“What did the harpooner do?” I looked around the room, as though the information I wanted would jump out at me. “Why were they so fancy?”
“Oh.” Tyler brightened. “How familiar are you with how whaling worked?”
“Apparently less familiar than you.”
“Follow me.” He led us back into the hall with the sperm whale’s skeleton attached to the ceiling, diving down at the boat on the floor. I’d seen them a million times before, but most of my thoughts were along the lines ofbig whale, small boat,scary, before I’d move on.
“This is a whaleboat,” Tyler said. “They launched from ships after a whale was spotted. They’d row up quietly, and the harpooner would stand at the front of the boat and stab the whale.”
My stomach turned over. “That’s horrible.”
“The harpoon got embedded in the whale’s blubber on one end, and attached to a line secured to the whaleboat on the other.” He took a few steps over to another exhibit with an inset paragraph titledNantucket Sleigh Ride.“The whale would be pissed, and dive and swim, towing the boat behind at about twenty miles an hour.”
I studied the sculptures of whales and boats resting below the display, their tiny detailing exquisite, the whales caught in motion, small figures on the boat ready to attack.
“They’d whip along the ocean until the whale needed to rest, and the whalers would use the line to pull themselves close, and the boatheader would take their lance and stab the whale until it died.”
I stared at him, appalled. “I hate this.” Why did people go so far in pursuit of oil? Light, power? A true miracle would be the Hanukkah miracle on steroids—a tiny bit of oil that lasted forever, instead of having to wreck our planet for more.
“You know what?” I said to Tyler. “I think Hanukkah’s the holiday of renewable energy. It’s all about energy efficiency, how it’s so amazing the oil lasts eight nights. I’m gonna tell the triplets to put that in the play.”
“The play?”
“Oh. The triplets are doing a Hanukkah play, and it is athing.All the cousins have been drafted. I play the handmaid. I carry a decapitated head.”
He blinked. “That sounds... really nice.”
“It is,” I said agreeably. “I assume you’re talking about the play, not the head, though. Otherwise I might have to call the police.”
He laughed. “Yeah. The head just sounds heavy.”
I considered. “How heavy do you think a decapitated head is?”
“You google it,” he said, crossing his arms. “I don’t want that in my search history.”
I laughed. “Fair. Okay, so, anyway. If our guy was a harpooner, it meant he was on a whaler, right? It could narrow down his ship.”
Tyler nodded. “We should look again later at the list of wrecks and see the whalers with OS in their name.”
We kept wandering. I’d forgotten how big the museum was, how many rooms, how many exhibits. I’d forgotten how spaces smelled different, the main building, the candle factory, the second floor over from the factory, with its exhibits of artifacts from far-off places. There were bells and fans, baskets and headrests, from India and China and Japan—all from places Nantucket whalers had reached.
And a necklace made from seashells that looked familiar.
“Tyler!” I called excitedly. “Jewelry made out of seashells from the Pacific.”
“Cool.” Tyler peered at them. “Wait—do you have a picture of your shells?”
I pulled up pictures of the seashell jar. “I don’t know anything about seashells.”
“Me neither,” Tyler said. “But yours look like these ones in the case. And—wait, are those puka shells? Like from the nineties?”
“I guess?” I studied the small white shells in my photo, which certainly did look like the old necklaces. A few of the other shells were smooth and dime-size, with a curl through them. I’d also photographed the beautiful scallop-shaped shells, vibrantly colored in pink and orange and yellow. “You look up puka; I’ll look up the others.”
“Puka shells are naturally occurring in Hawaii,” Tyler said after a minute. “When do we think Nantucket ships made it to Hawaii?”
“I think one of the boards in the candle factory mentioned a date,” I said, already looking it up.
We fell into a rapid rabbit hole. An American whaling ship first visited Hawaii in 1819; afterward, Hawaii quickly became a common stop for resupplying on the way to Japanese waters. “In 1834, one hundred whaleships stopped in Hawaii,” I paraphrased one article. “Twenty years later, over seven hundred stopped there in a single year, mostly from Nantucket and New Bedford. A lot of Native Hawaiians ended up as crew on Nantucket ships and came here.”
