Whales and Wiener Dogs

It’s probably hard for today’s Americans – if not for most of the planet’s 21st century inhabitants – to imagine a world without on-demand illumination. No street lights or desk lamps or wall switches. But that world existed as recently as the 19th century. People who lived in cities were held hostage by darkness. They shuttered businesses and rushed home at dusk to avoid criminals. And people everywhere, if they could afford it, lit their households with an assortment candles and lamp oils that burned dim, dirty and smelly.

One of the many oils that people burned for light was whale oil. When compared to the other available options, whale oil was the best, especially sperm whale oil, which burned brightest and cleanest. It was also the most expensive. Aside from candles and lamp fuel, whale oil had countless other uses; machinery lubrication, rust-proofing, cosmetics, nutrition, detergent and pharmaceuticals.

Again, it’s hard to imagine, but in the bigger scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago that undernourished groups of men in wooden sailing ships chased whales across the globe on 3-5 year expeditions. These men basically killed the whales with their bare hands, then dragged them in a row boat, sometimes ten miles or more, back to a larger boat where they chopped them up and cooked off their fat in giant metal pots that sat atop an open fire. During the late 18th and early 19th century, whaling was one of the top five industries in America, and many banks issued paper notes and currency depicting whaling scenes. Whaling was symbolic of the young nation’s ingenuity, progress and prosperity.

And – yes, I’m going somewhere with this – during that same time period, the people of Nantucket pioneered, and them dominated, the global whaling industry. Nantucket was the 3rd largest city in Massachusetts, and its business and political leaders had significant clout and lobbying power in the nation’s capital. But by the middle of the 19th century, Nantucket’s whaling industry was in considerable decline. The “Great Fire” of 1846, fueled by nothing less than whale oil, destroyed the main town, scorched 36 acres of land, and left hundreds destitute and homeless. On top of that, silt build up in the harbor kept the larger whaling ships from entering and leaving port. Then came the rise of petroleum. And about the same time, the Civil war started, when the Confederates destroyed dozens of Yankee whaling ships.

But Nantucket survived, in a way, by reinventing itself as a resort and vacation destination. Today, the yearly population of 10,000 grows at least five fold during the summer, and that’s where my journey to Nantucket begins – fourth of July weekend, on a ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket.

I’d originally planned a longer stay in Nantucket, but terrible weather that week combined with the sedentary aspect of my pregnant wife forced me into a solo day trip. The ride over was foggy (see video below), with extremely limited visibility, therefore no random ferry whales were sighted.

My initial impressions of Nantucket are as follows.

First, on the ferry ride over, I found myself seated next to a group of 6-8 college-age sausage heads who loudly discussed the positive traits of the various girls that they knew, even the fat chicks (“She’s a really nice girl actually. I just hate for her that she’s so fucking fat.”). When they wrapped this up, they argued about the best way to make a beer bong. I shit you not, this conversation lasted 15 minutes. 20 minutes?. Then they all hoped aloud that they’d find a hardware store on the island that had all the necessary beer bong parts (and cheap!).

Secondly, as we pulled into the harbor, the clouds broke and the sun came out. The day became quite beautiful, so I decided to sit on a bench (across the street from the whaling museum) to get my bearings and to re-assess my itinerary, which was built for rain, rain, and more rain. And just as I did this – again, I shit you not – four teenage girls in a beat up Ford F150 full of ladders and lawnmowers and shit pulled up at the curb and the girl at the passenger window got my attention and said, “Hey, you think you could buy us some beer?” Aside from the obvious “Dear Penthouse Forum, I never thought it would happen to me, but…” joke/scenario, my brain processed this fact: These girls might be so young that they don’t even know any 21-year olds. wtf? I declined, politely, to buy them beer. “We’ll give you the money,” she said. Again, I’m not making this up. I said, “Sorry, but I can’t.” And when they asked why I said, “Because I’m on probation and I don’t want to go back to jail.” (Feel free to use this line without attribution. It works on so many levels…)

So, yeah, you get the picture. And there are a lot of boats in the harbor that look like this.

Anyways, all this talk about beer got me in the mood for beer, so I headed back to the Gazebo bar near the wharf, and I drank myself a couple beers.

