The island of Nantucket, dropped in the Atlantic, everyone has heard
of, but few visit. We are told by tradition that it was originally
formed by the mythical Indian giant, Manshope, who, when he was tired
of smoking, emptied here into the sea the ashes from his pipe. It was
also the smoke from this pipe which created the fogs so plentifully
abounding around the place. These fogs are very dense, and it is said
of a certain noted Nantucket skipper going away on a long voyage that
he marked one of them with his harpoon, and returning to the harbor
three years later, at once recognized the same fog by his private
mark. Old Manshope, the giant, was the tutelary genius of all the
Indian tribes on the islands of Vineyard Sound and the adjacent
mainland, and his home was on the cliffs of Gay Head, in an ancient
extinct volcanic crater, now called the Devil's Den. He feasted here
on the flesh of whales, which he broiled on live coals, obtaining fuel
by uprooting huge trees. His firelight, thus made, is said to have
been the earliest beacon seen by superstitious sailors passing the
headland, and as it flickered in his midnight orgies, they solemnly
shook their heads, saying, "Old Manshope is at it again." This
powerful giant seems to have waded around Vineyard and Nantucket
Sounds and regulated all the affairs of the neighborhood. But finally
the sailors and colonists became so numerous that he waxed very wroth.
With a single stroke of his ponderous club he separated "No Man's
Land" from "the Vineyard," and then transformed his children into
fishes. His wife lamented this cruelty, and he seized and threw her
over to the mainland on Sakonnet Point, where she still lies, a
misshapen rock. Then the disgusted giant vanished forever.
The Norsemen first named the island Nautikon, appropriately meaning
the "Far Away Land." From this, on an early map, it appears as
Natocko, then as Nantukes, and finally it became Nantucquet, from
which the present name is derived. When Gosnold came along in 1602, he
first saw its great eastern promontory, Sankaty Head, describing the
island as covered with oak trees and populous with Indians. After the
original grant was made to Thomas Mayhew, he sold it in 1659 to the
"ten original purchasers" for £30 and two beaver hats, one for himself
and one for his wife, he reserving one-tenth. These purchasers
colonized the island, Thomas Macy, a Quaker who fled from Puritan
persecution in New England, beginning the first settlement, and Peter
Foulger, who came there somewhat later, had a daughter, who was the
mother of Benjamin Franklin. John G. Whittier, the good Quaker poet,
thus sings of Macy's flight to the island:
"Far round the bleak and stormy cape
The vent'rous Macy passed,
And on Nantucket's naked isle
Drew up his boat at last."
Macy landed at the site of the town of Nantucket, then the Indian
village of Wesco, or the "White Stone," which lay on the shore of the
harbor, and afterwards had a wharf built over it. The whale fishery,
which made Nantucket's prosperity, began early, in boats from the
island, and the population had increased by the Revolution to about
forty-five hundred, Sherburne, as it then was called, being the chief
whaling port in the world, with one hundred and fifty whale ships. The
island was covered with trees, but they were all destroyed during the
Revolution, and it was then made almost a desert, losing also the
greater part of its population and much of the fishery fleet. There
was a revival subsequently, and Nantucket reached its maximum
prosperity in 1840, with nearly ten thousand population. Afterwards
came the final decline of whaling, and the sandy, almost treeless
island now has about three thousand people, who depend for a living
chiefly on the summer visitors. It is without a whaleship, but it has
many snug cottages, and those going for health and rest can well say,
with Whittier:
"God bless the sea-beat island!
And grant forever more
That charity and freedom dwell,
As now, upon her shore."
Nantucket is southeast of Martha's Vineyard and south of Cape Cod, the
sea between them being known as Nantucket Sound. The island is an
irregular spherical triangle, sixteen miles long and three to four
miles wide, the outer coast bent around like a bow, as the Gulf
Stream currents wash the shores. To the south and east are the great
Nantucket Shoals, dangerous to the navigator, but acting as a
breakwater, preventing the island being entirely washed away by the
sea, which makes constant encroachments. The harbor of Nantucket town
presents sandy beaches and bluff shores, rising with some boldness
from the water, the sand dunes stretching away in regular lines behind
them. The town is snugly located at the bottom of a deep and secure
harbor, having a breakwater outside, and its chief daily event is the
arrival of the steamboat from the mainland, from which it is
frequently cut off for days together by winter ice and stormy weather.
There are various ancient and dilapidated wharves, fronting a
collection of strange-looking old gabled houses, many having raised
platforms on top of the peaked roofs, where the former inhabitants
used to go up to watch for vessels. It is a healthy place, with modern
hotels, tree-lined, pleasant streets, many gardens, and a magnificent
climate, the winter rigors corrected by the closeness of the Gulf
Stream. The surrounding country, outside the town, is almost
everywhere a flat prairie-land, with the one horizon all around, of
the distant blue sea. A narrow-gauge railroad leads over to the
southeastern coast at Siasconset, the quaint original gem of the
island, familiarly called 'Sconset, a curious little village of
fishermen's huts, existing now about the same as in the primitive
days. Its outlook is over the South Shoals, but not a sail is to be
seen, for these shoals are the grave of every vessel getting upon
them. It is a dismal reminder of vanished maritime prestige to see
about the Nantucket coasts the gaunt ribs of the old hulks, half
sunken in the sands where they have been cast ashore, as year by year
they gradually break up in the great storms and slowly disappear. In
the Boston _Daily Advertiser_ a poet plaintively mourns the fate of
these marine skeletons seen "at midnight off the coast":
"Half-tombed in drifting sands upon the shore
Are ye, and heedless lashed by angry seas,
As through your blackened ribs the breeze
Exultant plays, and crested breakers roar,
And screeching sea-gulls round thee, prostrate, soar.
Wert thou allured by sighs of moaning trees,
As sirens sought to charm with songs like these
Ulysses and his brave companions o'er
To reefs deep hidden, silent, save in storm?
The rolling thunder of the sullen surge,
The mournful sobbing of the gathering gale,
Plain answer make, as round the spectre form
Of these gaunt skeletons they ceaseless scourge
The giant's battered coat of oaken mail!"