The World & Nantucket (June 1965 | Volume: 16, Issue: 4)

The World & Nantucket

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Authors: Nathaniel Benchley

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June 1965 | Volume 16, Issue 4

One summer’s day recently, a pair of vacationers were relaxing on the beach at Siasconset, which is on the eastern end of Xaiitucket Island. The ocean surf was gentle and the sky was clear, and the nearest land to seaward was Portugal, sonic ^,ooo miles away. “I’ll tell you ihc only trouble with this place,” said one of the pair. “And that is, you’re completely cut off from the world.”

“Oh?” replied the other. “And what’s the world got?”

Both remarks sum up the trouble—such as it is—with Nantucket, because Nantucket’s life depends on what the world has got, yet its isolation inspires a sense of individuality that makes the word “insular” quiver with inadequacy. For over a hundred years, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nantucket led the world with its whaling industry, and the names of its captains were known from the Arctic to the Solomons. But in the more than three hundred years since the island was colonized, it has most often been the world that has had the upper hand, and it has not treated Nantucket too well. Nantucketers feel, with some justice, that most of their troubles have come from the outside, and to have to depend on the outside for a living is faintly irritating. They would like to be self-sufficient, but this is no longer possible. Their irritation reaches its peak around mid-August, when the tourists are the thickest and most ill-mannered, and it tapers oil slowly during the winter. By spring they’re glad to see the off-islanders again, because a winter on the island can make almost anything look good.

The world, to Nantucketers, is divided between islanders and off-islanders, and in the strict sense ol the word, islanders are those who were born and continue to live on Nantucket. (A student in a local school once defined Napoleon as “a famous off-islander,” and located Alaska in “the northwest corner of off-island.”) A person born on the island who goes away for loo long is in danger of losing his status, like the young Macy boy, of the whaling family, who didn’l care for the sea so went oft to America and set up a dry-goods store, down in Xew York. Roland H. Macy was his name. They say he made out all right, but that still doesn’t change the fact that he became an off-islander.

The island in question is shaped like a lopsided horseshoe, fourteen miles long and an average of three and a half miles wide, and lies thirty miles to the south of Cape Cod. It once, for some inscruiable reason, belonged lo New York, but in 1692 the colonial proprietors requested that it be transferred to Massachusetts, and this was accomplished by an act of Parliament. Folk history says that Nantucket’s ponds were not specifically included (possibly because nobody in Parliament knew there were any ponds), so they still belong to