Thirty Pounds and Two Beaver Hats

In September 1653 the Quarterly Court at Ipswich heard a complaint against Dionis Coffin. She and her husband Tristram kept an ordinary, a tavern, at Newbury, and the law set the price of beer at two pence a quart for beer brewed with four bushels of malt to the hogshead. ^[1] Dionis had charged three pence. Samuel Moore testified that she put in six bushels, not four, and the court discharged her. ^[2] She had given good measure; the law had simply not imagined it.

It was a small case, but it shows the world the Coffins lived in. The Massachusetts Bay Colony governed what people believed, whom they welcomed and what they charged for a quart of beer. In 1657 their neighbor Thomas Macy let four Quakers shelter in his house from a rainstorm. ^[3] The General Court fined him thirty shillings for it in 1659, the same year he left the mainland for Nantucket. ^{[4] [5]} No record says either case alone drove anyone away. Together they show what a man like Tristram Coffin, past fifty, with a large family and several moves behind him, might have wanted: a place beyond the colony's reach.

On 2 July 1659 Coffin, Macy, Christopher Hussey and other Salisbury neighbors bought the island of Nantucket from Thomas Mayhew. The price was thirty pounds and two beaver hats. ^[6] The island lay outside the Massachusetts colony's reach. In 1664 it passed to the Duke of York's government at New York, ^[7] and Massachusetts would not gain it until its new charter of 1691. ^[8]

Coffin was among the leaders of the venture and settled near Capaum Pond. ^[9] The purchase from Mayhew was only part of the business; the settlers also bought the land from the island's sachems by deed. ^[5] He built and kept a corn mill, employed Native people on his farm, and bought the neighboring island of Tuckernuck. ^[9] In 1671 he went to New York with Thomas Macy, the settlers' agent, to secure their title from Governor Lovelace. That year he became the island's chief magistrate, and he held the office again from 1677. ^[10]

Tristram Coffin died on Nantucket in October 1681, on the 2nd by the town record or the 3rd by the court records. ^[11] The sources differ on his birth, 1605 or 1609, so he was in his seventies. ^{[11] [12]} He left seven children and sixty grandchildren, and by 1728 one grandchild counted 1,582 of his descendants. ^[11] John, Perry and Patrick Long descend from Tristram and Dionis through their son James; they are the brothers' 10th great-grandparents. ^[12]