The story of the whaling industry on Nantucket Island is a reminder that beauty, tolerance, destruction, and exploitation are inseparable, not merely awkwardly adjacent. We choose to see one side or the other; or we attempt the more difficult task of encompassing the whole.

Nantucket was founded by people fleeing religious persecution from Puritans on the mainland—themselves refugees from persecution in the Old World. In 1702, the island converted en masse to Quakerism after its most powerful resident, Mary Coffin Starbuck, was moved by a single afternoon sermon.

The fortunes of the pacifist, abolitionist religion rose as they began whaling in earnest. Quakers perceived no contradiction between their beliefs and their industry; God had granted them dominion over the fishes of the sea. Pacifist killers, plain-dressed millionaires: the dissonance was total and apparently untroubling as they depleted local whale populations by the mid-18th century and took to the open oceans for multi-year hunts. Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”

Scrimshaw and whaling logbook illustrations are among the most intimate artifacts of American folk art: made slowly, in isolation, by people with too much time and too much at stake. The brutality is displaced by whales with unfathomably merry faces, which is either Quaker guilt sublimated into whimsy, or the strangest form of tenderness imaginable. The beauty of the whaler’s folk art is inextricable from the industry that produced it.

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Links:

• “Forty years after the commercial whaling ban, there’s both progress and more work ahead” – World Wildlife Federation, March 11, 2026

  
  

• “The Art of Whaling Illustrations from the Logbooks of Nantucket Whaleships” - Jessica Boyall, Public Domain Review, January 13, 2021

  
  

• Quakers and Whaling - Quakers in the World

  
  

• “How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World” - Nathaniel Philbrick, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2015

  
  

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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