The Island That Lit the World

How the Coffins, Folgers, Macys, Starbucks and Gardners of Nantucket built the whaling industry that lit the world.

The Island That Lit the World

For more than a century, between 1750 and 1850, a thirty-mile island off the coast of Massachusetts was the headquarters of the global oil business. Before petroleum, before kerosene, the world ran on whale oil, and Nantucket controlled the supply.

The family's Nantucket lines ran it. The Coffins owned ships. The Folgers captained them. The Macys provisioned them. The Starbucks, among them the family's own ancestors Edward Starbuck and Nathaniel Starbuck I, crewed them. The Gardners and Husseys competed with them: an interlocking network of family-run enterprises that dominated an industry for generations.

By 1790, Nantucket Quakers reported to Yearly Meeting that “there were no poor people on the island.” The wealth was shared more broadly than in most colonial communities, a consequence of the lay system, the Quaker ethic, and an economy in which nearly everyone was connected to the fleet.

When the industry shifted to the mainland, it moved to New Bedford, where the Winter family lived. By 1850, New Bedford was the wealthiest city per capita in America, built on whale oil. Richmond C. Winter was born eleven miles away in Fall River in 1839, at the peak of the whale oil economy.

From Farmland to Sea

When Tristram Coffin and his fellow proprietors bought Nantucket in 1659, they envisioned a farming community (the purchase is told in Thirty Pounds and Two Beaver Hats). The island's soil was poor and quickly overgrazed by sheep. By the early 1700s the settlers had turned to the sea. The Wampanoag people had been hunting whales from shore for centuries; English settlers learned from them and began pursuing whales in small boats launched from the beach.

Around 1712, a Nantucket captain named Christopher Hussey was blown offshore during a storm and killed the first sperm whale recorded by New England colonists. Sperm whale oil burned brighter and cleaner than anything else available, and it was the source of spermaceti, used for the finest candles. The discovery turned Nantucket from a struggling farming outpost into the center of a global industry.

The Economics of Whale Oil

Whaling was the petroleum industry of its era. Whale oil lit the street lamps of London, Paris and Boston. Spermaceti candles were the standard of fine lighting. Baleen, the flexible plates from a whale's mouth, made corset stays, umbrella ribs and buggy whips, the plastic of the eighteenth century. Ambergris, from sperm whale intestines, was worth its weight in gold as a perfume fixative.

At its peak Nantucket operated over 150 whaling ships, and the island's population grew to over 10,000. The founding families, the Coffins, Macys, Starbucks, Folgers, Gardners and Swains, became the owners, captains and investors of a global fleet that sailed to the Pacific, the Arctic, the coast of Japan and the shores of South America.

The Quaker Influence

Quakerism came to Nantucket through Mary Coffin Starbuck, Tristram's daughter, whose home became the center of the island's Quaker meetings. By the whaling era the island was overwhelmingly Quaker. Quaker thrift, hard work and community reinvestment made Nantucket's whalers remarkably efficient. Women ran the island while men were at sea for years at a time, and Quaker opposition to slavery helped make the fleet among the most racially integrated workforces in early America, with Black, Cape Verdean, Wampanoag and Pacific Islander crew members.

The Voyages

• 1659. Tristram Coffin and the other purchasers buy the island; Tristram moves there about 1660, and his whole family is settled by 1662. Shore whaling with the Wampanoag.
• 1676. Shore whaling begins in earnest at Quidnet and Siasconset.
• 1690. Ichabod Paddock is recruited from Long Island to improve whaling operations.
• 1712. Christopher Hussey kills the first sperm whale. Deep-ocean whaling begins.
• 1715. The Coffin family owns three whaling ships and a trade vessel.
• 1730s. Local waters are overfished. Ships go further, and voyages extend to two to four years.
• 1750s. Tryworks, brick furnaces, are installed on ships to render oil at sea. Voyages become longer and more profitable.
• 1763. Six Coffin men are captaining ships to South America and Greenland at the same time.
• 1773. Captain Hezekiah Coffin's ship Beaver carries whale oil to England and returns with tea: one of the three ships at the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773.
• 1790. Nantucket Quakers report to Yearly Meeting that “there were no poor people on the island.”
• 1790–1820. The Pacific becomes the primary hunting ground. Ships round Cape Horn.
• 1807. The Nantucket fleet reaches 116 vessels, the largest in America.
• 1818. The Nantucket ship Globe discovers the “offshore grounds,” 1,000 miles and more off South America.
• 1820. The whaleship Essex is sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific. Owen Coffin, 17, is drawn by lot and killed and eaten by his crewmates. The story inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
• 1824–1825. Coffin captains discover the Bonin Islands and islands in the Phoenix Group.
• 1830s. New Bedford surpasses Nantucket as the whaling capital.
• 1842–1844. James G. Coffin keeps illustrated logbooks on whaling voyages, now preserved by the Nantucket Historical Association.
• 1846. The Great Fire destroys much of Nantucket town. The industry collapses on the island.
• 1849. The whaleship Aurora is abandoned in San Francisco when her crew heads inland for gold.
• 1850. New Bedford is the wealthiest city per capita in America.
• 1852. Augustus “Whale Oil Gus” Folger is born to whaling captain Henry B. Folger. He leaves the Coffin School at fifteen to go whaling under Captain Edward B. Coffin.

Whaling as Venture Capital

The lay system was equity before equity existed. Ship owners, Coffin, Folger, Macy, funded voyages the way limited partners fund startups: they put up the capital, took the risk, and waited two to four years for a return.

