Editing Nantucket (section)

===Whaling industry===
{{See also|Whaling in the United States}}
In his 1835 history of Nantucket Island, [[Obed Macy]] wrote that in the early pre-1672 colony, a whale of the kind called "scragg" entered the harbor and was pursued and killed by the settlers.<ref>{{cite book |author= Macy, Obed |title=The History of Nantucket:being a compendious account of the first settlement of the island by the English:together with the rise and progress of the whale fishery, and other historical facts relative to said island and its inhabitants:in two parts |year=1835 |publisher= Hilliard, Gray & Co. |location= Boston |isbn=1-4374-0223-2 }}</ref> This event started the Nantucket whaling industry. A. B. Van Deinse points out that the "scrag whale", described by P. Dudley in 1725 as one of the species hunted by early New England whalers, was almost certainly the [[gray whale]], which has flourished on the [[West Coast of the United States|west coast]] of [[North America]] in modern times with protection from whaling.<ref>{{cite journal |last= Van Deinse |first= A. B. |year= 1937 |title=Recent and older finds of the gray whale in the Atlantic |journal= Temminckia |volume= 2 |pages=161–188 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last= Dudley |first= P |year= 1725 |title=An essay upon the natural history of whales |journal= Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London |volume=33 |pages=256–259 |doi=10.1098/rstl.1724.0053|s2cid= 186208376 }}</ref>

At the beginning of the 18th century, whaling on Nantucket was usually done from small boats launched from the island's shores, which would tow killed whales to be processed on the beach. These boats were only about seven meters long, with mostly Wampanoag manpower, sourced from a system of [[debt servitude]] established by English Nantucketers—a typical boat's crew had five Wampanoag oarsmen and a single white Nantucketer at the steering oar. Author [[Nathaniel Philbrick]] notes that "without the native population, which outnumbered the white population well into the 1720s, the island would never have become a successful whaling port."<ref name="philbrick2001"/>

Nantucket's dependence on trade with Britain, derived from its whaling and supporting industries, [[Nantucket during the American Revolutionary War era|influenced its leading citizens]] to remain neutral during the [[American Revolutionary War]], favoring neither the British nor the Patriots.<ref>
{{Citation
 | last = Hinchman
 | first = Lydia S.
 | title = William Rotch and the Neutrality of Nantucket during the Revolutionary War
 | journal = Bulletin of Friends' Historical Society of Philadelphia
 | volume = 1
 | issue = 2
 | pages = 49–55
 | date = February 1907 | doi = 10.1353/qkh.1907.a399227
 | s2cid = 160684041
 }}</ref>

[[Herman Melville]] commented on Nantucket's whaling dominance in his novel ''[[Moby-Dick]]'', Chapter 14: "Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires". The ''Moby-Dick'' characters [[Captain Ahab|Ahab]] and [[List of Moby-Dick characters#Mates|Starbuck]] are both from Nantucket. The tragedy that inspired Melville to write ''Moby-Dick'' was the final voyage of the Nantucket whaler ''[[Essex (whaleship)|Essex]]''.

The island suffered great economic hardships, worsened by the "Great Fire" of July 13, 1846, that, fueled by whale oil and lumber, devastated the main town, burning some {{convert|40|acres|0|abbr=off}}.<ref>{{cite book | last1 = Kelley | first1 = Shawnie | title = It Happened on Cape Cod | publisher = Globe Pequot | year = 2006 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=EuSeEVcASI4C | access-date = November 22, 2011 | isbn = 978-0-7627-3824-3}}</ref> The fire left hundreds homeless and poverty-stricken, and many people left the island. By 1850, whaling was in decline, as Nantucket's whaling industry had been surpassed by that of [[New Bedford]]. Another contributor to the decline was the silting up of the harbor, which prevented large whaling ships from entering and leaving the port, unlike New Bedford, which still owned a deep water port. In addition, the development of railroads made mainland whaling ports, such as New Bedford, more attractive because of the ease of [[transshipment]] of whale oil onto trains, an advantage unavailable to an island.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q8JvDwAAQBAJ&q=Decline+of+Nantucket+whaling&pg=PA110|title=Inventing New England|last=Brown|first=Donna|date=November 17, 1997|publisher=Smithsonian Institution|isbn=9781560987994|pages=110|language=en}}</ref> The [[American Civil War]] dealt the death blow to the island's whaling industry, as virtually all of the remaining whaling vessels were destroyed by [[Confederate States of America|Confederate]] [[commerce raiders]].<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yBK_6isJSDEC&q=Confederate+destruction+of+Nantucket+whaling+vessels&pg=PA175|title=Global Coastal Change|last=Valiela|first=Ivan|date=March 12, 2009|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=9781444309034|language=en|page = 175}}</ref>