Macy landed at the site of the town of Nantucket, then the Indian village of Wesco, or the "White Stone," which lay on the shore of the harbor, and afterwards had a wharf built over it. The whale fishery, which made Nantucket's prosperity, began early, in boats from the island, and the population had increased by the Revolution to about forty-five hundred, Sherburne, as it then was called, being the chief whaling port in the world, with one hundred and fifty whale ships. The island was covered with trees, but they were all destroyed during the Revolution, and it was then made almost a desert, losing also the greater part of its population and much of the fishery fleet. There was a revival subsequently, and Nantucket reached its maximum prosperity in 1840, with nearly ten thousand population. Afterwards came the final decline of whaling, and the sandy, almost treeless island now has about three thousand people, who depend for a living chiefly on the summer visitors. It is without a whaleship, but it has many snug cottages, and those going for health and rest can well say, with Whittier:
"God bless the sea-beat island!
And grant forever more
That charity and freedom dwell,
As now, upon her shore."
Nantucket is southeast of Martha's Vineyard and south of Cape Cod, the sea between them being known as Nantucket Sound. The island is an irregular spherical triangle, sixteen miles long and three to four miles wide, the outer coast bent around like a bow, as the Gulf Stream currents wash the shores. To the south and east are the great Nantucket Shoals, dangerous to the navigator, but acting as a breakwater, preventing the island being entirely washed away by the sea, which makes constant encroachments. The harbor of Nantucket town presents sandy beaches and bluff shores, rising with some boldness from the water, the sand dunes stretching away in regular lines behind them. The town is snugly located at the bottom of a deep and secure harbor, having a breakwater outside, and its chief daily event is the arrival of the steamboat from the mainland, from which it is frequently cut off for days together by winter ice and stormy weather. There are various ancient and dilapidated wharves, fronting a collection of strange-looking old gabled houses, many having raised platforms on top of the peaked roofs, where the former inhabitants used to go up to watch for vessels. It is a healthy place, with modern hotels, tree-lined, pleasant streets, many gardens, and a magnificent climate, the winter rigors corrected by the closeness of the Gulf Stream. The surrounding country, outside the town, is almost everywhere a flat prairie-land, with the one horizon all around, of the distant blue sea. A narrow-gauge railroad leads over to the southeastern coast at Siasconset, the quaint original gem of the island, familiarly called 'Sconset, a curious little village of fishermen's huts, existing now about the same as in the primitive days. Its outlook is over the South Shoals, but not a sail is to be seen, for these shoals are the grave of every vessel getting upon them. It is a dismal reminder of vanished maritime prestige to see about the Nantucket coasts the gaunt ribs of the old hulks, half sunken in the sands where they have been cast ashore, as year by year they gradually break up in the great storms and slowly disappear. In the Boston Daily Advertiser a poet plaintively mourns the fate of these marine skeletons seen "at midnight off the coast":
"Half-tombed in drifting sands upon the shore
Are ye, and heedless lashed by angry seas,
As through your blackened ribs the breeze
Exultant plays, and crested breakers roar,