“Right,” Tyler said. “So... why would your ancestor keep a quarterboard from a shipwreck?”
We stared at each other, the answer between us. “She could have known someone on the ship,” I said slowly. “Someone who... didn’t make it.”
“Probably a sailor, if they were out of Nantucket in the 1800s,” Tyler said. “A whaler, probably.”
I shuddered. True, Nantucket had been the epicenter of the whaling industry, but I hoped the man had been some other kind of sailor, or even a passenger on a vessel. “God, I hope not.”
“What’s wrong with whalers?”
“Besides the wholehunting whalesthing?”
“Oh. Right.” He leaned against the sofa’s back. “If we could find out what ship the quarterboard belonged to, the time frame and people would get narrowed down. There must be a list of shipwrecks from the 1800s, right? We can see if any of them included ‘OS’—those were the letters on it, right?”
It took very little googling to find an online resource of sailing vessels from Nantucket, aptly titledCatalogue of Nantucket Whalers: Their Voyages from 1815 to 1870. Included, too, was a publication concerning wrecks around Nantucket, over five hundred in total.
“It’s a lot of wrecks.” Tyler sounded dubious. “Even if we search for ‘OS’... it’s over fifty hits.”
We scanned the document anyway. The doomed ships carried rum and gin and soap; live oak and coal; bales of cotton and bushels of salt; spices and flour and raisins. There were schooners and steamships and brigs and more schooners, from Plymouth and Puerto Rico and New Orleans and New York.
“Whatisa schooner?” I asked. “And why are they so bad at not getting wrecked?”
Tyler laughed. “It’s a type of sailing vessel. With at least two masts, lined up along the keel.”
“The... keel?” I made a confused face.
“Don’t you spend your summers on Nantucket?”
“I’m a landlubber. Come on, be excited, you get to explain something to me.”
“Something you should already know,” he said, but a smile slipped out. “The keel runs through the center of the ship—the hull’s built around it. Well, now some ships are prefabricated, but laying down the keel used to be the first step of a ship’s construction.”
“So what I’m hearing is you’re a boat boy.”
He gave one of my curls a gentle tug. “If a ship is fore-and-aft rigged, it means it has its masts—its sails—up and down the keel’s line, instead of being square-rigged.”
I was so distracted by the hair tug, it took a moment beforeI gathered words. “What’s a square-rigged ship?”
“Like a brig, or a cutter can be. Actually, schooners can be square-rigged, too, if you have a topsail schooner—”
I decided we’d gone too far and too deep. “Okay, so what do schooners do? They’re not whaling ships, then?”
“They can be. I think small whaling ships could be schooners. But they were often merchant ships, or passenger vessels, or pirate ships...”
“So maybe he was a sailor but not a whaler,” I said, relieved. “Maybe he worked on a merchant’s ship. I wonder... Abby talked to a bunch of historians last summer. Maybe we could do the same. To us this quarterboard is just two letters, but if we found experts, they might recognize it.”
“You’re into this.”
This was both embarrassing and correct. “I like learning about my family. You don’t have to help.”
“Nah, it’s fun. Maybe someone at the Whaling Museum could help us.”
“Tyler Nelson.” A smile played at the edges of my mouth. “Are you trying to come up with an excuse to go to the Festival of Trees?”
He grinned. “Look, I don’t have a million small children to go with and pretend it’s for them. I have to take what I can get.”
“Ah, yes, a Christmas tree exhibit, the highlight of the Hanukkah season.”
He looked startled. “So you’ve never been?”
