THE GREAT FIRE of 1846 destroyed most of the business district of Nantucket Town. The island of Nantucket never entirely recovered from the spoilage and would never again regain the grandeur of her past. The fire spread with lightning speed through the stores and houses, fed by storage casks holding tons of whale oil. All told, the fire spread over almost forty acres and destroyed 360 buildings, including the majestic Atheneum and the Tudor-arched Trinity Church with its Gothic windows, spired belfry, and pinnacled buttresses. Some time afterward, it was determined that the spark had ignited in the William Geary Hat Store.
By this time, partly because of the prohibitive sandbar that spanned Nantucket’s main harbor, the whaling industry had already shifted to ports like New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard, where the harbors could handle the deep-draft spouters. The shift away from Nantucket had begun in the 1810s and now had reached the point of no return. Nantucket’s legacy as a seaport would quickly wane. All that would remain of her days as the queen of American whaling would be the charming Quaker homes and Greek Revival buildings that somehow escaped the Great Fire, which consumed one-fifth of the town.
Another major economic blow came when most of the island’s young men emigrated to the Continent to seek their fortunes on the opening western frontier during the great California Gold Rush of 1849. Gold fever ran through Nantucket with every bit the ruination of the Great Fire.
This coffin received another nail almost coevally, in 1852, when a process was discovered to refine earth oil for lamps and candles. It burned cleaner and cost less than whale oil and dealt a killing blow to the whaling industry’s former mecca. Since then, technology has provided us with ways to synthetically provide every product that once came only from the bodies of living whales. We no longer need to tear the skin off these intelligent creatures in order to light and warm our homes.
The shot to the heart for Nantucket was the American Civil War. Confederate commerce-killers like the famous cruiser Shenandoah patrolled the northern coastal waters, burning or sinking any Yankee ships. There would be no more whaling on the scale that had once made Nantucket the third wealthiest city in Massachusetts. With this coda, the legacy of Nantucket slipped peacefully into legend.
Nantucket’s part in the Underground Railroad continued on a small scale until the advent of the Civil War, of which slavery was the only good casualty.
The stateliness of the past has also gone out of whaling in these modern times. As an author and a historian, I am touched by the Melvillesque images of old-world spout hunting, and indeed I describe it to you as the grand and honorable pursuit it once was, but I caution readers to keep whaling in perspective. In those days of old Nantucket, whaling ships went out with a handful of men, sought hard and long for the sight of a pod, embarked in tiny whaleboats with hand-held harpoons, and collected comparatively few whales for the effort. It was enough upon which to build an industry, and the industry naturally waned when there was no more need for it. This is healthy economics, and we should not mourn.
In present times, however, we have the same handful of men hunting a dwindling population of great whales, but hunting them much more diabolically—with faultless radar and explosive-tipped, rifle-propelled harpoons. They take in whales by the thirties and fifties, often wiping out whole pods in one voyage.
I prefer to remember whaling as it was in those hard-working post-Colonial days, when man and whale went equally in the oceans of Earth, and I hope this novel, rather than romanticizing a ghoulish industry, will call to mind the days of old Nantucket. Perhaps soon our memories of whaling as an industry will be replaced by open-sea sightings of living, thriving whales, and we’ll sail on by and wave hello.
Today, Nantucket thrives again. It is a place where you and I can go, walk upon the cobblestones, drink grog, breathe sea air, sing chanties, count masts, and remember things of those past days as though we too were there.