Free Coast to Coast by Jan Morris Page A

intelligent women, just as one thinks of London in terms of taxis and good suits.
    My cousin took me for a trip around the island. We were driven by an elderly man with a passionate interest in matters of descent and relationship, so between them my two guides seemed qualified to answer any conceivable query on Nantucket that was sufficiently compounded of the insular and the heraldic. They took me first to a lonely house on the moors, a few miles from the town, to show me some heather. Heather is not indigenous to the United States, and in most parts is regarded as a sort of mystical fancy of legend, like the phœnix or the Holy Grail. In Nantucket, however, some time during the last century, some heather plants accidentally arrived from Britain with a consignment of fir trees, and in a sheltered corner of the island they took root and spread moderately. Their presence was discovered months afterwards, and kept a secret. It became a distinct social asset to know where the heather grew, and a club took existence around the knowledge. To this day the location of the wild heather is not known to many, but at this solitary house on the uplands various species had been cultivated, and grew wanly, not with the splendid flourish of heather at home, but with a hangdog, apologetic air, as if they were doing the best they could, but were homesick for Scotland. The house was shuttered, for the occupants lived there only in summer; it looked cold and inhospitable, and a few slates from the roof had been blown off by the mighty winds that sweep in from the ocean.
    Later my guides pointed out to me a moorland ridge beyond which, they said, was “the hidden forest”. Nantucket is an almost treeless island, a lump of land rising bare-backed from the sea; but it appears that at this place there is a sizeable wood. Again the islanders have done their best to keep it secret, so that its isolation will not be disturbed by droves of tourists in the summer. No road reaches the trees, and they are well hidden down in the hollow, generally allowing Nantucket people to be alone there when they wish to commune with their spirits of seclusion. Poor souls, they are annually offended by the influx of holiday visitors, larger each year. The previous summer’s batch had been grosser than ever; it evidently came from the worst quarters of Philadelphia (where the Nantucket authorities had inadvertently boughtadvertising space in a peculiarly unsuitable newspaper). “All they did last summer,” one dignified lady complained, “was stand about at the corners of streets, talking .” It seemed a harmless sort of tripperism, but was doubtless galling to the energetic islanders.
    Nantucket is, of course, almost part and parcel of the ocean; as much in league with the waters as Venice, its very buildings seasoned with tar and the salt winds. There is a fine museum commemorating its whaling days. It is full of bits of ships and jaws of whales; the great deck ovens which they used to reduce the whale blubber to oil; pictures of whalers and sea tragedies (almost an entire whaling fleet was once lost in the ice); gewgaws from distant countries; family trees and logbooks and harpoon spears. There is a fascinating account kept by the wife of a whaling skipper of the arrival of her first child, born at sea at some improbable and uncomfortable latitude; the crew seemed to have treated her very delicately. There are programmes of entertainments mounted by the crews of ships at sea—the first act of Othello was staged by one whaler with particular success. A letter from a skipper, in wire-like handwriting, describes a Christmas celebration, when four Nantucket ships met by arrangement in far southern waters, and had an agreeable time. There are cases devoted to scrimshaw, which many consider to be the only important indigenous folk art, Indian handicraft excepted, to have come out of America. Scrimshaw is the sailor’s practice of carving bone and ivory, especially