Nantucket, an Island Run by Shares

The share system, the Wampanoag, the Great Woman and the Coffin–Gardner feud: the island behind the Nantucket chapters. The purchase itself is told in Thirty Pounds and Two Beaver Hats, and Tristram Coffin's life in his chapter.

The Share System

The island was divided into full shares and half shares. The original purchasers held full shares, each with defined rights to land, grazing, timber and coastal resources. Later settlers could buy half shares, a second round of investment with proportionally reduced rights.

The proprietors governed collectively. Disputes were settled by vote, not by a distant colonial authority. Each shareholder could subdivide and sell portions of a share, creating a secondary market in Nantucket land decades before such a thing existed on the mainland. In modern terms, full shares were founders' equity, half shares a later round of investors, and the proprietors' meeting a board of directors.

The same equity-based thinking later governed the island's whaling voyages through the lay system; see The Island That Lit the World. For the first several decades the original proprietors were both landowners and legislators, a structure that held until the half-share holders began demanding equal representation.

The Wampanoag

Approximately 2,500 Wampanoag lived on the island when the English arrived. The name “Nantucket” is itself Wampanoag, translated either as “far-away land” or “sandy, sterile soil tempting no one.” The settlers bought the land from the island's sachems by deed as well as from Mayhew.

The first arrangement was coexistence: shared land use, cooperative fishing, and the beginning of shore whaling. The Wampanoag taught shore whaling to the settlers and were the island's first commercial whalers, paid not in fixed wages but in a share of the oil, a lay.

Over time the relationship deteriorated. As English settlement expanded, Wampanoag autonomy diminished. Disease, above all a devastating epidemic in 1763, reduced the native population to a fraction of its size, and those who remained worked in the whaling industry built in part on their knowledge.

This archive records it plainly. The prosperity of the whaling families was built on land and labor that came at an enormous cost to the island's original inhabitants. The founding of Nantucket was both an extraordinary act of enterprise and a displacement that followed the pattern of English colonization throughout New England. Both things are true.

Mary Coffin Starbuck, the Great Woman

Mary Coffin Starbuck (1645–1717) was Tristram Coffin's daughter. She married Nathaniel Starbuck and became the most powerful person on the island, called “the Great Woman” by contemporaries.

She became a Quaker after the missionary John Richardson visited Nantucket in 1702, and her household became the center of the island's Quaker meetings. Quaker values shaped the whaling culture: women ran businesses and households while men were at sea for years, and Black sailors found work on the ships, some rising to captain. This was the community into which Lucretia Mott, born a Coffin, her mother a Folger, was born.

The Coffin–Gardner Feud

The half-share holders, led by the Gardner family, who arrived after the original purchase, clashed with the full-share holders led by the Coffins over governance, land and political power: founders against early investors.

The Gardners argued that settlers who had contributed equally to the island's growth deserved equal representation. The Coffins argued for the primacy of the original purchase: they had organized the settlement, taken the first risk and structured the community. The conflict turned personal; John Gardner was imprisoned for defying Coffin authority. It shaped island politics for generations.

It was eased through negotiation, colonial intervention and intermarriage, but never fully resolved. By the height of the whaling era Coffins and Gardners served together on ships and married each other's children, and both families are in this archive.

From the Island

The proprietors' island funded generations of whaling, produced the Nantucket families who lit the world with whale oil, and through the Folger line produced Benjamin Franklin. Lucretia Mott was among the suffragists named in 2016 for a redesigned $10 bill, a plan later shelved.

Read more: The Coffin Family · Nantucket Founding Families

Footnotes for this page are in preparation.