Stove by a Whale. Thomas Farel Heffernan
were operating off the coast of Africa and by 1774 off the coast of Brazil. On March 25, 1793, the Beaver, Capt. Paul Worth, returned to Nantucket from the Pacific with 1,300 barrels of oil, the first Nantucket ship to have rounded Cape Horn. From that day on, Nantucket and the Pacific were wedded. Today’s visitor to Nantucket finds the Pacific Club at one end of Main Street and the Pacific National Bank at the other, while a map of the Pacific Ocean is dotted with Nantucket names like Gardner’s Island, Swain’s Island, and—sure enough—New Nantucket. There were even more Nantucket names in the Pacific before the islands began, largely in this century, to be reclaimed by their native names. There was, indeed, a Chase’s Island, which is now Arorae of the Gilberts.
The American whaling industry grew and prospered despite setbacks from natural disasters, the revolutionary war, pirates, competition, legislative restraint, and market fluctuation. It was growing impressively at the end of the eighteenth century, and Nantucket still had the primacy among whaling ports that it was not to lose to New Bedford until late in the 1820s.
In 1763 a doggerel verse had listed all of Nantucket’s then captains, seventy-five of them, drawn from twenty-eight families such as the Coffins, Folgers, Starbucks, Gardners, Husseys, Swains, Myricks, Delanos, Colemans, Bocotts, Bunkers, and Barnards.3 If the verse had been updated fifty years later, most of the old names would have remained in it, but a few new ones would have had to be added—Joy, Russell, Luce, Ray, Meader, and Chase.
There were a number of prominent Chase captains sailing out of Nantucket—Reuben, Shubael, and George B., to name but a few—and the Chases were a sizable clan. The islanders spoke of “the thousand Dunhams” and “the thousand Chases,” quite a tribute when coming from a Coffin or a Folger whose own families seemed to have been granted the stellar multiplicity promised to Abraham in his descendants.
Most of the Nantucket Chases traced their lineage back to two brothers, Thomas and Aquila, who settled in Hampton, New Hampshire, in 1639. Through Lt. Isaac Chase of Martha’s Vineyard their line descended to the majority of Nantucket Chases. But Owen Chase was not one of these.
A certain mystery has surrounded Owen Chase’s origins. The ordinary genealogical instruments of Nantucket—the Vital Records of Nantucket, the Folger Records, and the Barney Records—all identify Owen’s father, Judah, but at that point they stop, save to make provocative references to Judah’s mother: “Judah …, s. ——— and Desire” and “Desire Chase (‘a stranger’).”4 So mysterious does Grandmother Desire appear that one might wonder if that was her real name or if the historians had made her a personification like a classical goddess. Over a century after her death there were allusions to Desire at a Chase family reunion that made her still mysterious, Desire’s great-great-grandson recalled.5 One Nantucket historian says quite explicitly, “Desire Chase—was born ? date—Gave birth to Judah out of wedlock.”6 And that does seem to be the universal Nantucket oral tradition on the matter.
That tradition would have been more acceptable if it had come supported by evidence, especially since the evidence is abundantly available in vital records of the town that Desire came from, Yarmouth. Even some of the Nantucket records mention her Yarmouth origin.
Yarmouth, which is situated on Cape Cod right across the water from Nantucket, is as important a seat of the Chase family as Nantucket is, but the Yarmouth Chases are not from the line of Thomas and Aquila; they go back to William Chase, who was born around 1595, came to America in 1630 with Governor Winthrop, was a member of the first church in Roxbury, the minister of which was the celebrated John Eliot, and moved to Yarmouth in 1638.7 His son William and grandson John brought the family down to the point where some light begins to be shed on Desire. And at this point a diagram is nearly indispensable (Appendix H), for John’s son Isaac became the father of Desire, and John’s son Thomas became the grandfather of Desire’s husband, Archelus Chase. On its face the result is nothing more than the marriage of first cousins once removed, a relationship that was neither forbidden nor uncommon at the time.
Dates add something to the picture; those given in The Chase Family of Yarmouth indicate that Desire’s father, Isaac, married his first wife, Mary Berry, on May 23, 1706, and his second wife, Charity O’Kelley (Desire’s mother), August 3, 1727, and that Desire was born March 6, 1741.8 Archelus Chase’s birth date is given as May 17, 1740, and the year of his marriage to Desire as 1764.
These same records give Judah Chase’s birth date as March 26, 1765, indicating that at least at the time of his birth his parents were married. But on this detail they are almost certainly wrong. Against their date of Judah’s birth stands the March 26, 1764, given by the Vital Records of Nantucket, the Barney Records, the 1820 Nantucket census, and private records of Mrs. Charlotte Giffin King, a lifelong researcher into Owen Chase. So there is reason to support the Nantucket belief that Owen’s father was born out of wedlock.
That is neither here nor there, of course, except that it would tend to explain why the Nantucket records fall silent at Desire. The puzzle presented by the marriage of the cousins, however, becomes more enticing the more that the diagram is filled in with dates, siblings, and their marriages. It opens to the genealogist “a vague field for … surmise,” as did an unclear curriculum vitae in Billy Budd. The genealogical appendix at the end of the book contains more detail on these generations of the family.
The place of Judah Chase’s birth is even less clear than the date, the Pollard papers saying he was born off the island and Mrs. King’s records indicating that he was born on it. But in any event Nantucket was the only place he was ever associated with. He was a farmer, not, as far as records indicate, a seaman.9 In 1787 he married Phoebe Meader, daughter of a large and prominent Island family today commemorated in Nantucket’s Meader Street.
Phoebe Meader was a distant cousin of Benjamin Franklin through her Wyer, Swain, and Folger ancestors. Owen Chase’s precise relationship to Benjamin Franklin was first cousin four times removed.
Judah Chase settled in the Newtown section of Nantucket, an area south of the center of town, where for a while he owned a house jointly with David Wyer with whom he had family ties through the Meaders. He subsequently owned land closer to town between Beaver and Spring streets and owned other land as well. Whether he had a house on the Beaver Street property is not clear, but he also acquired other land including a lot and house two blocks from the Beaver Street property, which in time he sold to his son Owen.
To Judah and Phoebe Chase were born eight children. Benjamin, the first, died as a young man from drowning in the harbor in March 1809; his birth date has not been recorded. Eliza was born in 1791, William in 1794, Owen on October 7, 1796, Joseph M. in 1800, George G. in 1802, Alexander M. in 1805, and Susan in 1806.10 In 1808 Judah’s wife Phoebe died, and in the same year he married Ruth Coffin, forty years old, by whom he had one daughter, Maria, born in 1812.
All five of Judah’s surviving sons turned to the sea, and all five in time became whaling captains, an accomplishment that would distinguish the family even in Nantucket. The rapid rise of all of them to captain suggests that they started their sea careers at the earliest possible ages—they were all captains in their late twenties, save Alexander who was thirty at the time of his first known captaincy.
Judah Chase had the satisfaction of seeing all of his sons rise to captain, complete their sailing careers, and retire from the sea before his death in 1846.
About Owen Chase’s early years little is known. He clearly had some schooling, but it is hard to know where. Public schools were not founded on the Island until 1827, except for a short-lived effort in 1716 to establish one. There were some Quaker schools, dame schools, cent schools, and infant schools, but in 1818 a town committee reported that there were between three and four hundred children in the town between the ages of three and fourteen who could not afford private schooling.11
The soundest evidence we have of Owen’s literacy is the 1836–40 log of the Charles Carroll.12 Owen, the captain, kept the log himself, as is clear from his first-person references, and it demonstrates an adequate mastery of the written