2024 Life Logs, Day 260: A Day Trip to Nantucket
Date: Monday, September 16, 2024
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 68, Low 55 degrees F
Location: Back Home on Lakeview Avenue, Falmouth, MA
The Newcomers/Encore field trip to Nantucket today was perfect. It was sunny and warm and the field trip was fun and very informative. It couldn’t have been better. There were 15 of us who boarded the fast ferry in Hyannis at 9:15 am. By 10:30 am, we entered the Nantucket Harbor
and walked through the crowds of people
to the Whaling Museum where we met our walking tour guide. The guide was a young man named Isiah who has lived on Nantucket for all of his young life except for his college years away. He gave us a complete course on Nantucket history from the thousands of years that the Wampanoag people lived on Nantucket before the Quakers came to escape the strict laws of the Puritans,to the days when Nantucket was the Whaling Capital of the World and finally a tourist destination.
We went to the waterfront to learn what it was like in its whaling days.
We walked the streets and learned about the businesses that helped Nantucket grow. We walked to the Atheneum, the historic Methodist Church and Pacific National Bank in the center of downtown. Our walk ended in the 1700’s Friends Meeting House.
We changed gears at that point and went to lunch before arriving at the Whaling Museum for our tour at 1:30 pm. Our first stop at the museum was a lecture on the whaling ship Essex that went down in the Pacific Ocean.
The story is told in Nathanial Philbrick’s book, In the Heart of the Sea. I read that book before sailing around the world, but not until I was sitting in the museum listening to the story while looking at the huge map on the wall did I realize that the spot in the Pacific Ocean where Windbird sailed up and over a female sperm whale was very close to where the Essex was attacked by a male sperm whale and sunk. In my log on that day I wrote: “ We think we crossed the path of a pod of female sperm whales. The one we hit must have been close to the surface and then dipped when we hit. Unlucky to hit a whale; lucky we didn’t sustain more damage.” And lucky our encounter was with a female rather than a male like the Essex!
