Word: nantucket
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Fate of Man. To prevent his whale from swallowing his novel, Melville had to create a hero powerful enough to combat it. Such was Captain Ahab, in the novel's first draft merely "from Nantucket" but in its final version "from humanity...Fate's lieutenant." He seined such old tomes as Beale's Natural History of the Sperm Whale and Scoresby's Account of the Arctic Regions for obscure facts...
...Nantucket has always been a pretty good place to find sea shells; up to 1945 professional scientists had counted 46 different species of Mollusca on the island and in its waters. That was about the time Dwight Taylor of Pasadena, now a bright-eyed, serious 17-year-old, began his collection. Dwight kept picking up sea shells until he had picked up 120 species of them, and enough mollusk lore to write a dozen-page scientific treatise: "A Malacological Survey of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts...
...against pilings, New England's fishermen can still strike up an argument over the loss of the steamer Portland. Her sinking, with the loss of all hands, is New England's most famous shipwreck, and the 1898 gale in which she went down is still known, from Nantucket to Bangor, as "the Portland gale...
...There and Paint) Alger sect to the ubiquitous abstractionists, some of whom found it necessary to attach typewritten explanations of their work for the enlightenment of our occasionally befuddled judges. Spectators, as usual, were fondest of the good old standby scenes of someone's favorite Nantucket seascape or a nostalgic Connecticut farmhouse with trees...
Smart is the first to admit that there will be cagier seamen than he in the competition even though he's been handling the tiller according to one Nantucket legend since the tender age of six. But "there's only so much skill in handling a boat, and from there Lady Luck takes over," he says...