Captains earned large shares, a 1/8th or 1/16th lay, like general partners who were also investors. Green hands got 1/50th to 1/700th of the take. A single successful voyage could return life-changing wealth; a failed one meant years at sea for nothing, or death. When one whaling ground was depleted, scouts found the next: from Nantucket Sound to the Azores, from the Brazil Banks to the Pacific, from the Japan grounds to the Arctic.

The Nantucket Historical Association has published research comparing whaling voyages to venture capital. In “Short Lays on Greasy Voyages,” Jonas Peter Akins and Professor Tom Nicholas of Harvard Business School analyzed voyage returns and found structural parallels to modern venture capital: high variance, power-law returns, portfolio construction, and the importance of the operating partner, the captain.

The Whaling Wives

When men left on voyages of two to four years, the women ran the economy at home: households, finances, family businesses and community institutions. Anna Folger, Lucretia Mott's mother, ran the family's mercantile business, trading oils and candles in Boston. Nantucket women managed finances, raised children alone, ran shops, and held civic roles that would have been unthinkable in mainland Puritan communities, one of the most economically independent communities of women in pre-industrial America, made so by necessity.

The roofwalks on Nantucket houses, the “widow's walks,” were where women watched for returning ships. Some watched for years. Some watched forever. The whaling industry was built by the men who sailed and the women who stayed.

Neutrality and Survival

During the Revolution, Nantucket stayed quasi-independent, selling whale oil to both sides. The island grew almost no food and had no timber; picking a side meant starvation. The British largely left Nantucket alone, and the Americans resented it.

During the War of 1812, Nantucket again sought neutrality and negotiated a separate arrangement that kept its fleet sailing while the Royal Navy seized whalers from other ports. Between wars the fleet always recovered: by 1807 Nantucket had 116 vessels, the largest whaling fleet in America.

Where They Went

A single voyage might cover 30,000 miles over two to four years. Captains sometimes didn't decide between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope until they reached the Azores, reading the winds, the news from other ships and the markets before committing to a route.

• Atlantic circuit. Nantucket, the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands (provisioning and crew), the Brazil Banks, home. The earliest deep-ocean route, established after Hussey's 1712 kill.
• Pacific, via Cape Horn. Nantucket, Cape Horn, Chile, Peru, the Galápagos, Hawaii, the Japan grounds, the Arctic. The route that made fortunes.
• Indian Ocean circuit. Nantucket, the Cape of Good Hope, the Indian Ocean, the South Pacific. Used when the Atlantic and Pacific grounds were crowded.
• Post Office Bay, Galápagos. Crews left mail in a cask on Floreana Island; homebound ships checked the cask and carried letters back to New England. The world's loneliest post office, still in use.

Our Families in the Fleet

• Captain Hezekiah Coffin. Commanded the Beaver, which carried whale oil to England and returned with tea, one of the three ships at the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773.
• Owen Coffin. Seventeen-year-old crewman on the Essex, sunk by a sperm whale on November 20, 1820. After months adrift the survivors drew lots; Owen drew the short straw and was killed and eaten by his crewmates, including his cousin Captain George Pollard Jr.
• James G. Coffin. Kept illustrated logbooks on whaling voyages between 1842 and 1844, now preserved by the Nantucket Historical Association.
• Captain Henry B. Folger. Whaling captain and father of Whale Oil Gus, of the Folger family descended from Peter Folger (1617–1690), grandfather of Benjamin Franklin.
• Augustus “Whale Oil Gus” Folger. Born 1852. Left the Coffin School at fifteen; his first voyage was on a bark commanded by Captain Edward B. Coffin. The last of the old Nantucket whalers, he performed whaling songs until the age of 87.
• Captain Edward B. Coffin. Commanded the bark Mount Wollaston and took the young Augustus Folger on his first whaling voyage.
• Lucretia Coffin Mott. Born on Nantucket in 1793 to Thomas Coffin and Anna Folger, both of whaling families. Abolitionist, co-organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention (1848). In 2016 she was among the suffragists named for the back of a redesigned $10 bill, a plan later shelved. See Lucretia Mott.

Moby-Dick and the Essex

Herman Melville drew on Nantucket's whaling culture for Moby-Dick (1851). The book opens with Ishmael arriving on Nantucket and shipping aboard the Pequod; the first mate, Starbuck, takes his name from the Nantucket Starbuck family.

Melville was inspired in part by the Essex, a Nantucket whaler rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific in 1820. The first mate was Owen Chase; the captain was George Pollard Jr.

The Decline

Nantucket's dominance faded in the 1830s, as larger ships could no longer cross the shallow harbor bar. New Bedford, with its deep-water port, overtook it. Then the Great Fire of 1846 destroyed much of the town's waterfront and warehouses, and many families left the island for good.

Among them was young James Athearn Folger, who followed the California Gold Rush to San Francisco and founded what became Folgers Coffee. The discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859 dealt the final blow. Kerosene replaced whale oil, and by the Civil War Nantucket's whaling era was over.

Legacy

The Starbucks coffeehouse chain, founded in 1971, took its name from Melville's first mate, who took his name from the Nantucket Starbuck family: the family of the brothers' own ancestors Edward and Nathaniel Starbuck.

Read more: The Coffin Family · Nantucket Founding Families · Nantucket Background · Benjamin Franklin · The Liberty Tree

Footnotes for this chapter are in preparation (Starbuck's History of Nantucket, the Nantucket Historical Association, Akins and Nicholas).