“Look at this.” Tyler turned his phone to show me a picture of a seashell that looked like mine. “This is called a sunset shell, native to Hawaii. Very fancy. You have two of those. I bet the sailor found them and decided to bring them back to his girl.”
“So we’re looking for a whaleship that made it to Hawaii,” I said. “With an ‘OS’ in its name and that wrecked near Nantucket.”
“I’m down to look it up,” Tyler said. “But maybe over more coffee?”
We headed a few blocks to a Portuguese bakery with whitewashed walls and blue paintings of the sea, almost enough to make you feel like you’d been whisked away to the Azores. Nantucket whalers had been in contact with those mid-Atlantic islands since the 1700s, but I hadn’t thought much about contact with Pacific Islands.
Tyler ordered a cappuccino and I got a hot chocolate. We both got egg tarts and settled in. I scooted my chair closer to his, so I could peer over his shoulder as he pressed the search button on the old book we’d found of Nantucket wrecks, typing inOSand paging through the results, looking for a whaleship. FirstOS: schooner. Second: brig. Third: schooner. Fourth: schooner. Fifth: schooner.
Sixth: whaler.
I squeezed Tyler’s shoulder. “Look! There!”
“Slow down,” he cautioned. “Let’s go through the rest. There might be more.”
There were, but the two other whaler wrecks occurred before1820, before whaling ships had made it to Hawaii. Only one whaler remained with anOSin its name: theRosemary.
“Let’s see her deal,” I said, and with a few more taps, we’d pulled up an article.
In April of 1845, theRosemaryhad been coming in late at night in heavy fog and mistook Sankaty Head Light on Nantucket for Gay’s Head on the Vineyard—both lighthouses worked similarly. The ship steered as though approaching the Vineyard and went ashore near Long Pond, bilging and breaking apart. Five crewmen died, including the first mate; the rest were brought to shore.
A quick search brought up another article. TheRosemaryhad been returning from South America, with crews out of New Bedford and Nantucket. She’d been sailing for twenty years. She’d navigated so many difficult waters and had been so close to home on her final voyage.
“Jesus,” Tyler said. “I bet your girl was in love with one of the sailors who died. And she was so brokenhearted, she couldn’t get rid of his stuff.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Though statistically, it’s more likely he survived.”
“Sure, but would she really be keeping his shipwrecked quarterboard if he lived and they broke up?”
“Fair point.” It made me sad, thinking of one of my ancestors losing a loved one in a deadly shipwreck. I’d rather she hid away the belongings of a guy she wanted to move on from, not someoneshe’d been forced to give up. “If this ship went down in 1845...”
I pulled up the photo of the family tree on my phone and we scanned it. “Joseph and Esther were the first Barbanels who came to Nantucket,” I told Tyler. “They had Marcus and Naomi, who would have been in their forties and married in the 1840s. But Marcus’s daughters...” My gaze fell on Shoshana—my distant ancestress who had continued the family line in lieu of a male heir—and her younger sisters. I did some quick math on my napkin. “In 1845, Shoshana would have been nineteen, Josephine seventeen, and Louisa sixteen.”
“Sounds right to me.”
“So we’re looking for a sailor in his teens or twenties, I bet.”
“Why so limited?” Tyler said, grinning. “Don’t be ageist.”
I made a face. “Okay, Ihopehe was close to their age, but who’s to say. Still, he looks young in the picture, right?”
“I guess,” Tyler agreed skeptically. “It’s a painting; can you really tell?”
I swiped back to the photo of the painting. “Yes. He’s young and hot.”
Tyler rolled his eyes.
On a new napkin, I scribbled dates.
1819: ships make it to Hawaii (seashells)
1850s/60s: photography shows up (no need for painting!)
1813–1845: Rosemary whaling
1845: Rosemary sinks
“So we can expect our sailor and his lady love were together before his last voyage, right?” Tyler said. “And these trips took two or three years—so how old would the Barbanel girls have been in 1843?”
