Abram's Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Abram's Eyes tells the little-known story of Nantucket's Native American past. Heavily illustrated, including a detailed map of the island's Indian place-names, this book brings a fresh and exciting perspective to Nantucket's history.
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Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket: An Explorer's Guide, Ninth Edition (Explorer's Guides)
by Kim Grant
Kim Grant, a 25-year veteran travel writer, has combed the Cape and islands yet again to research the ninth edition of this perennially popular
guide. She provides readers with the best of the best: selective, up-to-date recommendations for lodgings of every stripe; hundreds of dining
reviews covering everything from clam shacks to four-star restaurants; daylong itineraries for every pursuit; and much more. Follow Grant’s
lead to find nature preserves, bike trails, beaches, lighthouses, antiques shops, local artisans, summer theatre, and nightlife - whatever your taste, budget, time frame, or interest, she never steers you wrong.
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Nantucket Island
The Cranberry Harvesters, Nantucket by Eastman Johnson
Nathaniel Philbrick's wonderful Abram's Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island is
one of the few books to do justice to the native American inhabitants who had lived in Nantucket and
Martha's Vineyard for some 5,000 years. Most local histories and tourist literature is focused on the
European settlers and the whaling period. Nantucket, 28 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, is something of an
archaeologist's paradise. Arrowheads are often washed from the sand banks and dumps of shells (midden waste)
are found in construction sites.
Nathaniel Philbrick states that:
'... Nantucket's present-day reputation does not justly reflect its past.
Instead of the birthplace of the Quaker whaleman (who flourished for a mere century or so),
Nantucket should be remembered as, in the words of Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop,
"an island full of indians." For the vast majority of its history, Nantucket had been home
to a people who viewed it not as a sandy launching pad to
wealth or relaxation, but as an island of remarkable variety and abundance.'
The indigenous people lived a comparatively healthy life, moving their wigwams to
the beaches in summer and the forests in winter. They were not extensive horticulturists like
their mainland relatives but they gathered the plentiful wild fruit and maintained small kitchen gardens.
They made considerable use of shellfish, ducks and beached pilot whales. Cemetery evidence shows them to
have been relatively tall - the men averaging five foot nine and a half inches, the women five foot three.
Unlike Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket no longer has a recognized Wampanoag
community.
In his A World of Islands Leslie Thomas describes waking up to the fifty-two
strikes pf the town clock in Orange Street at seven in the morning and then walking about the place
on a sunny July morning. He found a town that its inhabitants two centuries earlier would have had no difficulty in
recognizing:
'Trees spread like clouds over the streets, their ancient roots pushing the
brick pavements into hills and furrows. The main streets are cobbled, laid down in Nantucket's
whaling days to prevent the horse-drawn drays, used to drag the casks of blubber from the
quayside, from sinking into the mud of the unpaved streets. Some say the cobbles were
brought from Gloucester, Massachusetts, others from Gloucester, England, taken across the
Atlantic as ballast in ships come to fetch the whale oil.'
The whaling references are significant because this, as Thomas notes, was once the greatest
whaling port in the world. Its elegant late-18th century and early 19th century houses testify
to the island's wealth.
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The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket
by Paul Schneider
Cape Cod's Great Beach, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket are romantic stops on Schneider's roughly chronological human and natural history. His book is a lucid and compelling collage of seaside ecology, Indians and colonists, religion and revolution, shipwrecks and hurricanes, whalers and vengeful sperm whales, glorious clipper ships and today's beautiful but threatened beaches. Schneider's superb eye for story and detail illuminates both history and landscape. A wonderful introduction, it will also appeal to the millions of people who already have warm associations with these magical places
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