Mary Starbuck
Poet, Author, Nantucket Historian

By Ben Simons

Mary Eliza Starbuck (1856-1938), known as "Molly," was the daughter of a Nantucket whaling captain and became thefounding secretary of the Nantucket Historical Association, a poet, and the author of a book of memoirs, My House and I. Gifted with words and enchanted with a sense of Nantucket's fragile past, this "minor Mary" dwelt in the quiet twilight of a vanished world-but was one of the island's first modern women.

Unmarried, living alone at 8 Pleasant Street surrounded by her Walter Folger Jr. clock, her astronomical telescope, and her beloved Isabella grapevines, she remained betrothed to her house: "We have our friends, my house and I, even our lovers."

Throughout her life, she had glimpses of attachment, as to her handsome cousin, imprisoned during the Civil War: "Seth didn't live long after he came home. I wish he had. I wonder if the twinkle would have come back to those deep-set gray eyes! Or was everything 'different'?" Always the pageant of life passes before her eyes, but slowly fades into a recollection: "Was everything 'different'?" As a witness to an era of transition, Starbuck was privy as a girl to "the first stirring of womanhood toward public self-expression, the first awakening to the consciousness of woman's right to 'live her own life.' '' When the first woman in bloomers appeared on island, her mother delivered "a sort of impersonal smile, the Woman's Smile of Wisdom." Starbuck's own spacious mind had ample room for both horns of the dilemma: for her mother's skeptical smile and for the new stirring of "self-expression."

Her own self-expression would take many forms, including a small volume of poems first published in 1911 bearing the title "Nantucket" and Other Verses. The title poem includes her best-known lines:

"Just a sandy wind-swept island!"
What more would you have it be,
With a turquoise sky above it,
Around it a sapphire sea?

Raised in the tradition of Whittier, Starbuck captured in her poems a sense of the fleeting, colorful, mist-covered landscape that earned her the epithet "poet of the purple isle." A poem entitled "The Purple
Island"cries:

Purple Island! Purple Island!
There are mystic moments when
All voices of the springtime
Call us o'er and o'er again

Back to thee, far purple island.

Individual poems in that collection, amplified and reprinted in 1922, paint word scenes of Miacomet, Pocomo Head, 'Sconset, and other familiar haunts in quaint, convincing atmospheric strokes. In addition to the majority of weather- and sea-filled pieces, something more modern and introspective emerges in a few poems, such as "Consciousness":

Because, you see,
All those things he thinks he knows
Are only vertebrae
Without connecting tissue,
Are only toys
For men to play with!

Who the offending man was remains a mystery-perhaps her older brother who went off to Phillips Academy, while Mary sat at the feet of her teacher at the Cent School-but the bristling consciousness of her awakened mind signals something far deeper than descriptive lines like "gaunt, crazy wind-tossed pine trees/A never-ending moor." Her poem "Down" conveys a sense of her own active but dissociated inward eye:

Quite still I lie. I do not feel,
Of that I'm very sure,
My brain still works-no, photographs perhaps
Without developing-
"No pain, no ache, or do you think?"
Oh no, I look at pictures in my brain, that's all.

Like a long-developing daguerreotype, she would spend her own days at 8 Pleasant Street sorting through images from her Nantucket past.

These images were grounded in memories of her father, Captain Charles Starbuck. The captain was "tall and handsome" with a "full-toned, beautiful voice." He adored his children, gave them "silver pennies" upon returning from a voyage, and would bring exotic gifts, "shawls and china and lacquer ware," from his "great gamble" beyond Cape Horn aboard the Starbuck ship Islander. He drank neither tea nor coffee, took no "liquor," and shared with his daughter, his "regular witch," a love of flowers and gardening. He was a straight-dealing captain who lost his fortune on the Islander and returned home to die soon after. The associations with the roving life ran deep with daughter Mary:

Casks of pickled limes, of cocoanuts, of Cape Horn nuts, as English walnuts were called, and Castile nuts, now known as Brazil nuts. And small kegs of lime juice and of tamarinds, both of which made refreshing drinks for warm days.

Mary's mother, Lois (Pease), remarried another sea dog, Captain James Wyer. The Starbuck family remained in their house on Pleasant Street and Captain Wyer moved in, renting out his Orange Street home. Wyer would often don his "gunning coat" and take his new family to see the plover "going over," as Mary remembers:

The sound came nearer, a little soft, staccato whistle, then louder, a bit shriller but the notes dropping still softly, though more quickly, and then the upper air was filled with the nervous, plaintive notes of the plover until the whole atmosphere seemed to become of an unbearable density with the mysterious crying of the invisible birds, driven by instinct into the blackness, fearfully, pathetically leaving the known for the unknown!

Captain Wyer ended his days in the "Cap'ns' Rooms" at the Pacific Club, of which he was an original purchaser. His stepdaughter built up her treasure of memories to make her "to that extent . . . an Historical Personage": "It is a curious feeling to realize that some trifling experience of one's life should have become of great importance because it happened so long ago that there is slight likelihood of its ever happening again." Her memory of the swarming plovers certainly qualifies.

As she travels through a lifetime of Nantucket memories in My House and I (1929), she repeatedly returns to a concept familiar from her childhood: the "thousand-year box." These thousand-year boxes were found in barns, sheds, or kitchens, often "a thing despised by the good housewife," as they contained the clutter and loose ends of years: "There were brass knobs, no two alike, odd locks, odder keys, parts of drawer handles . . . whale-ivory umbrella handles or tops of walking sticks . . . silk velvet to make a bonnet." In general, they contained things "cast as refuse to the void" and "'source stuff' like the 'Sewers of Paris.'" Soon, this idea becomes a model for the very approach to preserving the past. As the Nantucket of old slips away, what would it be like to create just such a thousand-year box for the artifacts and experiences that threaten to fade? All of those collective "trifling experiences" she refers to could mature into something so grand as a "Historical Personage," and the parade of "precious 'old associations'" could emerge as something like history:

We thought that it would be a curious combination to dig up! Future generations would be informed that their ancestors went to bed with their hats on instead of the traditional boots, or that the Nantucketers wore beaver hats instead of nightcaps. Nantucketers were always different!

At first, Starbuck's own house played the role of the preserve for the memories and artifacts that surrounded her so vividly. But in 1894 she acted as a moving spirit in the foundation of the Nantucket Historical Association, serving as its first secretary. She and many fellow Nantucketers whose houses were filled with the ghostly remains of their ancestors, and who might have been faced with a difficult "succession of choices," had joined to form a more public organization that could house all of the artifacts accumulated for years in a larger version of the same: "Otherwise the world would [have] become an exaggerated 'thousand-year box' and no place to put it!" It took the foresight of Starbuck and her generation to organize and create a new stronghold for time.

Starbuck continued to live at 8 Pleasant Street until her death in 1938. Years earlier, she had attended the last Quaker funeral on Nantucket, "A sad and uncomfortable day . . . soft, moist and gray in the early spring . . . the petulant gusts of a 'smoky sou'wester' blew gritty clouds of dust from the road." She had learned from the Quakers in her midst, she said, "the principle of not saying anything unless one has something to say. Of course the other lesson has to be learned later-the trick of saying something when there isn't anything to say." With the last prayer at the Quaker's graveside, "that we might 'be at home in peace with Thee,' I saw that the man was trembling and trying to control himself." With her own death, she took her deepest memories with her.

Ben Simons is the NHA's assistant curator and contributed an article about the NHA's recent acquisitions to the Spring 2003 issue of Historic Nantucket.