11/13/2022 0 Comments Nantucket history chequebook 1989The current wooden lighthouse dates back to 1901 and is both a working lighthouse and a popular tourist spot.Īccording to the National Park Service, Nantucket is the “finest surviving architectural and environmental example” of a classic New England port. Each time, the island has stubbornly rebuilt the structure. In the years since, fires, strong winds, and erosion have destroyed Brant Point Light nine different times. Nantucket built the first lighthouse on Brant Point, at the entrance to the island’s main port, in 1746. It features numerous artifacts from whaling vessels, portraits and photos of sea captains, and the reassembled skeleton of a massive sperm whale. The museum occupies a former spermaceti candle factory, where workers converted sperm oil from hunted whales into candles. Today, the Nantucket Whaling Museum is dedicated to the island’s fascinating whaling history. “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s,” writes Herman Melville in his classic nineteenth-century novel Moby Dick, “For the sea is his he owns it, as Emperors own empires.” Nantucket ships left on whaling voyages that lasted up to five years and took sailors as far away as the South Pacific. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Nantucket was the world’s most productive whaling port. The Jethro Coffin House, a traditional wooden saltbox home, is now the oldest surviving residence on the island. This marriage ended much of the conflict between the two groups. In 1686, however, Jethro Coffin, the grandson of proprietor Tristram Coffin, married Mary Gardner, the daughter of a prominent tradesman. History of NantucketĪt first, the island’s original proprietors and its new tradesmen were often at odds. Soon after, English tradesmen also began to migrate from Plymouth Colony and Cape Cod to the up-and-coming island of Nantucket. In 1659, a small number of English proprietors led by Tristram Coffin joined the Wampanoag Indians on the island. The name “Nantucket,” is an anglicization of the Algonquian name for the “distant, desolate” island. Long after Pilgrims settled on Cape Cod, the island of Nantucket was inhabited primarily by Wampanoag Indians, who had lived on the island for thousands of years.
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