Done drinking, I set off to see the sights. Around town, there too many references to the town’s whaling past to count, but here are a couple examples:

According to the Hy-Line cruise web sheet, “Nantucket has more buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places than any other place in Massachusetts and more than 800 houses still standing that were built before the Civil War.” And after a short walk from the center of town, I arrived at “The Oldest House” (aka The Jethro Coffin house). It was built for Jethro as a wedding gift in 1686. Jethro was a blacksmith, and even over 300 years ago, Jethro Coffin was totally a badass name.

After breathing my beer breath all over the nice old lady from the historical society and telling her that if there weren’t any really cool folk-arty whale-related artifacts inside the house then I didn’t need a tour, she sent me off looking for some trail head that she said would lead me through a park to something called “Something Natural.” I thought she was fucking with me, but sure enough, I found this little park behind the Oldest House. It was really sort of nice, and after a few minutes of walking towards the sounds of people, I came upon a busy street corner and a very popular cafe (that didn’t seem to warrant a picture). But here’s the park:

In 2006, Forbes magazine reported that Nantucket had the highest median property value of any Massachusetts zip code. So the problem, to me, with a place like Nantucket is that while it’s capable of embracing its whaling past by putting up quaint images of whales all over the place, it’s otherwise mostly devoid of irony and kitsch. But there are exceptions to every rule. And that’s a good thing, because this yard sheep thing is freakin’ awesome.

(Update: in the above picture, I just noticed that if you look closely, you can see the baby sheep looking at the mommy sheep from the porch!)

As I always say, no trip to Nantucket is incomplete without a trip out to the Old Mill.

Nantucket became an island about 5000-6000 years ago. Some believe that it was first spotted by the Norse as early as the 11th Century. The island’s indigenous population, the Wampanoag Indians, lived there undisturbed until the island was deeded by the English to a man named Thomas Mayhew.

In 1659, Mayhew sold his interest in the island to Tristram Coffin, Thomas Macy, Christopher Hussey, Richard Swayne, Thomas Barnard, Peter Coffin, Stephen Greenleafe, John Swayne and William Pike, “for the sum of thirty Pounds…and also two beaver hats, one for myself, and one for my wife.” While these early settlers were, in part, trying to escape intolerant Puritans on the mainland, the island’s earliest European settlers were not Quakers when they arrived. Quakerism arrived at the very beginning of the 1700′s and eventually became the quasi-official religion of Nantucket’s ruling class, and therefore America’s whaling industry. The Quaker Meeting House below, built in 1838, was neither the earliest nor the largest built on the island. It was actually built to accommodate one of the three sects that had formed by that time, the Wilburites.

So, having hoofed it about a bit, it was time to see the main attraction, the Nantucket Whaling Museum…

After paying my admission, a friendly attendant ushered me into the lecture hall where a presentation (that I’ve probably seen 3 or 4 times before) was already in progress. It was actually during this talk, however, where I learned the stat that’s referenced in the title of this article, i.e., that 90 percent of the island’s homes are owed by non-full time residents. I don’t know if the guy giving the talk was plugged into the census bureau or not, but he sure did give a damn fine whale talk.

The lectures are given in the main hall (pictured below), which features a whale boat, various whaling weapons and implements, and the skeleton of a sperm whale. The whale actually washed up on a Nantucket beach on New Year’s Day 1998 and died. The museum cleaned and preserved the bones and then added it to the public collection when the building was remodeled in 2005.

The museum actually resides within a restored candleworks that was built in 1847, one year after the “Great Fire.” A not insignificant portion of the museum is set aside for the restored candle factory, and no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get interested enough to get my mind wrapped around candle making. But if you’re the kind of person who geeks out on 19th century candle making, then the Nantucket Whaling Museum is the place for you. Everybody geeks out on something. I once saw this Portuguese guy at the Mystic Seaport Museum force his family to listen to him explain, in excruciating detail, the art of coopering while holding them hostage in the hold of the Charles W. Morgan.

Since my base of general 19th-Century American whaling history is pretty solid, I don’t really visit whaling museums to bone up on Whaling 101 type stuff. I’m there to see the oddities and curiosities, the local color, and specific collections or individual pieces. In those aspects, the Nantucket Whaling Museum is pretty strong. The sperm whale jawbone below was gathered in 1865, and it’s asserted that it would have had to come from a whale 87 feet long (keep in mind that sperm whales are said to grow to between 50 and 70 feet long).

There are also some artifacts from the infamous Bounty (the Fletcher Christian/Capt. Bligh fiasco). The boxes in right part of the photograph below (bad shot, sorry) were gathered on Pitcairn Island in 1808 by Nantucket Captain Mayhew Folger. To the left of those boxes are Robert Louis Stevenson‘s funeral mat and pillow which were brought back from the Marquesas.

