Part Iii. Nantucket and the World's People

PART III. NANTUCKET AND THE WORLD’S PEOPLE Foreword Nantucket’s English settler families were not the first inhabitants of the island, nor has there ever been a time when their progeny, the “descended Nantucketers,” were the only residents. Sarah P. Bunker, who serves as the leitmotif for these Nantucketers, lived in a house built hard by a Wampanoag burial site and inherited a basket made for her father by Abram Quary, Nantucket’s “last Indian.” When she was a girl, her father—a sea captain in the China trade—was in the habit of receiving crewmen and foreigners at home, and he employed live-in “help” to assist with the care and upkeep of what was grandly known as “the Pinkham estate.” Years later, in the straitened circumstances of her widowhood, Sarah P. supported the household by nursing injured, sick, and dying people of “all sorts” as Nantucket’s bone-setter Zaccheus Macy had done a century earlier.1 As she lived out the last decade of her life in her upstairs room, what reached her ears from downstairs day in, day out was the incomprehensible conversation of her grand- daughter-in-law’s relatives from Finland. Sarah P. knew full well that on Nantucket there were strangers to be found wherever one turned, not just in sailors boarding houses and the servants quarters of descended Nantucketers’ houses. Parts I and II have followed the history of the Wampanoags who were in possession of the island before the English came; the Africans who were brought here by the English; and many people who came from other islands in the employ of Nantucketers. In Part III we will meet more people who came from far and not so far to adopt Nantucket as their home. While Nantucketers in general have partitioned the world geographically into on-island and off- island, Quaker Nantucketers sorted the world’s population into two kinds: themselves and everyone else. Everyone else—Bostonian and Bantu, Presbyterian and Portuguese, Maori and Methodist, Freemason and Finn—constituted the “world’s people.” As early-eighteenth-century Quaker tolerance hardened into nineteenth-century rigidity, Nantucket’s Friends began to exclude each other, expelling people from Meeting for marrying the world’s people, for socializing with the world’s people, for imitating the fashions of the world’s people. However would the shades of departed Quakers judge the Nantucketers of the twenty-first century?2 From 1725 until 1850 the descended Nantucketers, a great many of whom were also birthright Quakers, constituted the overwhelming majority of the island’s population, but during the mass immigra- tion period of 1850–1920 Nantucket was right in step with the rest of the United States. In 1910 fifteen percent of the population of the United States was foreign-born. By 1920, fourteen percent of the 1 Writing of his career, Macy asserted that among those he helped were “strangers and some blacks and all sorts, rich and poor, old and young, good and bad.” (Z. Macy, “A Short Journal,” 1792, Nantucket Historical Association MS Collection 96, folder 44, p. 7.) 2 The history of Quakerism on Nantucket from its rise to the moment it suspended its activities is covered in detail in Leach and Gow, 1997. Proscribed worldly practices ranged from “attending a place of music and dancing” to vaccination against smallpox. For some examples of activities for which members of Nantucket’s meeting were “labored with” and sometimes disowned, see Appendix 3a. Ultimately, factions of the remaining Friends mutually disowned one another, forming compet- ing Meetings. An informational marker formerly in the Quaker cemetery at the corner of Madaket Road and Quaker Road stated that in the Orthodox Quaker view, the members of the Hicksite Meeting were “heretical Friends.” Scientist Maria Mitchell and social activist Anna Gardner, both raised in Quaker families and imbued to the core with Quaker principles, sought their spiritual home elsewhere, in the Unitarian Church. As Quakerism in Nantucket imploded, the island’s churches in general found their membership rolls expanding with ex-Friends. 1 Nantucket population was foreign born. Back in 1830, when the island’s population was recorded as 7,310, roughly four percent of the island’s residents were classified as nonwhite. After a century of dramatic fluctuations, the population in 1930 stood at 3,678, with Cape Verdeans and African Americans together accounting for about seven and a half per cent.3 The Depression years of the 1930s and the prewar days of the early 1940s were uncharacteristically static. Few children who entered the Nantucket public schools in the 1940s had not been born on the island even if their parents or grandparents had come from “off.” The second half of the twentieth century was, however, a period of great population growth. By the close of the century, “Where