Among the island’s most esteemed historical institutions, the Nantucket Atheneum and the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA) have worked together since the latter’s founding in 1894. That the Atheneum existed for about 70 years before the NHA – serving as the central archive of knowledge for the island’s inhabitants, explorers and tradesmen – its collection overflowed with the riches of the world, brought back to the island by a loyal following of naval traders whose business was naturally suited to adventuring forth to exotic locales. As Michael Harrison, the Obed Macy Research Chair at the NHA, said, “everything on Nantucket was brought to the island at some point.” We sat down with the curator on the occasion of a formalization of sorts, where the Atheneum’s collection of artifacts was transferred in full ownership to the NHA.
Tell us about the Nantucket Atheneum in its earliest days.
Today, the Nantucket Atheneum is the island’s free public library, but it was formed in the 1820s as a private subscription library and incorporated in 1834. It had a museum from its earliest days, containing primarily mineral specimens, seashells and cultural items from the South Pacific – so-called “curiosities” meant to entertain and educate. The original collection was almost totally destroyed in the Great Fire of July 1846, which leveled Nantucket’s waterfront and central business district, but a new collection was swiftly assembled through private donations. The Atheneum took out newspaper ads specifically appealing to the island’s whalemen in the Pacific, “as many opportunities may be presented to them, in course of their long and widely extended voyages, for the procurement of many articles of peculiar fitness for a museum.”
What changed at the Atheneum in 1905 when its collection was lent to the NHA?
For 60 years, the Atheneum was the primary repository for historic and scientific artifacts on island, although there were other, smaller collections, such as the one Eliza McCleave displayed at her Main Street home between 1842 and 1895. By 1905, however, the island had organizations specifically dedicated to scientific and historical pursuits: the Nantucket Historical Association, founded in 1894, and the Maria Mitchell Association, founded in 1902. After the Atheneum became a free public library in 1900, its leaders felt a keen need for additional library space. They closed their museum in 1905, giving their mineral and bird collections to the Maria Mitchell and lending the seashells and historical collections to the NHA.
And it’s been there ever since?
Yes. For 115 years, the NHA has cared for the Atheneum collection, displaying significant artifacts and making others available to visiting researchers. The two organizations felt the time had come to convert the loan to a gift.
The island’s historic whaling community is integral to the collection’s being. Tell us about that community’s contact with the world at large.
The many significant artifacts in the collection from the South Seas testify to the regular presence of Nantucket whalers in the Pacific from the 1790s to the 1860s. It is one of America’s more curious stories that the inhabitants of what is essentially a small sandbar in the Atlantic should have been for a time the leading whale hunters in the world, sending their sons and husbands on long voyages to the far side of the world to kill the largest animals on earth. These men, as well as a few Nantucket women, visited places and met people that few among their fellow citizens would ever see or meet, and they avidly collected souvenirs as reminders and proof of their experiences. It is those souvenirs that form the core of the Nantucket Atheneum Collection at the NHA.
The museum at the Nantucket Atheneum in the 1880s. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association, image no. GPN499.
The collection’s age is rather unique. How does this help you continue to tell your stories?
The earliest European and American travelers in the Pacific traded for real local artifacts and natural curiosities from the people they met. Later, as the number of foreign visitors increased, Indigenous people turned to making items specifically for trade to outsiders, preserving more authentic and meaningful items for themselves. The Atheneum Collection contains significant examples of these early artifacts – weapons made to be weapons, cloth made to be worn, masks used in specific rituals – reflecting the key role played by whalemen in early cultural exchange in the Pacific.
There’s a rich selection of South Sea Island artifacts. Tell us about some of those.
One of the more spectacular items in the collection is a 10-foot model of a Maori waka taua, or war canoe, from New Zealand. It is notable for its elaborate stern carving and figurehead. The collection contains numerous shark-tooth-covered spears and daggers from Kiribati in the Gilbert Islands and multiple ceremonial adzes from Mangaia in the Cook Islands. Two tatanua masks from New Ireland in Papua New Guinea, used in funeral dances, are particularly evocative.
Do we know any specific information about any of them? Who brought them back, what community they were trading with, etc.?
Unfortunately, we can no longer link many objects in the collection to their original donors – surviving records are too vague and fragmentary. The Maori waka model we know was presented in 1847 by Captain George Rule, a whaling master, who is known to have been at New Zealand on a whaling voyage in late 1823. A sash woven of banana fibers was collected on Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands by Captain Joseph Allen, who commanded numerous whaling voyages to the South Pacific between 1798 and 1830. Many of the adzes and spears were donated by island merchants and shipowners such as the prominent Matthew Barney, but we can no longer determine which ones came from which donors.
What are some objects that speak directly to the island’s history?
As Nantucket’s involvement in whaling collapsed in the 1850s and 1860s, the Atheneum Museum increasingly collected items directly related to island history. Among these was the original builders’ model of the Camels, the novel floating dry dock used between 1842 and 1849 to lift heavily laden ships over the sandbar at the mouth of Nantucket Harbor. The collection also contains a spectacular model of the whaling ship India made on a long voyage by Captain Joshua Coffin, and a 15-foot sperm-whale jawbone, brought to island by Captain William Cash in the whaler Islander in 1865.
In what ways do the NHA and the Atheneum collaborate today?
The NHA and the Atheneum are vital and complementary community resources on Nantucket, both serving year-round and seasonal residents alike. Students of island history benefit from each institution’s unique strengths – the NHA’s artifacts, archives and manuscripts and the Atheneum’s books and unparalleled collection of historic island newspapers. We collaborate on numerous programs every year, including an annual marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.
-Greg Smith
