Nantucket Love Stories

By Xlibris US

The sky swirled angrily, terrifyingly, reaching with skeleton fi ngers to pluck her from her wretched existence. Phebe fell to her knees and prayed, prayed for an answer to this Apocalypse, which was surely directed at her alone. And when at last she found the courage to look up, it became clear what God wanted of her. She had suffered enough. She had endured loneliness enough. She had done her penance for whatever sin she had committed. God would shed his mercy on her at last. Phebe knew what his wish for her was, and she was prepared to comply.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499051469

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Jim Patrick

Originally published by Inky Dink Press, Nantucket, Massachusetts, August, 1991. Second printing July, 1992. Third printing June, 1994.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except where permitted by law.

For more information please visit www.nantucketlovestories.com

The First Tea-Sociable on Nantucket and Obed’s Will are of anonymous authorship and are reprinted from records provided by the Nantucket Historical Association research library, Jacqueline Haring, curator. The introductory letter to The First Tea-Sociable on Nantucket and text as it appeared in the original Sept. 29, 1877 issue of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror are reprinted with permission of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror and Ottaway News, Inc., Mr. Peter Stone, President.

Cover design by Maria Rosario B. Legarde

Book design by Jenelyn Pigar

Photo of Jim Patrick by Cristina Arthur

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/19/2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Maushope’s Island

Maushope’s Island

The Prophecy

The Prophecy

The Bargain

The Bargain

The Vigil

The Vigil

The Horseshoe

The Horseshoe

Abiah’s Story

Abiah’s Story

Pearl Street

Pearl Street

The First Nantucket Tea-Sociable

The First Nantucket Tea-Sociable

Phebe’s Vow

Phebe’s Vow

Quaker Rose

Quaker Rose

Black Cat

Black Cat

The Mutineer’s Wife

The Mutineer’s Wife

Obed’s Will

Obed’s Will

Captain Dudley

Captain Dudley

Nathan Quibby

Nathan Quibby

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Many researchers, historians, and authors have kept these stories alive, and deserve my thanks. I highly recommend further reading among their works, which are listed in the bibliography at the end of the book. The staff at the Nantucket Atheneum Library were patient and helpful, and provided a very pleasant atmosphere. The library itself is where I found almost everything I used, and is a treasure.

Dick Burns is responsible for the irreplaceable and impeccable criticism of the first draft. He made me work twice as hard but his input turned a ragged collection of half-baked stories into a casserole. Crane’s Duplicating printed the original version, and the assistance of Richard Price and Marie Crabtree was invaluable. Nantucket Journal originally published Phebe’s Vow along with an illustration by Kerry Hallam, and the original printings featured charming illustrations by Marjory Trott. I got good publication or research advice from Helen Chase, Roy Flanders, Peter Viera of Poet’s Corner Press, Gayl Michael and Jacqueline Haring of the Nantucket Historical Association, Suzanne and Jerry Daub at Yesterday’s Island, Marianne Stanton at the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, and Mrs. Marriott King.

And as a special note, along the way I, like many other Nantucket authors, got important advice, encouragement, and material help from Mimi Beman, longtime owner of Mitchell’s Book Corner, whom the island has since lost, and whom we all greatly miss. Thankfully, as of this writing, Mitchell’s and Nantucket Bookworks both survive, and have partnered to continue their support and nourishment of the island’s literary community.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

– Wm. Shakespeare,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Introduction

These stories are taken from the history, legend, and lore of Nantucket. But this is not a history book, nor is it, strictly speaking, a romance. Love has many faces. Not every story is pretty, and not every ending is happy. Love weaved as complex and mystifying a web around these characters from yesterday as it does today. It was their struggles in love’s web, rather than the history itself, that fascinated me and led to the writing of this book.

With minor exceptions, which are explained in the bibliography, the people in these pages lived and the events really took place. The book is organized chronologically, and the stories introduced with anecdotes and bits of history that I found interesting, in hopes that the reader might experience a real sense of the history of this special, ragged crescent on the map, as well as its romance.

For various reasons I left out a few potential stories - for instance, the courtship of 350-pound Deborah Chase. This robust maiden bopped a Tory guard over the head with a water bucket for trying to enforce the British curfew law during the Revolution. Later, she upended a dray loaded with oil casks when the driver made lewd and inappropriate conversation with her. Finally, she threw a bridegroom into a vat of whale oil when he, fresh from his betrothal and in a carousing mood, stole a kiss from her on a dare from his groomsmen. I could find no details on Deborah’s courtship, but she was indeed later married and presumably gave birth to a brood of future shot-putters.

A variety of tales from the South Seas tempted me. There is probably an intriguing story behind the behavior of Captain Richard Cathcart of the whaleship Otter who discovered that his wife was having an affair with the ship’s owner. He sailed into the nearest port, discharged the crew, sold the ship, and presumably headed for the South Seas where the women were tanned, naked, and reputedly as free with their affections as was his wife. But this is as much about the story as I could find.

