Of special importance to us today is that he maintained his journal-writing habits, recording deaths and noteworthy storms in the same quirky style that characterizes his logs. Indeed, whenever a storm swept across the island and its surrounding waters, Peleg inevitably took pen to paper, anticipating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that Nantucketers “remember the quarter deck in their homes”:5th of 3rd mo. 1771. A most terrible gale of wind with abundance of snow. It began to snow soon after 12 and by sunset was a hard storm and lasted till the afternoon of the next day when it moderated. Effects: a vessel cast away on the east end of Nantucket of which the master and mate both died and the people that survive suffered great hardships. A great deal of shipwreck between here and New York wherein great numbers of people endured a world of misery and distress. 35 or 60 sheep drowned in Copalm [Capaum].
20th of 3rd mo. 1772. A terrible gale of wind with abundance of snow. What effects we know not as yet.
3rd of 4th mo. Monthly meeting day by adjournment: A very hard gale of wind at NE with abundance of rain, sleet and snow. It began yesterday morning and is at this present a hard wind and rain. While I write this I perceive the wind to sound hollow in the chimney and plenty of rain and sleet against my chamber window.
16th of 4th mo. A southerly wind with a great deal of rain. I am at this time in my chamber in pretty good health. Where I shall be tomorrow at this time, alas who can tell.
21st of 3rd mo. 1773. A terrible gale of wind at NE or NNE. While I write this it is as terrible a storm as is commonly known at any time of year. Snow, hail, rain, and sleet.
In comparing Peleg’s sea log and island journal, we begin to understand how the Nantucketers managed to bridge the gap that was so often imposed between themselves and their loved ones. As far as they were concerned, Nantucket was not so much a piece of real estate as it was, in the words of the contemporary chronicler Edouard Stackpole, a “Mother Ship,” in which all Nantucketers—whether they were on island or hundreds of miles out to sea—experienced the same storms and the same misfortunes.
As a final testimonial to this sense of interconnectedness, and how Quakerism provided the glue that held them all together, let us return to Peleg’s log. It is 1754; he is twenty years old and bound for the Davis Strait on board the good sloop Phebe; it is an unusually fine day; it is also a Sunday, and inevitably his thoughts turn to Nantucket:And if the weather is so pleasant at home it is a charming day for the young ladies to go to meeting, and if they do but get any good by it, it will be very well. So remembering all at home both male and female, mother, brothers, sisters, Friends, and acquaintances and all others without exception and wishing them all well and a happy and prosperous meeting in the Royal Assembly while we are drinking flip and chasing whales, and wishing them all well till we once more meet together which I hope will not be long (by the blessing of God), I conclude the remarks of this 24 hours being in the vast Atlantic Ocean and how far to eastward of the Grand Bank of Newfoundland we know not nor greatly care, for we are all in health and all merry together.
CHAPTER 12
Kezia Coffin’s Revolutionary Rise and Fall
NO FIGURE in Nantucket history has captured the imagination of subsequent generations in quite the same way as Kezia Folger Coffin. Crèvecoeur met her when he came to Nantucket in the 1770s and claimed that on this island of “superior” wives, Kezia (pronounced “Ka-ZYE-ah”) stood out above the rest. While her husband was away on whaling voyages, she began trading with “pins and needles and kept a school.” It was not long, however, until she had entered the mercantile big time, becoming the sole agent for a leading trading house in London. In a matter of years, she and her husband were among the wealthiest couples on the island. Crèvecoeur raved, “Who is he in this country and who is a citizen of Nantucket or Boston who does not know Aunt Kesiah?” Here was a Mary Starbuck with an attitude—a little less holy and a lot more ambitious—a “she-merchant” who achieved the kind of financial success that the Reverend Timothy White could only dream about.
But if Kezia may have been Nantucket’s first famous person, she would ultimately become one of its most infamous persons. When a writer by the name of Joseph C. Hart visited the island in the 1830s, Nantucketers were still talking about Kezia Coffin, and Hart grasped hold of her story as material for a novel. But whereas Crèvecoeur had seen her as a paragon, Hart portrays her in his potboiler Miriam Coffin as a pariah—a Lady Macbeth of whaling whose nefarious schemes ultimately end in financial ruin during the dark days of the Revolution.
