Quaint Nantucket

I

The Beginning of All Things

THERE is a tradition that, near the end of the year 1659, an open boat, containing two men, a woman, and six children, sailed away from the little village of Salisbury, on Merrimac River, bound to an island in the Atlantic Ocean, of which the voyagers knew nothing except that it was inhabited by Indians and their innumerable dogs. It was a circuitous voyage of nearly two hundred miles. The boat encountered tempestuous weather; and the woman, alarmed for the safety of herself and children, besought her husband, who was master of the voyage, to turn about and go back to their home. Like the usual hero of a tradition, he spurned a woman's prayers, and continued to drive the boat over a rugged sea until

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it reached a little harbor on the western shore of Nantucket. Yet this master, Thomas Macy by name, was not a seaman, but a weaver by trade, and his mate in navigating the boat was a yeoman.

If the tradition is to be believed, these rustic mariners made themselves exiles from home, to be outcasts upon an island which was thirty miles distant from the mainland; where none of the comforts of life existed, where wintry gales blew with a roar like the roar of iron-mills, and seafowl sometimes perished in a struggle for life.

Midsummer- July 16, 1661- is the earliest authentic date of the settlement of Englishmen on Nantucket. Then they were drawing lots for their homesteads. They had come from the frontier of the Massachusetts colony, where wolves, bears, and a stony soil made a farming life unprofitable. They looked upon their island estate as a vast farm securely fenced from wild beasts by the ocean. Its forests of oak, walnut, beech, pine, and cedar trees were ready to give timber for their houses;

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closed by the stupendous waves that broke upon it. The neck contained fresh meadows, through which a brook was running; patches of white-oak trees; and a great swamp skirted by cranberry vines. One and twenty lots were laid out in this attractive region; and an order was made that "no English man shall give liberty to any Indian to dwell on Nanahumake or to plant Indian corne there," and no person "shall fall any timber within its considerable woodland."

Thomas Macy was engaged "to supply the yland in the trade of weaveing," for which he was given a half of one share in the estate. Afterwards the proprietors gave a like interest to William Worth, to Joseph Coleman, and to Richard Gardner, on condition that they serve the colony as seamen; to Eleazer Foulger, son of Peter, on condition that he "supply ye occasion of ye yland in ye trade of a Smith;" to Nathaniel Holland, on condition that he 'employ himself as a taylor for ye benefit

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ye inhabitants;" to Joseph Gardner, on condition that he supply their wants “as a Shoomaker;"