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is past,” a Baltimore newspaper reported that spring on “dishonored credits, deserted dwellings, inactive streets, declining commerce, and exhausted coffers.” Nantucket remained an astonishing exception. Just as its isolated situation many miles out to sea enabled it to enjoy the warming influence of the Gulf Stream (providing for the longest growing season in the region), Nantucket existed, at least for the time being, in its own benign climate of prosperity.
    Between July 4 and July 23, ten whaleships left the island, most heading out in pairs. The wharves were busy with laborers long into the night, all caught up in the disciplined frenzy of preparing whale-ships for sea. But Gideon Folger, Paul Macy, and the Essex ’s captain, George Pollard, knew that all the preparations would be for naught if they couldn’t find a crew of twenty-one men.
    Since there were only so many Nantucketers to go around, shipowners relied on off-islanders with no previous sailing experience, known as “green hands,” to man their vessels. Many came from nearby Cape Cod. Shipping agents in cities up and down the East Coast also provided the owners with green hands, often sending them to Nantucket in groups aboard packet ships.
    A green hand’s first impression of the island was seldom positive. The young boys loitering on the waterfront inevitably harassed the new arrivals with the cry “See the greenies, come to go ileing.” (“Oil” was pronounced “ile” on Nantucket.) Then followed a walk from Straight Wharf to the base of Main Street, where a clothing and dry goods store served as the “grand resort and rendezvous of seafaring men.” Here men looking for a berth or just killing time (known as “watching the pass” on Nantucket) spent the day in a haze of tobacco smoke, lounging on an assortment of benches and wooden boxes.
    On this island of perpetual motion, job-seeking seamen were expected to whittle. It was the way a man whittled that let people know what kind of berth he expected. A whaleman with at least one voyage under his belt knew enough to draw his knife always away from him. This signaled that he was looking for a boatsteerer’s berth. Boatsteerers, on the other hand, whittled in the opposite direction, toward themselves; this indicated that they believed they were ready to become a mate. Not knowing the secret codes that Nantucketers had developed, a green hand simply whittled as best he knew how.
    Many of the green hands felt as if they had found themselves in a foreign country where the people spoke a different language. All Nantucketers, even the women and little children, used nautical terms as if they were able-bodied seamen. According to one visitor, “Every child can tell which way the wind blows, and any old woman in the street will talk of cruising about, hailing an old messmate, or making one bring to, as familiarly as the captain of a whaleship, just arrived from the northwest coast, will describe dimension to a landlubber by the span of his jibboom, or the length of his mainstay. ” For the green hands, whose first taste of the sea may have been on the packet ship to Nantucket, it was all a bewildering blur, particularly since many of the islanders also employed the distinctive “thee and thou” phrasing of the Quakers.
    Compounding the confusion was the Nantucketers’ accent. It wasn’t just “ile” for “oil”; there was a host of peculiar pronunciations, many of which varied markedly from what was found even as nearby as Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard. A Nantucket whaleman kept his clothing in a “chist.” His harpoons were kept “shurp,” especially when “atteking” a “lirge” whale. A “keppin” had his own “kebbin” and was more often than not a “merrid” man, while a “met” kept the ship’s log for the entire “viege.”
    Then there were all these strange phrases that a Nantucketer used. If he bungled a job, it was a “foopaw,” an apparent