The Center of the World's Stage

After some truly miserable weather earlier in the week, the sun has reappeared and the prevailing wind has gone back to the southwest.  There are even parking spaces in town.  The water has cooled, and the fish are back.  All's right with the world, at least for those fortunate enough to find themselves vacationing on Nantucket at the end of the summer. But this has tested my self-discipline over the past few days, for I needed to get some work done, specifically, some historical research about German submarine attacks on allied shipping near Nantucket during the First World War.

You see, one day early in October, 1916, a German U-boat sunk six ships a short distance from the Nantucket lightship moored 43 miles southeast of the island.  Afterwards, there was some conjecture that the Germans had established a submarine base in the shoals and sand banks just south of the island, an ideal place for a "mother" ship of light draft to bring out fuel and supplies.  That unproven proposition is the basis of a new book I am writing with the tentative title, "Dead In The Water."

As a result, for the past few days, I have found myself not on the beach, but settled in at the Nantucket Historical Society Research Library, where I spent hours looking at microfilm of the 1916 edition of the Nantucket weekly newspaper, "The Inquirer and Mirror," which has been the island's newspaper since 1821.  I had no difficulty finding what I needed; however, while I tried to focus on the U-boat attacks, I was distracted by many other items in the Nantucket paper.  One of the big stories, with extensive coverage of all the testimony, was a two-week trial in New Bedford, where a jury sustained the validity of one Horace Starbuck's will and found that Mr. Starbuck of Nantucket was of sound mind and was not influenced by his niece, Florence Hill, who received the bulk of his estate.  Other items of interest to me included the news that during the summer of that year this island finally was connected by an underwater telephone cable to the mainland, and that, while mail boats ran regularly back and forth to Woods Hole, a proposed "aerial mail service" for Nantucket was set back a year because aviators did not submit bids in response to U.S. Postal Service advertisements.

The United States had not yet entered the war in Europe, and in 1916 that global conflict received little coverage in the local newspaper other than in the aftermath of the German submarine activity offshore, which made Nantucket, according to the paper's headline, "The Center of the World's Stage." Indeed, The Starbuck trial received much more coverage that the war in Europe, and a local writer for the paper noted that there would have been more concern about the German attacks on shipping, if the vessels involved had been carrying laths and shingles, valued items on this island.  But, certainly, world events never have been the focus for a weekly local paper like the "Inky Mirror," as it is called, Nantucket's "newspaper of record" now for 190 years, and the paper's coverage of the war in 1916 was such that in a column called "Newsy Bits" on page three, I found the following item which I have quoted in its entirety: "The glorious British army has again extricated itself from danger by surrendering to the Turks."

Of course, the world war would come again to Nantucket; however, except for the German U-boat attacks, it still seemed very far away in 1916, when this island was much more isolated than it is today.  But enough said; it's time to go fishing.