The Nantucket Cook

 

Any woman who stepped aboard a ship that was bound to exotic Pacific destinations must have felt a fair number of qualms, shipwreck being one of the foremost.  Death by drowning was dreaded by mariners of both sexes, but being cast away on a tropical island ― where, as was popularly known, free love was practiced ― held particularly dire implications for a decent lady. Cannibalism was another ghastly prospect.  If shipwreck should indeed happen, the best she could hope for, perhaps, was that the island where she was cast up by the sea was uninhabited. 

According to an old sea captain, Roland F. Coffin, this last is exactly what happened to an unnamed seafaring woman.  His story started in the whaleboat where he was one of the oarsmen, at the moment when everyone realized that they’d got lost after being towed a long way off by a fighting whale. After thirty-six hours of sailing and rowing about in a fruitless quest for the sight of a sail, the six men were faint for lack of food and water, so the captain ordered his boat’s crew to abandon the search and head for the distant islet that one of the seamen had glimpsed on the horizon. 

It took all night to work up to the island, so they did not land until dawn. Too small to be charted, it seemed quite deserted, but at least it offered the chance of a drink of coconut milk, if not fresh water. Then one of the boys—a Nantucketer by the name of Tom Bunker—let out a yell that he had scented a spring, and when they followed his lead, they found a pool of beautiful clear water in among some rocks and trees. They drank their fill, then finally straightened to look around.

“Odd thing that there ain’t no birds,” said Tom Bunker thoughtfully. “Uninhabited islands always have thousands of birds”—and, while the others were digesting this strange statement, a solitary figure rushed out of the coconut palms, and then stopped dead, wavering back and forth in obvious uncertainty and disbelief.

“It’s a native,” said the captain. After waving to the others to keep back, he approached the figure in a friendly fashion, doing his utmost with gestures to demonstrate that he meant no harm, and finally the figure allowed the captain to come close.  At which, to the seamen’s surprise, both the captain and the native let out a yell of amazement, and the native began to caper about.

It was then that they found it was a tattered and weather-beaten American female—and a female from their home port of Nantucket, at that. “It ain’t no dream; you are real,” she cried, according to Coffin. “Thank God, I am saved!”

She was the wife of the captain of a whaleship that had foundered on the reef. After being washed ashore, she had found to her horror that she was the only survivor.  Being a resourceful soul, though, she had managed remarkably well.  She had scavenged the wreck for materials for a cabin, and then, having built it, she had settled down to wait for rescue.  She had been waiting, in fact, for five years—but now, by the grace of God, she was saved! 

“Well, as to that, ma’am,” said the captain, and hemmed and hawed a bit—while of course, he said, they would do everything in their power to help her, whether she was saved or not was a matter of opinion, because they were in great need of being saved themselves. Not only had they mislaid their ship, but they were starving, it being a number of days since their last meal.

Though naturally disappointed, the castaway rallied fast.  First, she took them to the little hut she had built, and then she told them to sit down outside and relax while she cooked them some breakfast.  “Of course I didn’t expect company,” she said, so it would take a little while to get things together, but all they needed was to be patient.

And off she went into a grove of coconuts, where Coffin, to his mystification, saw her running back and forth with a lump of wood, hitting the ground every now and then.  He, like the others, did not wonder about it very long, however.  All six men were exhausted after their many hours of pulling at oars, and so they stretched out on the sand for a nap.  And then, as Coffin reminisced, they woke up to “one of the finest smells of cooking I ever smelt.”

Breakfast was stewing in a pot she had retrieved from the wreck five years before, and which was now steaming over a fire. “And if you don’t say it’s a good stew,” she said, “then call me a bad cook.” And then she served out the stew in coconut shell bowls, and it was brown and rich and smelled very savory indeed. 

The men fell upon the food, Coffin reminiscing, “The woman looked on quite delighted for to see us eat, and a-fillin’ each chap’s dish as fast as it was empty.” Finally, she couldn’t persuade them to eat a scrap more.  Then, as she took the coconut bowls away, she observed, “I bet you don’t any of you know what you’ve been eatin’.” 

“Well, ma’am,” prevaricated the skipper, and admitted that he couldn’t rightly guess, though, as he added, “it was a powerful good stew, and shows that you’re a first-class cook, but that of course you would be, coming from Nantucket.”

“Well,” said she, “that there was a rat stew.”  The ship rats had survived the wreck and bred on the island, and because they had destroyed all the birds’ nests on the island, she had been forced to live on those rats for all the five years she had been here.    

Unfortunately for the men, they had to do the same.  Being so resourceful, she gave them a varied menu, of “roast rat, broiled rat, fried rat, rat fricassee, and rat stew,” but, as Coffin concluded, relief was general when their ship found them, and they sailed away, leaving the rats in full possession of the isle.

A version of this story was published in Mains’l Haul, the journal of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, v. 42, no. 4, Fall 2006. The anecdote originally appeared in An Old Sailor’s Yarns, by Captain Roland Folger Coffin (Funk & Wagnalls, 1884) and was retold in The Story of the New England Whalers, by John r. Spears (NY: Macmillan, 1908) pp. 265-272. It is the first yarn in the book of similarly hair-raising yarns about seafaring wives in trouble, Lady Castaways.