And here’s some random narwhal tusks and some other weird stuff just laying around on top of a shelf without any sort of description or explanation:

One of the curiosities that I did NOT see was a sea chest from the doomed 1819-1820 voyage of the Essex, which was rammed and sunk by a whale. What happened next is sort of a long story, but the 21-man crew set out in the 3 whale boats, and by the time they were recovered, there were only eight survivors and seven of the crew had been eaten (one of which was killed and eaten). Anyways, the box is the only remaining artifact from that voyage of the Essex. It was discovered by another whaler that passed by. I’ve been to the Nantucket Whaling museum more times that I can count and I’ve never seen this damn box.

It’s probably safe to say that the Nantucket Whaling Museum has the best collection of scrimshaw and whalebone products that I’ve ever seen. I think a guy that works there told me that only about a fifth of their pieces are even on display (I think he was hitting me up for money for a new scrimshaw wing). And there’s a good Frederick Myrick/Susan’s tooth display in the whalebone/scrimshaw room.

I’m not an antique furniture geek, but I get the distinct impression that furniture geeks everywhere would tumesce upon entering the room full of 17th and 18th century New England furniture.

During the most recent round of remodeling at the museum, a roof deck was opened. It’s good for grabbing a bit of fresh air, but the view is a bit unspectacular, in my opinion.

This cool whale-related weather vane sits atop the museum.

And that’s about it. I wish I had a bit more on food, drink, lodging, etc., but maybe next time. The whole time I was there, I only consumed those crappy beers, a couple pieces of pizza, and an ice cream cone. The latter two establishments, I can’t even recall their names, but I’ve added everywhere else, aside from a few shops, to the map below.

View Nantucket Walking Tour in a larger map

I honestly don’t know if it’s one of the ten places in the US that you should see before you die. I can think of almost ten places just in Hawaii, but Nantucket and the Nantucket Whaling Museum are pretty cool, I guess. I go there at least once per year. For longer vacation stays, I actually prefer the Vineyard, but then again, the Vineyard’s not the spiritual center of American whaling and one of the main settings of the greatest novel ever written in the English language. And on that note, I’ll add that if you’d like to know more about Nantucket and Whaling, there are three books that I’d recommend right off the top of my head. In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick is the story of the whaleship Essex and its crew of survivors/cannibals. Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin is exactly what it purports to be, and it’s actually a very non-dry (wet?) read. It fills in a lot of the gaps that you don’t always get in the museum lectures and exhibits: stuff like the mixed allegiances of the Nantucketers during the American revolution, for example. And, of course, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. All these books are great summer reads that you can blow through quickly (yes, even Moby Dick).

I’ll part with this final impression of modern day Nantucket. After I wrapped up my gift shopping for wife and family, I sat down on a bench along the Steamboat Wharf road to eat a slice of pizza and to wait for my ferry back to Cape Cod. As I did this, the car ferry from the mainland was unloading on the wharf, and Nantucket’s summer citizenry drove into town. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a redheaded girl running along the sidewalk and rounding a corner across the street. I didn’t entirely catch exactly what happened, but the next thing I know she was on the sidewalk holding her ankle and crying. I hate to sound like the bad Samaritan here, but nothing I gathered about the way she approached the corner seemed to justify the histrionics, and I assumed that she’d get up and walk it off pretty quickly. And on top of that, there were cops at every corner directing all this incoming traffic. As I processed this thought, I heard a car horn honking. I looked up, and I saw two women in their 50′s in an Audi. They appeared to be trying to get my attention. They pointed at me and then at the girl, and then the woman driving seemed to shrug at me in disbelief. They clearly expected me to help the girl, and it was clear as well that they planned to sit there and browbeat me until I did so. But here’s the thing. I was across the street and diagonally distant from the girl, maybe as much as 40 or 50 feet away. And the women were RIGHT NEXT TO THE GIRL, like 5 or 6 feet away from her. They honked again. I got up, ambled across the street and approached the girl, more than half expecting to see some sort of Joe Theismann-esque injury. I could see nothing wrong with her ankle. I did notice that she was much younger than I thought though. Maybe 12 or 13. I asked for her name and that’s about as far as I got before a couple cops arrived. And about then is when I heard the woman driving the Audi go, “Were you just gonna sit there and do nothing?”

So, yeah, you get the picture.