Hearing such tales, the wives of Nantucket often tried to make their husbands into Plum-puddingers, or whalemen who sailed only the Atlantic. The shrewd wives were aware that South America’s tip, Cape Horn, derived its name from the belief that Nantucket men hung their morals upon that peninsula like a hat when they entered the Pacific, and picked them up again on their return. Witness the fate of the Bounty mutineers. Discovered on Pitcairn Island by Nantucket whaleman Mayhew Folger, these men had lived short but happy lives with a dozen native women brought along to further that end. All but one of the mutineers were eventually killed by the six native men whom the mutineers shortsightedly brought along also.

Perhaps more disturbing to homebound wives was the story of the young captain who sailed into a South Sea harbor, fell in love with a dusky unclad maiden there, sold his load of sugar and spice, and married her. He sent a measly share of the profits home, along with a ‘Dear Jane’ letter.

There is also the story of William Cary, shipwrecked on the Fijis. Twice spared from death at the hands of cannibals through his knack of befriending them, he nonetheless spent nine years longing to return home before finally seeing that dream come to pass. Although his diary includes no mention of a personal love interest among the natives, he fails to fully explain why one David Whippey, a Nantucket friend encountered during his travels, stayed. The reader can only conjecture what romances the tradewinds brought to Mr. Whippey, but they were obviously sufficient to insure his stay.

Stories such as these undoubtedly prompted the adventures of Nancy Grant. She married her husband Charles at the tender age of sixteen and immediately made an unheard of demand - a honeymoon to Provincetown. But young Nancy was just warming up. Miserable and lonely during Charles’ first voyage, she insisted on accompanying him on the next. She bore a second child aboard ship. Left behind yet again with this child on Charles’ third voyage, she was undaunted. She sailed to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on muleback carrying the toddler, and met her husband’s ship at the Bay of Islands. Charles was not surprised, and Nancy bore him two more children on that voyage. Captain Grant was evidently no worse for the company, for he became the most prolific of all whalegatherers. The aforementioned second child, George, became curator of the Nantucket Whaling Museum, a man truly born to the task.

The first escort service on record was launched by a ne’er-do-well named Benny Cleveland. His solution to the increasing number of wives left to face winter’s howling storms alone while their husbands were at sea was an advertisement in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror to the effect that he was available to ‘sleep at the home of timid ladies for fifteen cents a night, or two nights for a quarter.’ His unique occupation spawned a flurry of envious poems, most notably one entitled Benny Cleveland’s Job, wherein the author bemoans his own dull fate and notes Benny’s excessive rates - saying he would gladly undertake the chore for free.

And finally, blurring the border between reality and fantasy, as any good love story should, is the recent account of a happily married grandmother and a portrait hanging in the Whaling Museum. Haunted by a powerful attraction to the whaling captain in the portrait and a recurring dream of swimming in a black, phosphorescent sea with a stabbing pain in her side - she learns that the wife of the captain had suspected her husband of falling in love with a mermaid. The wounded wife had a silver-tipped harpoon fashioned, and hired a man who specialized in such evil deeds to kill the mermaid. It was evidently done, as the grandmother’s mysterious attraction and pain attests.

As to the stories I have included, the Indian romances were passed down through storytelling, and recorded later by the settlers. Wauwinet, Wonoma, and Autopscot were all alive at the time of white settlement. All of the colonial characters were real. The events have either been described in the first person, or by authors whose research led them to believe they actually took place. In only minor cases were character names created by me; this was because their names were not mentioned in the histories. In those cases I attempted to choose family names that would have been appropriate with the place and period. In only one instance where the source text described actual characters - the Newbegin family - was the line between fact and fiction hazy. No disclaimer identified any portion of the story as fictional, as a novel would, but neither was any source material cited, as a proper history would. The story was already a century old at the time of its retelling, and thus probably derived from the swirl of hearsay that no doubt surrounded the Newbegins’ lives.

At the end of the book I have listed all the sources I used to arrive at these stories, and the reader may find them as enjoyable as I did. In addition, I explained any discrepancies or character names created, so as to separate historical authenticity from fiction. While I cannot claim to have undertaken a definitive historical text, my intention is that the reader come away with an accurate picture of early Nantucket history.

I should note here that I have found the waters of Nantucket historical documentation to be as treacherous as the rips around her shores, and many a researcher has come hard upon the shoals of fancy rather than fact. I hereby launch my lifeboat. When presented with conflicting accounts, I cast overboard any that appeared clearly false. But I will readily admit that if I was unable to reach a conclusion as to which account was true and which false, I hoisted the most romantic sail.

My voyage was undertaken solely to discover those things about Nantucket that tug at the corners of the heart - the mysterious, unseen but not unfelt presences of the people who lived their lives here, loved here, and left something of themselves behind.

