their crossword puzzles and detecti ve novels- " There's the Shenandoah!" And so it was, of course, late eighteenth century the whalers could go furth er afi e ld , reduc ing the ir catch to whale o il in barre ls. After decades o f her yards braced sharp against the topmast backstays, her wet, growth , in the mid-nineteenth century the commerc ial g lory stretched canvas gleaming dull y against the grey-green island passed from the islands. Ships grew bi gger, that was part of worl d of Nantucket Sound , off the south shore of Cape Cod. the problem , but only part. Ships could be, and were, ho icked Shenandoah! A name to conj ure with in sailing ship history, across the sandbars by camels which reduced their draft. No, and a vessel new-born in our own century, maki ng hi story in the main thing was the mainl and railroad , which New Bedfo rd her own right , as her owner-skipper ex plains a few pages on had , and the islands, of course, did not. in this SEA HISTORY. While the whaling ga me was on, Nantucket and Edgartown ***** ships and men coursed the world ' s oceans, and the islanders The first people on the scene get to name things, but few would developed a notable intern ationalism. It was as thou gh they begrudge Bartholemew Gosnold his naming Cape Cod , Martha's were aloof enough from the land masses to reject ideas of Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands in his visit in the early summer territori al dominance , and enough part of the ocean world to of 1602. Many Native American place names survi ve, and indeed fee l the world 's wideness . predominate in the islands, from Nantucket itself to Menemsha Pond on Martha's Vineyard , Naushon and Nashawena in the Eli With their sea empire lost, Nantucket and the Vineyard zabeths and dozens more. Gosnold himself strikes one as hav ing tow ns became centers of vi sitation by people seeking brac ing a happy touch with things. He regarded the Indians with real resea air, and seeking renewal in the arti stic and reli g ious enspect, and he seems to have led his own people with something campments that grew up in the cosmopolitan culture that had quite other than the hectoring, blustery style adopted by too many taken root. And all the time the life of the ordinary islanders, Europeans let loose in the Americas. American yeomen , went on-growing crops, building boats, The delectable islands he stumbled on were settled late. fis hing the seas and shallows , connected to the wider world Captain John Underhill , writing a generation later, in 1638, by the ubiquitous ¡schooners that thro nged their waters. observed: " Nahanticot, Martins Vineyard , Pequeet, Narragan* * * * * sett Bay, Eli zabeth Ilands, all these places are uninhabited . . . . '' (You ' II note " Martin " for " Martha ," a confusion that perTwenty years ago, Norma Stanford and I came to Nantucket sisted for some time-but the names of the people who moved aboard the schooner we then had , Athena. We had come to there tended to stick, as witness the Mayhews of the Vineseek Ed Stackpole's help in a great undertaking in New York . yard-the ori ginal settlers-and the Coffin s of Nantucket, still Ed was rowed out to Athena by Charlie Sayle, schoonerman very much around.) But settled they ultimately were, and a par excellence. What a meeting we had aboard , that .glori ous mighty world wide trade eventuall y came to center on the isAugust afternoon ! Its consquences still continue, as does Ed 's lands-the deep-sea whaling trade. and Charlie ' s interest in the work of history. You ' II meet these Na ntucket and the Vineyard became fa mous and bred up a islanders furth er on in thi s SEA HISTORY. J, SEA HI STORY , WINT ER 1986-87
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