The novelization of Kezia Coffin’s story—lurid cautionary tale that it might be—bears out the supposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Even though one of their own had been portrayed in a less than flattering light, Nantucketers loved the book. The local paper praised Miriam Coffin for its “thrilling interest” and historical accuracy. The rest of America liked it, too, and Miriam Coffin went on to become a run-away best-seller. In fact the continued popularity of the novel throughout the nineteenth century prompted the wife of William Starbuck, a subsequent owner of Kezia’s house, to lament having torn down the original structure. So many people had offered to pay her for “ just a shingle or little trifle of what used to be Miriam’s” that Mrs. Starbuck believed she could have turned the home into a profitable “resort.”
So who exactly was Miriam, a.k.a. Kezia, Coffin? Certainly she was not as “perverted” as Hart’s novel might lead us to believe, nor was she the ideal helpmate Crèvecoeur claimed her to be. Indeed, the story of Kezia’s spectacular rise and fall is in many ways emblematic of the island as a whole during the Revolution, a conflict that served as a horrific wake-up call to a community that had begun to think of itself as the “Nation of Nantucket.”
Although Crèvecoeur claimed that Nantucket wives were never “turbulent, of high temper, and difficult to be ruled,” Kezia Coffin appears to have been the exception that proves the rule. Whereas tradition tells of Mary Starbuck’s routine deference to her much less capable husband during town meetings, Kezia established a tradition of an altogether different sort when, in the words of the Nantucketer George Worth, she reputedly dismissed “a town meeting with all the authority and determination of a Cromwell dispersing an obdurate parliament.”
While exemplary wives such as Kezia’s sister Judith (mother to Obed Macy) quietly guided and sustained the business interests of their husbands, Kezia was not about to take a backseat to anyone. Her business dealings in London put her in contact with some of the movers and shakers of her time, including none other than her cousin Benjamin Franklin, who in a letter written from London in August of 1765 asked her to remember him “kindly to your husband and daughter, tho’ I am unknown to them.” Clearly, Kezia was no second fiddle to her spouse (who was fifteen years her senior) when it came to her dealings throughout England and America.
In 1770, she built what was claimed to be “the most regal private mansion” on the island. Located on the west side of Center Street between India and Hussey Streets, it broke with all local traditions of frugality and simplicity, introducing the boldly symmetrical architectural fashion of the mainland to an island still clinging to the lean-to design. And rather than facing it to the south, as was still customary on the island, Kezia took the audacious step of positioning her mansion so that it ostentatiously faced the street.
Although nominally a Quaker, Kezia did not let the religion’s strict code of conduct cramp her style. She and her daughter were advised “not to dress so fashionable” by a committee of Friends, and in 1773 she was disowned for purchasing a spinet for her daughter. Providing a revealing glimpse into the dynamics of the Coffin household is the following testimony from Quaker Disciplinary Records: “John Coffin declares he had no hand in bringing the spinet to his house and had forbidden it being used there and was sorry it was even brought into his house.” In order to appease the Quakers, of which Kezia’s daughter and husband remained members, the spinet was moved to “Esquire Hussey’
s house,” where her daughter continued to play the instrument on the sly.
Kezia broke with another Nantucket tradition when she obtained the services of a Yale-educated lawyer by the name of Phineas Fanning, who was officially sworn in as a “lawful attorney” on Nantucket in March of 1773. This marked the first time in the history of the island that an attorney decided to take up residence on Nantucket. According to one account, Fanning originally came to the island “out of curiosity merely,” but after meeting Kezia’s only daughter, ultimately married her and settled on the island. However, in 1773, the year Fanning began to practice law on the island, Kezia Coffin’s daughter (who was named after her mother) was only fourteen years old. According to another tradition, it was Kezia “Sr.” who first convinced Fanning to relocate, inviting him into her household so that she could take advantage of his legal expertise in her various business dealings, specifically using him to draw up a power of attorney that gave her total control over her husband’s business interests. In any event, on an island where the courts were avoided at all costs in favor of the time-honored tradition of mediation, Kezia’s intimate connection with a lawyer was highly unusual.
