"The skipper stormed, and tore his hair,
Thrust on his boots, and roared to Marden,
'Nantucket's sunk, and here we are
Right over old Marm Hackett's garden!'"
The streets avoid the fatal straight-line, though they are not remarkably crooked. In the business quarter they are paved with cobble-stones, showing ruts deeply worn by the commerce of other days. Grass was growing out of the interstices of the pavement, where once merchants most did congregate. One of the principal avenues is built along the brow of the sea-bluff, so that almost every house commands a broad sweep of ocean view. The sides of a great many houses were shingled, being warmer, as many will tell you, than if covered with clapboards. As in all maritime towns, the weather-vane is usually a fish, and that, of course, a whale. It is the first thing looked at in the morning by every male inhabitant of the island. Some of the lanes go reeling and twisting about in a remarkable manner.
Nantucket was larger than I had expected. The best view of it is obtained from the side of Coatue. A single old windmill on the summit of a hill behind the town adds to its picturesqueness, and somewhat relieves the too-familiar outlines of roof and steeple. But what, in a place of its size, is most remarkable, is the almost total absence of movement. It impressed me, the time I was there, as uninhabited. There were no troops of joyous children by day, nor throngs of promenaders by night; all was listless and still. Here, indeed, was the town, but where were the people? I was not at all surprised when accosted by one who, like me, wandered and wondered, with the question, "Does any body live in Nantucket?" In midwinter, said an old resident to me, you might have a hospital in the town market-place without danger of disturbing any body. The noise of wheels rattling over the stony street is not often heard.
Owing to the total loss of its great industry, the population of Nantucket is not greater than it was a hundred years ago, and not half what it was early in the century.[235] A large proportion of the houses, it would appear, were unoccupied; yet many that had long remained vacant were being thrown open to admit new guests, that are seeking
"The breath of a new life—the healing of the seas!"
Old brasses were being furbished up, and cobwebs swept away by new and ruthless brooms. The town is being colonized from the main-land, and though the inhabitants welcome the change, the crust and flavor of originality can not survive it. Already the drift has set in: we may, perhaps, live to see a full-fledged lackey in Nantucket streets.
The wharves show the same decay as in Salem and Plymouth, except that here all are about equally dilapidated and grass-grown. Not a whaling vessel of any tonnage to be seen in Nantucket! The assertion seems incredible. In 1834 there were seventy-three ships and a fleet of smaller craft owned on the island. At this moment a brace of fishing schooners, called smacks, were the largest craft in the harbor. The dispersion of the shipping has been like to that of the inhabitants. I have seen those old whale-ships, with their bluff bows and flush decks, moored in a long line inside the Golden Gate. There they lay, rotting at their anchors, with topmasts struck, and great holes cut in their sides, big enough to drive a wagon right into their holds. To a lands-man they looked not unlike a fleet in array of battle.
LAST OF THE WHALE-SHIPS.