Scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook For in their succorless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not have willingly dared.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

In 1659, a sober group of 27 Quaker and Presbyterian families arrived on Nantucket and set about imposing order on the haphazard business of whaling . Whales had always beached themselves on the treacherous sandy shoals all around - up to a dozen might be washed ashore in a major storm - and the local Indians had become skilled in hunting them in nearby waters. At first, the white settlers treated the island itself as their vessel, erecting tall masts from which a permanent watch was kept for passing whales. As the years went by, they stopped waiting at home, and sent large ships out into the ocean to pursue their prey. The Wampanoag played an integral part in the process: the actual kill was effected by two rowboats working in tandem, and at least five of each thirteen-man crew, usually including the crucial harpooneer , would be Indian. (The common occurrence when an injured whale would speed away, dragging a boat helter-skelter behind it for endless terrifying hours, was known as a " Nantucket Sleighride .")

The early chronicler Crèvecoeur provides an extensive account of Nantucket as it was in 1782 in his Letters from an American Farmer. Although perturbed by the islanders' universal habit of taking a dose of opium every morning, he held them up as a model of diligence and good self-government. Whaling was a disciplined profession, unmarred by the stereotyped debauchery of sailors elsewhere, and to feed themselves and equip their ships the islanders kept up a shrewd and extensive trade with the mainland. At that time there were already more than a hundred ships. The whalers were not paid; instead each had a share (a lay) of the final proceeds of the voyage. Crèvecoeur was impressed by the Nantucketers' ambition: "Would you believe that they have already gone to the Falkland Islands and I have heard several of them talk of going to the South Sea."

They did indeed reach the Pacific. The great days of Nantucket were immortalized by Herman Melville:

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders Two thirds of this terra-queous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.

In fact Moby Dick is a valediction; by the time it was published in 1851, Nantucket's fortunes had gone into an abrupt decline. Soon after a devastating fire in 1846, reports of the Californian Gold Rush lured young men westwards; the discovery of underground oil in Pennsylvania came as the final blow. A magazine article of 1873 reported, "Let no traveler visit Nantucket with the expectation of witnessing the marks of a flourishing trade of the great fleet of ships which dotted every sea, scarcely a vestige remains."

Nantucket

• Nantucket
• Ferries to Nantucket
• The whalers of Nantucket
• Eating

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