Nantucket's Whale Oil Boom: Two Beaver Hats, a Sandbar, and a Seawall

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Nantucket began as geological debris: a pile of sand and gravel bulldozed south by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, left as a moraine and outwash plain, and cut off from the mainland by rising seas 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Its name likely comes from an Algonquian word some translate as sandy, sterile soil tempting no one. In 1659 Thomas Mayhew sold 90 percent of his interest to Tristram Coffin and his investors for 30 pounds and two beaver hats. The settlers ran sheep, whose hooves and grazing stripped the thin vegetation and let the sand blow away, so the island turned to whaling, first rowing out from the beaches with Wampanoag men held in debt bondage at the oars.

Whaling voyages ran like venture capital, with crews paid a lay, a share of the oil profits, and Quaker owners who backed abolition and the Underground Railroad grew rich on it. Then came collapse: the Great Fire of July 1846 burned 40 acres of the oil soaked town, a sandbar locked the larger whale ships out of the harbor while New Bedford had a railroad, the 1849 Gold Rush drained the crews, and Confederate raiders sank what was left. Poverty froze the town in place for nearly a century, and that preserved architecture became the draw for 1950s developers selling an exclusive summer escape.

• The whaling business allegedly began when a scrag whale, likely a gray whale, wandered into the harbor.
• A typical early whaleboat carried one white colonist at the steering oar and five indebted Wampanoag rowers.
• An epidemic in 1763 killed 222 Wampanoag while leaving the white colonists untouched.
• In 1977 the town considered seceding from Massachusetts over political representation.
• A 2021 coastal resilience plan lists 40 projects costing an estimated $930 million, against $3.4 billion in damages by 2070 if nothing is done.