are you from?” had become a standard conversational opening gambit, and descended Nantucketers began to seem and feel exotic. Nantucket men (and some captains’ families) who went to sea in whaling days had observed first- hand the world’s geography and the variety of the world’s people. Pacific Islanders, Asians, Africans, and the great panoply of peoples known as mulattos and mestizos held no mystery for them. Even the Nantucketers who stayed at home—Sarah P. Bunker and her young neighbor Gulielma Folger, for exam- ple—knew a great deal about the world’s people, because despite the selectmen’s efforts to deport the unin- vited, they have always been coming to the island. Racial, ethnic, and national diversity were unsurprising to the descended Nantucketers. What would amaze them is the variety of people who have made their permanent home on the island and the extent to which they have been able to become part of the island community. In general, the new Nantucketers of the twentieth century have not converged in a particular part of town. Ethnicity has not determined the churches or the social organizations they have joined. There have been Armenian Congregationalists, Norwegian Catholics, Jewish Episcopalians, and Italian Jews who have also been Masons, Redmen, Oddfellows, or—most recently—Rotarians. While stereotyping has become nigh impossible, quick assimilation has also meant Nantucketers have never quite gotten to know where some of their neighbors (or their own grandparents) came from or what forces pushed them across the sea to this small island where they put down new roots. In this, we are all more insular than we should be. Scandinavian, Dutch, and Latvian fishermen have not yet been recognized in Nantucket’s public history, nor have Armenian rug merchants, Greek grocers, or Jewish restaurateurs, yet Nantucketers born in the twentieth century grew up with all of these and more. The current surge of East Europeans, Central Americans, and Southeast Asians finding employment on Nantucket comes on top of centuries of interna- tional migration to the island. Here are some stories from Nantucket’s cosmopolitan history. 3 The 1830 federal census recorded 279 nonwhite residents of Nantucket. The 1930 federal census recorded 278. The percentage change has to do with the much lower general population in 1930 rather than with absolute numbers of residents classified as nonwhite. 2 Chapter One From the Far Antipodes China Forty years after the last execution on Nantucket, there was another death by hanging on the island. It happened in 1809—the same year that a desperately displaced Native Hawaiian boy is said to have been found weeping in desolation on the Yale University campus.4 That year a Chinese man known as Quak Te, thinking himself abandoned on Nantucket, succumbed to despair and took his own life.5 In consideration of the fact that “Quak Te, of Nantucket, a Black man deceased, having while he lived, and at the time of his decease, Goods, Chattels, Rights, or Credits in the county aforesaid, lately died intestate,” Judge of Probate Isaac Coffin ordered an inventory of what had been found in his room. The inventory identified Quak Te as a mariner and placed a total value of $72.67 on his belongings, $41.60 of this being in cash held by the deceased. He was also in possession of a sleeping bag and a very large wardrobe. Among the clothes listed in the inventory were four pairs of “Nankeen trousers” and three “Nankeen jackets,” a “China coat” and a pair of black pantaloons, three waistcoats, a greatcoat, and more. This was not what would be found in the sea chest of an ordinary seaman.6 Who was poor Quak Te, and how had he come to such a sad end on a November day in Nantucket? In 1807, Chinese merchant Punqua Wingchong and his servant had come to Nantucket on the ship Favorite, a vessel owned by a consortium of Nantucket ship owners.7 Among the Nantucketers entertain- ing Punqua Wingchong was Keziah Coffin Fanning, who described her guest as “a Chinaman that came with Mr. Whitney last fall from Canton. He is a merchant there. He is the color of our native whites.”8 Relations between the United States and England had been deteriorating, and while Punqua Wingchong and his servant were visiting Nantucket, President Thomas Jefferson imposed a foreign trade embargo that blocked them from returning to Canton.9 After a long, frustrating stay on Nantucket, the merchant traveled to New York to appeal to John Jacob Astor to help him get home. Astor prevailed upon President Jefferson to allow a ship with cargo to sail for Canton in the summer of 1808, and Punqua Wingchong took passage home aboard her. But what about Punqua Wingchong’s servant? Apparently he was left behind on Nantucket to look out for his master’s wardrobe until his return.

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