Word: nantucketers
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...went down to the sea in whalers chose a job that was both dangerous and boring. Trips frequently lasted as long as five years, and one Nantucket captain spent only six of his 41 whaling years at home. Sometimes a captain came back with enough oil from one cruise to retire for life. But there is also the story of the skipper who spent two years at sea and returned to tell his owners: "We didn't get a single goddam barrel of oil, but we had a goddam fine sail." For the average crewman the money rewards were...
...rapt audience at Baltimore's Goucher College, Novelist Carson (The Member of the Wedding) McCullers streamed through her consciousness, trying to tell the strange tale of how she and Playwright Tennessee Williams converted Member into a Broadway hit one summer on Nantucket Island. "Ten's not a cook and I'm not a cook, and the house kind of went to pieces," recalled Carson in a kind of far away tone. "We ate mostly pea soup with wienies in it, I guess, and the cat had kittens on my bed. There were milk bottles and whisky bottles...
...Book. A young investment broker named William Baker helped ease the blow of Shirley's divorce. He had met the Gardners during a Nantucket vacation, and when he heard of the divorce, began calling on Shirley. Within four months they were married, although Baker was no longer a broker but a corporal in the U.S. Army. When Tomorrow the World closed, Shirley camp-followed her husband through the South until 1945, then returned to Manhattan for her first musical, Hollywood Pinafore, in which she played the part of a gossip columnist called Louhedda Hopsons. During the war years, Shirley...
Sometimes the God-fearing men of Nantucket were unable to get over the sight of the Pacific and its paradisial isles. The old records contain stories of men who left their ships and settled down with native women. Once, in 1824, a whole shipload of men mutinied, killed the officers of the Globe, and set up a short-lived kingdom on Mili Island...
Stackpole stops his story before the petroleum boom came along to supply most of the world's need for oil. But even before that, the clouds were gathering over Nantucket. Stubborn sand bars drove captains to New Bedford and other ports; the appeal of the Gold Rush drew crewmen to California. But if the oldtime whaling man disappeared, he left a record behind him, as Author Stackpole notes, as citizen of the world, man of industry, oceanographer and as "a sea-hunter whose exploits make ... a bright page in American history...