News and Events for Nantucket Island
by Catherine Macallister Herman Melville was a young boy when he heard the true tale of the whaleship Essex and her crew, who sailed from Nantucket and met their fates in the southern Pacific Ocean after being sunk by a whale. The haunting story of Essex stayed with the writer, […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ After surviving the gruesome loss of the Nantucket whaleship Essex in 1820, George Pollard, the ship’s captain, and Owen Chase, its first mate, returned home in June of 1821. Pollard immediately returned to the sea in command of a another whaleship. But Chase stayed home […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ More than 100 years after the first white people settled on Nantucket, the French-American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoer visited and recorded his perceptions of island life in his influential book Letters From An American Farmer. Published in 1782, the book was the first […]
~ by Amy Jenness ~ author of On This Day in Nantucket History, available at Mitchell’s Book Corner. A year after publishing his novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville visited Nantucket for the first, and only, time on July 6, 1852. Melville travelled with his father-in-law Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. During […]
