For
Nothing Will Grow On These Hungry Soils Without The Assistance Of
This Extraordinary Manure, Fourteen Bushels Of Indian Corn Being
Looked Upon As A Good Crop.
But it is time to return from a
digression, which I hope you will pardon.
Nantucket is a great
nursery of seamen, pilots, coasters, and bank-fishermen; as a
country belonging to the province of Massachusetts, it has yearly
the benefit of a court of Common Pleas, and their appeal lies to the
supreme court at Boston. I observed before, that the Friends compose
two-thirds of the magistracy of this island; thus they are the
proprietors of its territory, and the principal rulers of its
inhabitants; but with all this apparatus of law, its coercive powers
are seldom wanted or required. Seldom is it that any individual is
amerced or punished; their jail conveys no terror; no man has lost
his life here judicially since the foundation of this town, which is
upwards of an hundred years. Solemn tribunals, public executions,
humiliating punishments, are altogether unknown. I saw neither
governors, nor any pageantry of state; neither ostentatious
magistrates, nor any individuals clothed with useless dignity: no
artificial phantoms subsist here either civil or religious; no
gibbets loaded with guilty citizens offer themselves to your view;
no soldiers are appointed to bayonet their compatriots into servile
compliance. But how is a society composed of 5000 individuals
preserved in the bonds of peace and tranquillity? How are the weak
protected from the strong? - I will tell you. Idleness and poverty,
the causes of so many crimes, are unknown here; each seeks in the
prosecution of his lawful business that honest gain which supports
them; every period of their time is full, either on shore or at sea.
A probable expectation of reasonable profits, or of kindly
assistance, if they fail of success, renders them strangers to
licentious expedients. The simplicity of their manners shortens the
catalogues of their wants; the law at a distance is ever ready to
exert itself in the protection of those who stand in need of its
assistance. The greatest part of them are always at sea, pursuing
the whale or raising the cod from the surface of the banks: some
cultivate their little farms with the utmost diligence; some are
employed in exercising various trades; others again in providing
every necessary resource in order to refit their vessels, or repair
what misfortunes may happen, looking out for future markets, etc.
Such is the rotation of those different scenes of business which
fill the measure of their days; of that part of their lives at least
which is enlivened by health, spirits, and vigour. It is but seldom
that vice grows on a barren sand like this, which produces nothing
without extreme labour. How could the common follies of society take
root in so despicable a soil; they generally thrive on its exuberant
juices: here there are none but those which administer to the
useful, to the necessary, and to the indispensable comforts of life.
This land must necessarily either produce health, temperance, and a
great equality of conditions, or the most abject misery. Could the
manners of luxurious countries be imported here, like an epidemical
disorder they would destroy everything; the majority of them could
not exist a month, they would be obliged to emigrate. As in all
societies except that of the natives, some difference must
necessarily exist between individual and individual, for there must
be some more exalted than the rest either by their riches or their
talents; so in this, there are what you might call the high, the
middling, and the low; and this difference will always be more
remarkable among people who live by sea excursions than among those
who live by the cultivation of their land. The first run greater
hazard, and adventure more: the profits and the misfortunes
attending this mode of life must necessarily introduce a greater
disparity than among the latter, where the equal divisions of the
land offers no short road to superior riches. The only difference
that may arise among them is that of industry, and perhaps of
superior goodness of soil: the gradations I observed here, are
founded on nothing more than the good or ill success of their
maritime enterprises, and do not proceed from education; that is the
same throughout every class, simple, useful, and unadorned like
their dress and their houses. This necessary difference in their
fortunes does not however cause those heart burnings, which in other
societies generate crimes. The sea which surrounds them is equally
open to all, and presents to all an equal title to the chance of
good fortune. A collector from Boston is the only king's officer who
appears on these shores to receive the trifling duties which this
community owe to those who protect them, and under the shadow of
whose wings they navigate to all parts of the world.
LETTER V
CUSTOMARY EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT OF THE INHABITANTS OF NANTUCKET
The easiest way of becoming acquainted with the modes of thinking,
the rules of conduct, and the prevailing manners of any people, is
to examine what sort of education they give their children; how they
treat them at home, and what they are taught in their places of
public worship. At home their tender minds must be early struck with
the gravity, the serious though cheerful deportment of their
parents; they are inured to a principle of subordination, arising
neither from sudden passions nor inconsiderate pleasure; they are
gently held by an uniform silk cord, which unites softness and
strength. A perfect equanimity prevails in most of their families,
and bad example hardly ever sows in their hearts the seeds of future
and similar faults. They are corrected with tenderness, nursed with
the most affectionate care, clad with that decent plainness, from
which they observe their parents never to depart: in short, by the
force of example, which is superior even to the strongest instinct
of nature, more than by precepts, they learn to follow the steps of
their parents, to despise ostentatiousness as being sinful.
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