Thomas More gave to his island of Utopia. But this island is a built-up desert, a sandbar, albeit one of the most enterprising and prosperous sandbars in history. Even saying it is a desert calls for some qualification. It is fertile for many plants—including secret patches of heather; Nantucketers do not import weeds, as Herman Melville facetiously suggested, or send overseas for wood to plug a hole. But what Melville said about the Nantucketers’ energetic business with the whale needs no qualification: “And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.”1 When Melville wrote, Nantucket meant whaling wherever its name was spoken; the ant-hill was known in most nations that had ocean ports.
American whaling did not begin on Nantucket; it had already started on Long Island in the middle of the seventeenth century before Nantucket was settled.2 Immemorially known to Indians and by white men discovered in 1602, Nantucket was sold to a group of partners in 1659, one of whom, Thomas Macy, became the island’s first white settler. Nantucketers, the old histories relate, began their whaling business around 1668 when a whale entered their harbor and stayed three days, long enough for them to fashion a harpoon and kill it. In 1672 they engaged James Lopar to conduct whaling in partnership with the town; in 1690 they brought over the—quite literally—legendary Ichabod Paddack from Cape Cod to school them in whaling. (Ichabod was real, but he is probably most remembered for the yarn—now spun in children’s books—about his frequent Jonah-like visits to the bowels of a whale where he was welcomed by an enticing mermaid.) Shore whaling yielded to the fitting out of thirty-ton vessels for six-week cruises and seventy-ton vessels for longer cruises down the Atlantic and to the Grand Banks. In 1712 Christopher Hussey killed the first sperm whale, and in 1745 the Nantucketers exported their first whale oil to England. By 1763 Nantucket ships were operating off the coast of Africa and by 1774 off the coast of Brazil. On March 25, 1793, the Beaver, Capt. Paul Worth, returned to Nantucket from the Pacific with 1,300 barrels of oil, the first Nantucket ship to have rounded Cape Horn. From that day on, Nantucket and the Pacific were wedded. Today’s visitor to Nantucket finds the Pacific Club at one end of Main Street and the Pacific National Bank at the other, while a map of the Pacific Ocean is dotted with Nantucket names like Gardner’s Island, Swain’s Island, and—sure enough—New Nantucket. There were even more Nantucket names in the Pacific before the islands began, largely in this century, to be reclaimed by their native names. There was, indeed, a Chase’s Island, which is now Arorae of the Gilberts.
The American whaling industry grew and prospered despite setbacks from natural disasters, the revolutionary war, pirates, competition, legislative restraint, and market fluctuation. It was growing impressively at the end of the eighteenth century, and Nantucket still had the primacy among whaling ports that it was not to lose to New Bedford until late in the 1820s.
In 1763 a doggerel verse had listed all of Nantucket’s then captains, seventy-five of them, drawn from twenty-eight families such as the Coffins, Folgers, Starbucks, Gardners, Husseys, Swains, Myricks, Delanos, Colemans, Bocotts, Bunkers, and Barnards.3 If the verse had been updated fifty years later, most of the old names would have remained in it, but a few new ones would have had to be added—Joy, Russell, Luce, Ray, Meader, and Chase.
There were a number of prominent Chase captains sailing out of Nantucket—Reuben, Shubael, and George B., to name but a few—and the Chases were a sizable clan. The islanders spoke of “the thousand Dunhams” and “the thousand Chases,” quite a tribute when coming from a Coffin or a Folger whose own families seemed to have been granted the stellar multiplicity promised to Abraham in his descendants.
Most of the Nantucket Chases traced their lineage back to two brothers, Thomas and Aquila, who settled in Hampton, New Hampshire, in 1639. Through Lt. Isaac Chase of Martha’s Vineyard their line descended to the majority of Nantucket Chases. But Owen Chase was not one of these.
A certain mystery has surrounded Owen Chase’s origins. The ordinary genealogical instruments of Nantucket—the Vital Records of Nantucket, the Folger Records, and the Barney Records—all identify Owen’s father, Judah, but at that point they stop, save to make provocative references to Judah’s mother: “Judah …, s. ——— and Desire” and “Desire Chase (‘a stranger’).”4 So mysterious does Grandmother Desire appear that one might wonder if that was her real name or if the historians had made her a personification like a classical goddess. Over a century after her death there were allusions to Desire at a Chase family reunion that made her still mysterious, Desire’s great-great-grandson recalled.5 One Nantucket historian says quite explicitly, “Desire Chase—was born ? date—Gave birth to Judah out of wedlock.”6 And that does seem to be the universal Nantucket oral tradition on the matter.
That tradition would have been more acceptable if it had come supported by evidence, especially since the evidence is abundantly available in vital records of the town that Desire came from, Yarmouth. Even some of the Nantucket records mention her Yarmouth origin.
Yarmouth, which is situated on Cape Cod right across the water from Nantucket, is as important a seat of the Chase family as Nantucket is, but the Yarmouth Chases are not from the line of Thomas and Aquila; they go back to William Chase, who was born around 1595, came to America in 1630 with Governor Winthrop, was a member of the first church in Roxbury, the minister of which was the celebrated John Eliot, and moved to Yarmouth in 1638.7 His son William and grandson John brought the family down to the point where some light begins to be shed on Desire. And at this point a diagram is nearly indispensable (Appendix H), for John’s son Isaac became the father of Desire, and John’s son Thomas became the grandfather of Desire’s husband, Archelus Chase. On its face the result is nothing more than the marriage of first cousins once removed, a relationship that was neither forbidden nor uncommon at the time.
Dates add something to the picture; those given in The Chase Family of Yarmouth indicate that Desire’s father, Isaac, married his first wife, Mary Berry, on May 23, 1706, and his second wife, Charity O’Kelley (Desire’s mother), August 3, 1727, and that Desire was born March 6, 1741.8 Archelus Chase’s birth date is given as May 17, 1740, and the year of his marriage to Desire as 1764.
These same records give Judah Chase’s birth date as March 26, 1765, indicating that at least at the time of his birth his parents were married. But on this detail they are almost certainly wrong. Against their date of Judah’s birth stands the March 26, 1764, given by the Vital Records of Nantucket, the Barney Records, the 1820 Nantucket census, and private records of Mrs. Charlotte Giffin King, a lifelong researcher into Owen Chase. So there is reason to support the Nantucket belief that Owen’s father was born out of wedlock.
That is neither here nor there, of course, except that it would tend to explain why the Nantucket records fall silent at Desire. The puzzle presented by the marriage of the cousins, however, becomes more enticing the more that the diagram is filled in with dates, siblings, and their marriages. It opens to the genealogist “a vague field for … surmise,” as did an unclear curriculum vitae in Billy Budd. The genealogical appendix at the end of the book contains more detail on these generations of the family.
The place of Judah Chase’s birth is even less clear than the date, the Pollard papers saying he was born off the island and Mrs. King’s records indicating that he was born on it. But in any event Nantucket was the only place he was ever associated with. He was a farmer, not, as far as records indicate, a seaman.9 In 1787 he married Phoebe Meader, daughter of a large and prominent Island family today commemorated in Nantucket’s Meader Street.
Phoebe Meader was a distant cousin of Benjamin Franklin through her Wyer, Swain, and Folger ancestors. Owen Chase’s precise relationship to Benjamin Franklin was first cousin four times removed.
Judah
