From Farmland to Sea
When Tristram Coffin and his fellow proprietors purchased Nantucketin 1659, they envisioned a farming community. But the island’s soil was poor and quickly overgrazed by sheep. By the early 1700s, the settlers had turned to the sea. The Wampanoag people had been hunting whales from shore for centuries. English settlers learned from them and began pursuing whales in small boats launched from the beach.
Around 1712, a Nantucket captain named Christopher Hussey was blown offshore during a storm and killed the first sperm whale recorded by New England colonists. Sperm whale oil burned brighter and cleaner than anything else available. It was also the source of spermaceti, used to make the finest candles. The discovery transformed Nantucket from a struggling farming outpost into the center of an emerging global industry.
The Economics of Whale Oil
Whalingwas the petroleum industry of its era. Whale oil lit the street lamps of London, Paris, and Boston. Spermaceti candles were the standard of fine lighting. Baleen—the flexible plates from a whale’s mouth—was used for corset stays, umbrella ribs, and buggy whips, making it the plastic of the eighteenth century. Ambergris, found in sperm whale intestines, was worth its weight in gold as a perfume fixative.
At its peak, Nantucket operated over 150 whaling ships. A single successful voyage could return oil worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in modern currency. The island’s population grew to over 10,000. The founding families—the Coffins, Macys, Starbucks, Folgers, Gardners, and Swains—became the owners, captains, and investors of a global fleet. Nantucket ships sailed to the Pacific, the Arctic, the coast of Japan, and the shores of South America.
Nantucket operated over 150 whaling ships at its peak. The founding families became the engine of a global industry that lit the world.
The Quaker Influence
Quakerism came to Nantucket through Mary Coffin Starbuck, Tristram’s daughter, who opened her home to the first Quaker meetings in the late 1600s. By the whaling era, the island was overwhelmingly Quaker. The faith shaped the industry: Quaker values of thrift, hard work, and community reinvestment made Nantucket’s whalers remarkably efficient. Women ran the island while men were at sea for years at a time. Quaker opposition to slavery also meant that Nantucket’s whaling fleet was among the most racially integrated workforces in early America, with Black, Cape Verdean, Wampanoag, and Pacific Islander crew members.
Moby-Dick and the Essex
Herman Melville visited Nantucket and drew on its whaling culture for Moby-Dick (1851), perhaps the greatest American novel. The book opens with Ishmael arriving on Nantucket and shipping aboard the Pequod, a whaling vessel whose crew includes descendants of the island’s founding families: Coffin, Starbuck, and others. The character of Starbuck, the first mate, takes his name directly from the Nantucket Starbuck family.
Melville was inspired in part by the real story of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820. The crew drifted for months. The first mate was Owen Chase; the captain was George Pollard Jr. Their ordeal became one of the most famous survival stories in maritime history.
The Decline
Nantucket’s dominance began to fade in the 1830s as larger ships could no longer navigate the shallow harbor. New Bedford on the mainland, with its deep-water port, overtook Nantucket as the whaling capital. Then came the Great Fire of 1846, which destroyed much of the town’s waterfront and warehouse district, including oil stores and chandleries. Many families left the island for good.
Among them was young James Athearn Folger, who would follow the California Gold Rush to San Francisco and found what became Folgers Coffee. The discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859 dealt the final blow to the whaling industry. Kerosene replaced whale oil. By the Civil War, Nantucket’s whaling era was over.
Legacy
The founding families of Nantucket—your families—didn’t just settle an island. They built an industry that powered the global economy for two centuries. They lit the streets of the world’s great cities. They sailed to every ocean. They inspired the greatest American novel. And when the island burned and the industry died, their descendants scattered across the continent and built new empires—in coffee, in electricity, in reform.
The Starbucks coffeehouse chain, founded in 1971, took its name from Melville’s first mate—who took his name from the Nantucket Starbuck family, who were your ancestors’ neighbors and business partners on the island.