Philbrick to speak on the Half-Share Revolt
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
Few would dispute that author, historian and Egan Foundation Director Nat Philbrick is a local treasure for the insight and research he can share on our history. He will be spreading the historical wealth at the Nantucket Historical Association's Brown Bag Luncheon on Thursday.

Philbrick: "I'm looking forward to discussing it, because it's a part of Nantucket's history I haven't returned to in a long time."

"What I think I'll be focusing on is the 1670s. By this point, the English commonwealth on Nantucket was a little over 15 years old, and there was what was known as the Half-Share Revolt," Philbrick said. Without giving away too much of his presentation, the Half-Share revolt can be summarized this way: The settlers didn't all get along.

The Half-Share Revolt, Philbrick explained, occurred shortly after the arrival of English settlers to Nantucket in 1659.

"When the first settlers came, the original purchasers - like Coffin, Macy and Mayhew - were full-share owners, but they needed to recruit people to fill in the gaps in the community, so they recruited half-share people like Peter Foulger and John Gardner," Philbrick explained. "Full-share people assumed they would stay in control. Coffin, whose sons were also full share men, thought he was going to run the place."

As you might surmise, the half-share owners felt differently. "Coffin was old guard. He saw this in English manor terms. Nantucket was his deal, and these half shares were upstarts. The half-share people, led by Gardner, said, 'Wait a minute; this isn't the way we want this to go,'" Philbrick said. While it wasn't quite the Hatfields and the McCoys, "there was a real struggle for power," he added. "It was the Gardners versus the Coffins."

At the time, the island was still very much up for grabs, so far as the 100-plus white settlers were concerned.

"There was, relatively speaking, quite a bit of space. But when you look at it, you can realize how small this siland gets when there's dischord among citizens," Philbrick said. "It was a different place in the 17th century, but the dynamics of human behavior will be remarkably familiar to us."

Philbrick's presentation will address some of the lesser-known cultural aspects of Nantucket's early days, when it was still a "closed system" with no official jurisdiction, years before the seat of power was moved to New York.

"We have this tendency to look at Nantucket as this pious, Quaker whaling community, and that didn't kick in until the end of the 17th century," Philbrick said.

"The original settlers were going to be sheep farmers. …The island's identity was still up in the air. This was a place for people who wanted to get away from puritan New England. These were people who did the pilgrim thing to get away from the pilgrims."

Philbrick recently re-engaged with this aspect Nantucket's history during his research for the acclaimed 2006 book "Mayflower," and said he enjoyed "figuring out what was going on in terms of town politics, and how Nantucket developed, in terms of settlement patterns and individual families."

"I'm looking forward to discussing it, because it's a part of Nantucket's history I haven't returned to in a long time," Philbrick said.

Ah, the lasting appeal of a Nantucket land dispute.

Bring a sandwich! I

NHA BROWN BAG - FOOD FOR THOUGHT SERIES When: Thursday, Feb. 15, 1-2 p.m. Where: NHA Whaling Museum

(Discovery Room), 13 Broad Street Cost: Free For more information, please call 228-1894.