But Kezia’s flirtation with scandal was not limited to just flashy clothes, palatial homes, and fancy lawyers; she may have also been a drug user. When on Nantucket, Crèvecoeur became well acquainted with Kezia and her circle of friends, which included the physician and sheriff, Dr. Benjamin Tupper, who readily admitted to taking opium. According to Crèvecoeur, “He takes three grains of it every day after breakfast, without the effects of which, he often told me, he was not able to transact any business.” Crèvecoeur claimed that this “Asiatic custom . . . prevails here among the women,” and certainly, Kezia’s many commercial ties would have given her ample opportunity to acquire the drug. Whether or not the more mercurial aspects of her personality can be attributed to an opium addiction, she was a person who thrived on controversy.
If Kezia seems to have been a character straight out of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, Nantucket in the years prior to the Revolution had some undeniable similarities to the “good times” of the 1980s. While the rest of New England suffered through the series of economic disasters that made the Revolution an inevitability, Nantucket experienced thirty years of steady growth, with its most dramatic period of expansion occurring between 1770 and 1775. By this time the Nantucket whale fishery had reached the west coast of Africa and the distant Falkland Islands, annually sending out 150 vessels while employing more than 2,000 seamen.
One of the main reasons Nantucket had succeeded where others had failed was that almost every segment of the community was involved, in one way or another, in the whale fishery. Even if a voyage was unsuccessful, it had at least kept a significant portion of the population employed. And since virtually all Nantucketers felt obliged to invest whatever they had available in the whale fishery (prompting Crèvecoeur to comment, “the greatest part of their property is floating on the sea”), this “mode of conducting the business” had the potential, when things went well, of spreading the wealth throughout the community.
But all was not sweetness and light on Nantucket during this era. Human nature being what it is, the urge to make a profit often got in the way of Christian charity and familial good will; there was also a fair amount of envy directed toward those who began quietly and not-so-quietly to amass fortunes. In 1764 Sylvanus Hussey complained that the island’s leading firm of Joseph Rotch (pronounced “Roach”) and Sons would “break through all the solemn ties of nature where it grates with interest.” During that same year, William Rotch, the eldest son of the company’s founder and a devout Quaker, informed a candle manufacturer “that all the friendship that can be expected in trade is to let your friend have a thing at the same price that others would give for it.” The message was clear: Even on an island where almost everyone was related in some way or another, nothing got in the way of business.
But if Nantucket whaling merchants had what one historian has called a “combative hierarchy” among themselves, they were even more difficult to deal with if you happened to be a merchant from elsewhere in New England. Since they were involved in virtually all aspects of the fishery—from harpooning the whale to manufacturing candles—Nantucket whaling merchants were in a position to insist upon their own terms, especially since they had a direct trade link with London. One Boston merchant warned a counterpart in Newport, “’tis vain to attempt to tie [the Nantucket men] down to any measures they do not like.”
It was a no-holds-barred, dog-eat-dog environment in which someone of Kezia Coffin’s temperament apparently thrived. It was also an environment in which it was easy to develop more than a few enemies—both on and off island. Complicating the picture was the inexorable approach of the Revolution, a conflict in which the high-flying island of Nantucket had absolutely no interest. Indeed, it was hardly accidental that two of the three ships in the Boston Tea Party were owned by Rotch and Sons, whose Counting House at the foot of Main Street was built in the midst of this pre-Revolutionary boom in 1772.
Rather than attempt to temper some of the hostility they had engendered over the years, Nantucketers continued to press for every possible advantage, even as the colonies teetered on the edge of rebellion. During the winter of 1775 the island petitioned for and won an exemption from the Restraining Act that dramatically curtailed fishing elsewhere in the region. When the bubble burst that spring with skirmishes in Lexington and Concord, Nantucket was in no position to expect any favors from the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which ordered a boycott on all trade with the island. Although this was later amended, Nantucketers continued to pay the price for years of willful autonomy from the region.
