Free Coast to Coast by Jan Morris

single family, so that within a few hundred yards there were three separate, teeming colonies of Starbucks. There is another fine red Georgian building in the cobbled main square of the town. It is the Pacific Club, once the haunt of the whaling captains, who sat and drank and played cribbage in its low-ceilinged rooms between their prodigous voyages to the other side of the earth. It was once the office of a shipowner, and on its lintel are inscribed the names of his vessels, Independence and Hiawatha —two of the ships involved in the Boston tea party. They still play cribbage at the Pacific Club, and among the company there is one man—only one—who remembers going a’whaling.
    I have a cousin living on Nantucket, a widowed lady whose house was built at the end of the seventeenth century in the original Nantucket settlement, to the west. Early in the i8oo’s the villagers moved to thesite of the present town, where there was better water and a more satisfactory harbour, and my cousin’s house was moved with them. It is a pretty cottage faced with shingles, with old-fashioned open fireplaces and glass panes in the doors of the rooms (the original Nantucketers were Quakers, and these little internal windows were designed to play the part of chastity belts: my cousin covers them with chintz curtains). She is keenly interested in things genealogical, and seems to be related to most of the Nantucket worthies. On the walls of her drawing-room two family trees hang. One, an orthodox up-and-down tree, concerns her English family, and ends with my mother. The other is a characteristic Nantucket tree, semicircular instead of vertical, so that lateral descent may be traced, intricate quirks of relationship, avuncular connexions and obscure cousinships. From this lady I learnt a good deal of the curiously inbred and introspective quality of Nantucket, an aloofness that must baffle and irritate the many tourists who visit the place in summer.
    Women dominate the life of Nantucket (perhaps they always have, since the days when most men of virility and character were away with the whaling fleets). The most famous native of Nantucket was a woman. She was Maria Mitchell, the astronomer (closely related, I need hardly say, to my cousin), the daughter of a Quaker bank cashier, who studied astronomy under her father’s tuition, discovered a comet, and became world-famous as one of the first women to practise her profession with distinction. Honours were showered upon her, she is portrayed in the Hall of Fame at New York University, she became Professor of Astronomy at Vassar, and died an unmarried celebrity.
    The memory of this remarkable person strongly pervades the intellectual life of Nantucket, for in her memory there was founded a Maria Mitchell Association. It has an excellent little scientific library and an observatory, and is run chiefly by women. For many years now it has maintained a resident astronomer, and when I was there the office was occupied by another distinguished woman, Miss Margaret Harwood. Though she was near the age for retirement, she was a gay and school-girlish sort of person, who shoved her felt hat anyhow on the back of her head‚ and would talk into the small hours if the opportunity arose. She lived in a charming little house next door to the observatory, exchanging data with men of science all over the world, and observing from Nantucket a particular portion of the Milky Way allotted to her by international agreement.
    She was not the only prominent professional woman in the place. I was told that the leading lawyer was a woman, and so was one of the mostsuccessful real estate brokers. The only hotel open all the year was owned and managed by two sisters; one of the two papers was edited by a woman; and the new airport (this must surely be unique) was managed. by a woman. Everywhere in Nantucket women seemed to be in the ascendant, and I shall always associate the island with the conversation of