A real whale of a time: Paul Hodgkin on an uncomfortable moment in Quaker history

‘This story of Quaker ecocide and genocide holds multiple identities.’

by Paul Hodgkin 8th November 2024

The island of Nantucket is fourteen miles long and lies twenty-five miles off the coast of Massachusetts. From 1690 until the 1840s, Nantucket supplied most of the whale oil that lit the industrial revolution. People – mostly white, mostly European people, that is – worked longer, and studied harder, because of lamps filled with Nantucket whale oil. Beethoven performed his sonatas, and Jane Austen wrote her novels, by it. The story of Nantucket is the story of a spreading light enabled by daring sea faring, early feminism and Quakerism. It is also a story of genocide and ecocide.