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Maushope’s Island

First there were spear carriers who hunted slower animals and were hunted by faster ones. They came from the south and west, and made their homes under the great walls of ice.

Then the sea rose and the land became an island. Those who were stranded on it hunted and fished and gathered berries and eventually forgot that there was another world. After many generations they were joined by people who turned treetrunks into canoes and caught the wind with pieces of deerskin. Some came from the land they called Naumet, and others, later, from a nearby island called Noepe. These people possessed magic. They turned mud into bowls and pots. They put seeds in the ground in spring and harvested corn and squash in summer. They captured whales that ventured too close to shore, which could feed a village all through the winter. And they believed in a ‘pawaw’, a medicine man with a special gift to hear the spirits, to see the future, and to heal the sick.

The inhabitants of the island, which they now called Natocket, clustered into several villages. The village leader was called the ‘sachem’, and he ruled by consulting with the elders and the pawaw about important matters. In matters of great importance, the sachems consulted one another. And in extreme circumstances the sachem of all the Massachusetts tribes would request that a Natocket sachem visit him on the mainland.

Wauwinet was the young sachem of the people whose ancestors had sailed from Naumet and called themselves Nausets. Their land stretched from Sesachacha Pond north to the end of Nauma, the great point, and west past Polpis to the beginning of the harbor at Monomoy. They camped by the sea at Sesachacha in summer, and wintered at Squam in a cluster of tightly made huts, woven with branches and chinked with mud. They called their village Canopache, or ‘Place of Peace’.

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Maushope’s Island

Wauwinet suddenly felt much younger than his thirty-five years, and it was not a pleasant feeling. It was the first time he had faced the council of elders alone. He had always thought he would be prepared when the time came to take over as sachem of the Nausets. But this was the first crisis since his father’s death a year earlier. Now he saw before him only relentless criticism in the scowling faces of the old men sitting cross-legged on woven mats in the smoky, sooty meeting hut. The somber atmosphere was as oppressive as the low, arching mud walls and greasy deerskin flaps that shut out the bitter winter night. But more oppressive were the stares that seemed, in their bleak silence, only to shout all the louder: ‘You are not your father! You are a mere boy! How do you expect to lead men such as us, men who grew up with your father, who hunted whales and deer with your father, who taught you how to make your first arrow and string your first bow?’

Things were happening much too quickly for Wauwinet. Problems were closing in like the mud walls. Tomokommoth hunters had been chased away from the deer herd twice in the past month. The corn crop had been too small and would not last through the winter. And a messenger from Massasoit had summoned him to the mainland. What ominous message would he hear there? War with the Narragansetts? Would he have to send a war party to help his father’s old friend? The Natocket tribes had not warred in as long as anyone remembered.

Wauwinet pulled the pipe from his pouch, filled it with tobacco and lit it. He passed it to the pawaw, who sat to his right.

Who will begin? said he.

Food is scarce this season, said a stonefaced, square-jawed man.

Next year we will plant more beans and squash, less corn, said Wauwinet.

And what will we eat this year? asked another. Soon the corn will run out.

We will send out more hunters.

Every hunter is already out in the snow every day. Deer are scarce.

The Tomokommoths are starving, too, said a burly man. He was the father of Talagamomos, Wauwinet’s best friend and hunting partner. He wished his friend were in the meeting to help with with all these hard old men. Wauwinet was growing to hate their stern faces. ‘If only one would smile, just once,’ he thought.

We cannot wait for a whale to wash ashore, Wauwinet, said the first old man. We must go to sea and bring one home.

It is too dangerous in this cold, said another.

Wait for warm weather.

We may starve by then.

It is Wauwinet’s decision, said the stoneface. These were the exact words Wauwinet wished least to hear. All eyes now turned to him. But he had anticipated this.

The pawaw will study the signs tomorrow, he said. And if he determines that whales are just beyond the horizon, we will send three boats. There were some grumbles, but mostly silent nods of agreement. That had been the easy problem.

Wauwinet, said Talagamomos’ father. Our real problem is the Tomokommoths on our land. Without them, deer would be plentiful.

Wauwinet knew the conversation would eventually turn in this direction. He wanted no part of warning the Tomokommoths against stealing their deer. Their sachem was a fierce and obstinate old man, who would deny the charges. He had always been a thorn in Wauwinet’s father’s side. More than once his father had said: ‘Someday the Tomokommoths will go too far. If they stay on this island, someone will go to war with them. I hope it isn’t us.’

If their sachem were to ignore his warning, Wauwinet would be forced to take stronger measures, or appear to be a weak leader. ‘If only a whale washed ashore tomorrow,’ he thought ruefully, ‘this would be a small issue.’

They must be warned, said the stoneface. Again, all the scowling old faces turned to the young