As far as the rest of America was concerned, Nantucket was an island of British sympathizers. The governor of Connecticut advised all those Nantucketers who were for the rebellion to remove to the mainland and “leave the rest to be supported by their good friends the [British] administration.” In Philadelphia a Nantucket coasting vessel was refused a shipment of flour; the reason given: “You are all Tories at Nantucket.” In July of 1775, a Cape Codder wrote to the Continental authorities in Watertown concerning “particulars I have heard about Nantucket,” specifically mentioning 70 to 100 “Boston people (supposed to be Tories mostly) [who] arrived there last week.” According to the informant, “Many of said inhabitants were against their landing, but the sages of the Friends [i.e., William Rotch] overruled, observing they were rich and would be an advantage to the island.”
Rather than admitting that his own notoriously hard-nosed business practices may have contributed to some of the ill feeling directed toward the island, William Rotch chose to see it in terms of religious persecution. According to Rotch, Nantucket had been “marked out by this part of the country for destruction” largely because of its pacifist Quaker beliefs. While Rotch used his religion as a smoke screen (even as his brother secretly planned a new, London-oriented whaling operation on the Falkland Islands), Kezia Coffin seems to have been more open about her Tory inclinations. Her daughter began keeping a journal in 1775, and the sixteen-year-old diarist (who refers to her parents as “Dadda” and “my ever-to-be-honored Mama”) recorded the events of the mounting crisis from a distinct point of view. When a “little vessel” with 100 Continental soldiers arrived on Nantucket in May of 1775, she was unimpressed with their fanfare: “They marched off the wharf with drums beating, fifes playing and colors flying. . . . God save George the King!” A few days later “these rebellious fellows” confiscated “50 odd whaleboats” that would ultimately see service on Lake Champlain as part of Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated attempt to seize Canada.
Despite the arrival of the refugees from Boston, it soon became apparent that the island was not going to be any kind of haven during the war. Both British and American privateers had no qualms about taking Nantucket whalers and coasting vessels, making it virtually impossible to carry on the whale fishery as hund
reds of island seamen languished in the British prison hulks in New York and Newport.
With no other means of support and with food in increasingly short supply, many Nantucketers turned to farming. To encourage this new endeavor, the town proprietors laid out large tracts of land in the southeastern part of the island as well as in Squam and Pocomo (pronounced “POCK-ah-ma”). Others took up fishing. Two saltworks were started on Brant Point and Polpis to provide a preservative for the fish, but the foggy Nantucket weather was too humid to allow adequate amounts of salt to be extracted. With firewood becoming next-to-nonexistent on the island, peat was dug as a substitute.
In the early years of the war, partly because several islanders were able to maintain a profitable trade route with the West Indies, things were better on Nantucket than elsewhere in New England, where the depredations of soldiers left several towns in flames. Other, more secretive means of conveying goods to the island were also employed. According to Obed Macy, who grew up during the Revolution, it was not uncommon for islanders to set out for “Connecticut and elsewhere” in small open boats “built of frail materials, and purposely made weak in order that, by degrees of pliability, they might pass more easily through the water.” It was common practice to set out in these “fast sailing” boats at night and during a storm so as to reduce the chances of capture.
Needless to say, it was a dangerous business, and one in which Kezia Coffin, with the aid of her lawyer and future son-in-law Phineas Fanning, participated. In her daughter’s journal there are repeated references to Fanning’s smuggling adventures. On October 9, 1775, he sailed from Shelter Island, New York, to Nantucket in “the quickest passage ever made,” leaving under the cover of darkness and reaching Nantucket just after midnight of the next day. According to the younger Kezia, “by stealth they took more in than they were allowed,” bringing “60 or 70 weight of butter, as much cheese, one cow (dead), 2 bbls. cider, 3 bushels quinces, several bushels of apples, dried cherries, pears, apples, etc., and one deer skin.” In December Fanning was at it again, arriving with a new load of provisions “after going through everything but death.” Three days later, Kezia records, “Our house has been like a tavern, people coming after provisions.”