The Nantucket Navigators: Journey to Hudson

By the mid 1700s, Nantucket, a small island 26 miles from the mainland settled by Quakers, had become the whaling capital of the world. During that time a group of whalers and merchants with ties to Nantucket decided to start looking for land for a new settlement. Why? To answer that question we need to look at the unique people and geography of the island.

Nantucket was originally founded by a group of farmers and sheepherders to escape Puritan harassment. They formed an association of proprietorship, establishing a communal governance and sharing resources, much as they later did in Hudson. After settling Nantucket, they soon realized that the island could not sustain them so they turned to the sea. They copied the drift whaling practices of the native Wampanoag and used them as crew. As ships improved and “tryworks” for processing the precious whale oil on board were invented, they went to the deep seas on long voyages.

Before, during and after the Revolutionary War, whaling and other maritime ships were harassed, captured, and sometimes the crew was pressed into service by the British. In addition, Britain was eager to develop a whaling trade of its own that would overtake the one flourishing in the colonies. They limited the colonists’ trade, imposed duties on the colonists’ whaleships’ cargo, and offered bounties to boost their own whaling industry.

This letter, from the Selectmen of Nantucket to the provisional government of the colony of Massachusetts outlines the vulnerabilities of the island community and clarifies the Proprietors’ willingness to leave the most successful whaling community in the United States at that time and venture to lands unknown:

Our local situation is peculiar, and our circumstances in several respects different from any other place in America…placed on an Island, detach’d at least Thirty miles from any part of the Continent, whose production is insufficient to support one third part of its Inhabitants with the Necessaries of life, and laying open to any Naval power, to stop all supplies with a small armed force by sea, the only channel by which we can receive them; The Inhabitants are the greater part, of the people call’d Quakers, whose well known principles of Religion, will not admit of their taking up arms in a military way in any case whatever… [as quoted in Starbuck’s History of Nantucket]

After the war, a group of merchants and whalers led by Thomas Jenkins, began looking for a harbor safer than Nantucket Island and with the greater security of diverse trade opportunities. They sailed in 1783 up the Hudson River to find land for a settlement and decided upon Claverack Landing. Several factors contributed to their decision to settle here: The riverfront that comprised Claverack Landing was deep enough for a port with whaleships; there was an established commercial wharf infrastructure; and the farm land nearby could supply the merchants with diverse goods to trade and an abundance of forest lands for lumber to construct ships.