NANTUCKET: YESTERDAY'S ISLAND
Story and photography
by Margaret & Eric Anderson

Nantucket is an island, a county, and a town, the only spot in America with the same name for all three. In its heyday it was the third largest city in Massachusetts. And when it was the Whaling Capital of the World in the early 1800s it had 88 ships at sea.

Those days are all around you as you walk its streets. And walk you will. This was a city built at a time when people walked albeit with the rolling gait of the sailor. You may need a tour operator if you want to see the Jethro Coffin House built in 1686 and continue on to the famous Great Point lighthouse at the north east end of the island. Both bus tours and sunset cruises are readily available at the town dock. Follow the signs. Indeed the shop signs are everywhere recalling an era when illiterate people could read the purpose of a store only from its hanging sign. You won't have walked far even if Nantucket's name meant "faraway land to its it first recorded inhabitants. The Wampanoag Tribe were living there when Captain Bartholomew Gosnold came across it in 1602. it's not clear what happened to the Wampanoags but in 1659 the island was sold to nine English settlers for thirty pounds and two beaver hats. They sure got a bargain.

James Grieder, a Nantucket native and one descended from the original families who came to the island, says he can walk down Main Street and listen to the voices of his ancestors. "I hear their stories," he says. "They led a lonely and hard life especially after the whaling years. And their pleasures were simple."

The pleasures are still simple in this little smile-shaped island 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. The list is endless, too: Sipping a beer at the West Ender at Madaket at the end of the day; seeing the moon rise over Altar Rock (at 100 feet above sea level the rock misses the highest point on the island by only five feet); listening, at the Whaling Museum, to 19th century stories of how man hunted -- almost to extinction -- the most magnificent animal to ever swim the Seven Seas; walking the uneven cobbles around the many boutiques and strolling the beaches of this 14 miles by three-and-a-half island; exploring the many churches and surveying the island like a monarch from the top of the First Congregational Church on Centre Street; and watching the sunset from the lawn at the Wauwinet, the island's most elegant retreat.