In the Heart of the Sea

first English couple to be married on the island, in 1662, and had established a lucrative outpost for trading with the Wampanoag. Whenever an itinerant minister came to Nantucket looking to establish a congregation, he was firmly rebuffed by Mary Starbuck. Then, in 1702, Mary succumbed to a charismatic Quaker minister named John Richardson. Speaking before a group assembled in the Starbucks’ living room, Richardson succeeded in moving Mary to tears. It was Mary Starbuck’s conversion to Quakerism that established the unique fusion of spirituality and covetousness that would make possible Nantucket’s rise as a whaling port.
    Quakers or, more properly, members of the Society of Friends, depended on their own experience of God’s presence, the “Inner Light,” for guidance rather than relying on a Puritan minister’s interpretation of scripture. But Nantucket’s ever growing number of Quakers were hardly free-thinking individuals. Friends were expected to conform to rules of behavior determined during yearly meetings, encouraging a sense of community that was as carefully controlled as that of any New England society. If there was a difference, it was the Quaker belief in pacifism and a conscious spurning of worldly ostentation—two principles that were not intended to interfere, in any way, with a person’s ability to make money. Instead of building fancy houses or buying fashionable clothes, Nantucket’s Quakers reinvested their profits in the whale fishery. As a result, they were able to weather the downturns that laid to waste so many mainland whaling merchants, and Mary Starbuck’s children, along with their Macy and Coffin cousins, quickly established a Quaker whaling dynasty.
    Nantucketers saw no contradiction between their livelihood and their religion. God Himself had granted them dominion over the fishes of the sea. Peleg Folger, a Nantucket whaleman turned Quaker elder, expressed it in verse:
    Thou didst, O Lord, create the mighty whale,
That wondrous monster of a mighty length;
Vast is his head and body, vast his tail,
Beyond conception his unmeasured strength.
     
    But, everlasting God, thou dost ordain
That we, poor feeble mortals should engage
(Ourselves, our wives and children to maintain),
This dreadful monster with a martial rage.
    Even if Nantucket’s Quakers dominated the island economically and culturally, room was made for others, and by the early nineteenth century there were two Congregational church towers bracketing the town north and south. Yet all shared in a common, spiritually infused mission—to maintain a peaceful life on land while raising bloody havoc at sea. Pacifist killers, plain-dressed millionaires, the whalemen of Nantucket were simply fulfilling the Lord’s will.

    THE town that Thomas Nickerson knew had a ramshackle feel about it. All it took was one walk through its narrow sandy streets to discover that despite the stately church towers and the occasional mansion, Nantucket was a far cry from Salem. “The good citizens of [Nantucket] do not seem to pride themselves upon the regularity of their streets [or] the neatness of their sidewalks,” observed a visiting Quaker. The houses were shingled and unpretentious and, as often as not, included items scavenged from ships. “[H]atchways make very convenient bridges for gutters . . . ; a plank from the stern of a ship—having the name on it—answers the double purpose of making a fence—and informing the stranger if he can be at a loss—in what town he is.”
    Instead of using the official street names that had been assigned for tax purposes in 1798, Nantucketers spoke of “Elisha Bunker’s street” or “Captain Mitchell’s.” “The inhabitants live together like one great family,” wrote the Nantucketer Walter Folger, who happened to be a part-owner of the Essex, “not in one house, but in friendship. They not only know their nearest neighbors, but each one knows all the rest. If you should wish to see any man, you need but ask the first inhabitant you meet, and he will be able to conduct you to his residence, to tell what occupation he is of, and any other particulars you may wish to know.”
    But even within this close-knit familial community, there were distinctions, and Thomas Nickerson was on the outside looking in. The unhappy truth was that while Nickerson’s mother, Rebecca Gibson, was a Nantucketer, his father, Thomas Nickerson, had been from Cape Cod, and Thomas Junior had been born in