NATHANIEL AND THOMAS PHILBRICK HAVE UNEARTHED THE OLDEST WHALING LOGS OF THEIR KIND
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
Peleg Folger was the second youngest of 18 children, an 18th century Quaker who was bound by Nantucket's religious sobriety to become a pious and responsible community elder. He was the man who ultimately excommunicated from the pacifist Nantucket Quakers the young men who left to fight in the American Revolution, according to maritime author and historian Nathaniel Philbrick ("Mayflower," "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex").

But in his youth, Folger served on a whaling boat. Free from the constraints of island expectations, he was a different person as a young man at sea - a fun-loving prankster who kept a series of logs that slept for over a century in the Atheneum archives, only to have the dust blown off them by Nathaniel and his father, Thomas Philbrick. A scholarly editor and professor emeritus of English, with a specialty in maritime literature, Thomas edited the journals, while Nathaniel wrote the foreword to "Peleg Folger Logs," a bound volume of Folger's logs, published by Mill Hill Press.

"The logs are all in the voice, of course, of a young provincial Quaker, who had apparently never been to sea before and undergoes a very dangerous and exciting number of years," Thomas said. "They're going farther north than American whalers ever had, so a lot of this is quite fresh and new to every Nantucketer's experience."

Folger's logs are the oldest of their kind, the first account of extended whaling that went farther than short coastal whaling. This meant the journeys were harder, the separations longer and the dangers often more menacing than whaling journeys had conventionally been.

"He loses his greenness very quickly," said Thomas, whose greatest challenge was translating Folger's references: "The Stinking Islands," for example, turned out to be the Cabot Islands on the East Coast of Newfoundland, which had become a seabird rookery and were overrun with bird guano. Similarly, "whore's eggs" - Thomas discovered - were sea urchins and "penguins" referred to the Great Auk, a bird that is now extinct.

In addition to descriptive retellings of adventures at sea, the logs also contain "curious incidents and suggestion that you wouldn't expect from a pious young Quaker," according to Thomas. "Obviously at times they got drunk aboard ship when things went well, an ancient maritime tradition. And he talks about what merry times they had."

Nathaniel calls Folger "Nantucket's real-life Ishmael."

On the other hand, Thomas said, "I don't think we can make it a romantic experience, a Melvillian experience. Peleg returns to Nantucket after this series of voyages and just abandons the sea and becomes a schoolteacher and landsman completely. It would be very hard to say how he'd been changed psychologically or spiritually."

"Peleg's story is really the story of Quakerism on Nantucket," added Nathaniel, who will speak on the most remarkable observations from the logs at The Coffin School on June 22.

"In the beginning, Quakerism was this wonderful spiritual force on the island that brought it together and gave it definition, but then, like a lot of intense beliefs, it began to ossify. Instead of being an agent of exciting change, the Quakers became the rich guys," explained Nathaniel, who called Folger's actions during the American Revolution "kind of oppressive."

"He was not the fun-loving prankster of his teens or 20s; he was the solemn elder that pontificates," Nathaniel said.

Given Folger's work in his later years, the sea figures as something of a liberator in his life, freeing him for a time to be creative and spontaneous in a way that is echoed by the sea logs kept by 19th century Nantucket statesman Benjamin Sharp (the journal is now on display at the Egan Foundation), who sailed with The Dauntless in his youth, and drew humorous cartoons to illustrate his adventures at sea.

"For many young people, the sea was 'it' - you got away from home, Mom, Dad, your sister and brother, and you were a young person in a man's world. You grew up," Nathaniel explained. "You saw the world and met a group of people you wouldn't have seen if you had remained at home. It's similar for a lot of people to what Army service was in WWII."

To read of Folger's experiences while away at his seafaring "college" is to realize how timeless is the world at sea.

"The sea is about as eternal an environment as we have on this earth," added Nathaniel. "On Nantucket, you go to a beach and you stand with your back to the island looking at the ocean, and you see the same thing someone saw 300 years ago. It hasn't changed since Peleg's time."

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BOOK TALK

Join Nantucket historian, Nathaniel Philbrick as he marks the release of a whaling journal begun by a young Nantucketer in 1751.

Where: Co-sponsored by the Nantucket Atheneum and The Egan Maritime Foundation, The Coffin School, 4 Winter Street

When: Thursday, June 22, 7 p.m. For more information: Call 228-1110.