Away Off Shore

 

by Pa Rock

Reader

Nathaniel Philbrick was a freelance journalist when he and his family relocated to Nantucket in the fall of 1986.   His wife had been employed as an attorney on the island, and Philbrick's role in the new situation became that of a stay-at-home dad.    The journalist soon began immersing himself in the island's rich history by both exploring the island's records and by taking his children and visiting the varied sites where all of that history occurred.    He used his researching skills to write articles about Nantucket's past for scholarly journals, and was eventually asked by a publisher on the island to write a book about Nantucket's history up through the nineteenth century.

Away Off Shore is that book.  Since the publication of that effort in the early 1990's, Nathaniel Philbrick has gone on to publish several very well received books regarding various aspects of the American saga, including In the Heart of the Sea which was made into a movie, and Mayflower which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Nathaniel Philbrick's "Nantucket" book is surprisingly easy to read for an historical account.  He doesn't interrupt the flow of his writing with tedious footnotes, but instead reserves all of his comments and references regarding source material to a lengthy section of "notes" which follows the main body of the text.  The notes are arranged by chapters which makes it easy for the reader to quickly zero-in on subjects that he or she wishes to know more about.

Away Off Shore is subtitled Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890 - with 1602 representing the year that the island was first spotted by a European explorer and 1890 being roughly the end of the whaling era on Nantucket.

Philbrick recounts the island's history through a series of brief biographies about various island residents across that span of time, but first he dedicates a couple of chapters to discussing Nantucket's history before the Europeans arrived when it was already occupied by a well established Native American population which had no concept of land ownership.  But with Bartholomew Gosnold's "discovery" of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket in 1602, all of that began to change.

A New England merchant (who had been born in England) by the name of Thomas Mayhew was awarded control of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket as a "proprietary colony" in 1641, and Mayhew had made himself "Governor" of the colony.  In 1659 he was approached by a group of individuals from the area around Salisbury, Massachusetts, who wanted to buy Nantucket.  One of those people was Mayhew's cousin, Thomas Macy.  The group of nine men were able to purchase Nantucket from Governor Mayhew for thirty dollars and two beaver hats.  The sale took place on July 2, 1659, and the group planned to begin settlement on the island the following spring.  Most of the group were Baptists and their primary motivation to leave the mainland was to get away from the increasingly intolerant Puritans who ran the government.

That fall, however, Thomas Macy's difficulties with the Puritans heated up when someone accused him of giving shelter to a group of Quakers during a storm.  Macy paid a fine but still did not trust that the Puritans would let the matter rest, and in October he made a decision to immediately uproot his family and move to their new island home.  Macy, age 51, who had already lived in Massachusetts for a quarter of a century, and his wife and five children, along with James Coffin (age 19), Edward Starbuck (age 55),  Isaac Coleman (age 12), and a pilot by the name of Daggett whom they acquired in Martha's Vineyard - all got into a small boat and sailed for their new home on Nantucket, arriving just as winter was about to set in.   It is likely they spent that winter sheltering in dugouts and benefiting from the kindness of the native population.

And from there on the story progresses through the social, religious, and economic growth of Nantucket as captured through the stories of some of its more pivotal citizens.  Chapter 3 tells the story of the one of the original European purchasers of the island, Thomas Macy - the first to bring his family to live on the island.  Chapter 4 is dedicated to Tristram Coffin, also an original purchaser and a man who controlled some other shares of relatives who lived off of the island - making Tristram a first among equals.  Chapter 8 details the life of Mary (Mrs. Nathaniel) Starbuck who was Tristram Coffin's youngest daughter.  Mary ran a company store for whalers, and was regarded as one of the most influential people on the island.  When representatives of the Quaker religion wanted to expand their influence onto Nantucket, they did it through carefully cultivating Mary Starbuck, and she was ultimately responsible for making Quakerism the dominant religion on the island during the 18th century.

I mention those three in particular - Macy, Coffin, and Mary Starbuck -  because they are all direct-line ancestors of mine - and of all of my Sreaves cousins.  (Ironically, I descend from the Nantucket Macy's on my mother's side of the family.)   I heartily recommend this book to anyone with Nantucket roots - and there are literally thousands upon thousands of us.  I have read several books about Nantucket, but this one gives the best feel for what it would have been like to have actually been there as this history was occurring.

Nathaniel Phibrick did such a good job of illuminating so many things about Nantucket in this book.  In it I learned why the early residents tended to produce such thorough family genealogies - they did it because the island's small population led to many very complicated family relationships - knots - and through thorough genealogies they could keep better track of their relationships to each other.  I also learned why some of my Nantucket ancestors relocated to North Carolina - they "swarmed" with other relatives in a mass movement much like groups of related mainlanders would do in wagon trains.   I also learned why some of that group, my relatives included, later moved on to Indiana - because they could not abide the casual acceptance of slavery in North Carolina.

Away Off Shore presents as an even-handed telling of Nantucket's history, and gives a very realistic portrayal of a small sandbar away off shore in the Atlantic that was technically a part of Massachusetts and the United States, but during its heyday was the whaling capital of the world.  Within a century of Thomas Macy and his family scrambling ashore and digging a dugout in a hillside for shelter, Nantucket had sailing vessels chasing whales around the globe - and independent wives at home managing families and running businesses while their husbands and sons were at sea for years at a time.

It's an amazing story, and Nathaniel Philbrick tells it very well!