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ARTiculate "It's not the same place it was when we came here. On the other hand, there's so much of what it used to be, that it's still here," Burch said. "I love Nantucket for what it was, for what it is, and, I hope, for what it's going to be." Going back to what it was: Few Nantucketers have spent as much time speaking publicly about the island's history as has Burch. To commemorate his historical service, we asked Burch for things he has been the most surprised to learn about Nantucket, and he responded with one epiphany for each decade of his work at the museum - speaking in wholly eloquent paragraphs on the history he knows by heart, without needing a single "um" to collect his thoughts: One thing that I was surprised to learn was the reason that Nantucket became the whaling capital of the world. That Nantucket was the capital of the world is no big big news. Whaling wasn't even big news. You go back to 2000 BC, and the Phoenicians and the Basques were indeed whalers. But what made Nantucket different was that Nantucketers were the first people - and for a long time, the only people - who went after the sperm whale. The big difference here was that the whales that the early people - the Phoenicians and the Basques and even Jonah - went after were baleen whales. Baleen whales were kind of slow and easy and not terribly important. But the sperm whale, which was discovered accidentally by a Nantucket whaler in 1712, was quite different from these other whales in that it was very aggressive and carnivorous, rather than a vegetarian. So for almost a century or so, the only people who went after the sperm whales - which were such an abundant source of oil - were the Nantucket whalers, and that contributed enormously to the fact that Nantucket became the whaling capital of the world. And as a side bar to this particular thing, Nantucket also contributed enormously to the exploration of the Pacific Ocean, and to this day, there are more than 200 places in the Pacific that were first discovered and written down by Nantucket whalers, not the least of which is the Antarctic continent. So that's what hit me most importantly as I learned about this wonderful place, as I started working here. Another thing to think about is that many of our early (and I mean, 1659) citizens - like Thomas Macy, for example - came to Nantucket because they were really nailed by the Massachusetts Bay people for having taken into their hearts the Quakers. If you were looking at it in today's terms, the ruling factions in Massachusetts, the Puritans, considered the Quakers to be hippies; these were people who went their own ways and did their own things, and they certainly made the Puritans unhappy with what they did. So many of the people, including Thomas Macy, came here from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for having giving some shelter to some of these Quakers. Here, they went along with them in doing their own thing. Originally, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard were considered to be part of the New York colony and eventually this became a colony of the Massachusetts, instead of New York. But there have been a couple of times in the last century or so when Nantucket decided they weren't going to be either Massachusetts or New York, and that they wanted to go out on their own. To this very day, many of the rules and regulations of Massachusetts are looked at strangely by Nantucket people. We have often gone our own way and continue to do so.
- Doug Burch |
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