"The Best Nantucketer of Us All"
Dr. Benjamin Sharp

By Frank D. Milligan

Unlike traditional museums, historic sites have a rhythm about them that is as predictable as Nantucket's tides and the arrival of summer day-trippers. Ever so quietly, spring-cleaning and seasonal staff training give way to packed walking tours, guided tours of Hadwen House and the Oldest House, and corn-grinding demonstrations at the Old Mill. In town the lines lengthen in the foyer at the Whaling Museum as visitors flock into Sanderson Hall where interpretive staff continues the NHA's long-standing tradition of recreating the whaling story, a tradition that Peter Wilson in this issue of Historic Nantucket ascribes to the Whaling Museum's first curator and real-life whaler, George Grant.

Summer brings back to the island and to the NHA many seasonal residents who share with Nantucket year-round residents a passion for preserving and teaching our island's fascinating history. For one hundred and ten years NHA volunteers--trustees, educators, special event coordinators, and researchers--have gathered in offices, workshops, and private homes with one goal in mind: to support an organization in its preservation and education work. The coming together of volunteers with common goals but uncommon zip codes is a tradition that has left a distinguishing mark upon this historical association.

Perhaps no individual better reveals this commitment to service than Dr. Benjamin Sharp (1858-1915), of whom the notable Nantucket resident and former NHA president William F. Macy wrote: "No 'off islander' I have ever known has absorbed so much of the spirit of all that was best in old Nantucket as he." Following Sharp's sudden and tragic death in 1915, Macy was asked to say a few words about his late good friend at the NHA's Annual Meeting. Macy summed up his sentiments with one short but telling sentence: "Though not a Nantucketer, he was perhaps the best Nantucketer of us all."

Benjamin Sharp was born in Philadelphia in 1858 and studied at Swarthmore College and Nantucket's Coffin School, an institution for which he would later serve on the board of directors. Sharp went on to receive a medical degree from the University of Penn-sylvania in 1880 and studied in Europe where he received a Ph.D., majoring in zoology. Sharp chose not to practice medicine, a decision for which he seemed to have few regrets: "I have not killed anyone yet," he once said, "but then, I have never really practiced medicine; I have helped to take a man's leg off at the knee joint; the leg was saved-but not the man."

Ben Sharp worked as a professor of zoology at the University of Pennsylvania and undertook extensive research at many locations, including two summers at the zoological research station in Woods Hole. He soon acquired considerable fame as a scientist and published extensively. He was selected as the zoologist in charge on Robert Perry's first trip to Greenland in 1891 and three years later traveled north again, this time to Alaska, Siberia, and the Arctic. That same year he was elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences, which seemed to propel him increasingly into international research and lecturing.

Despite a hectic international itinerary, few gave more to the betterment of the island. He was called "Nantucket's foremost citizen"-unquestionably a citation of note for any resident, seasonal or otherwise. More importantly, he was universally recognized as a man everybody respected and liked as a friend. In the 1870s Sharp purchased a Nantucket property where he loved to paint and entertain a close circle of friends that included Susan Brock, the NHA's curator from 1894 until 1928. That Sharp would buy a home on the island was not surprising, given his love for the sea. He never tired of going down to the wharves during summer storms.

Sharp gave inestimable time to various Nantucket causes, including the Coffin School, the Maria Mitchell Association, the Civic League, and especially the Cottage Hospital, for which in 1912 Sharp and a group of friends purchased an estate on West Chester Street for the then tidy sum of $16,000. But it was the NHA to which he devoted most of his energy while on island. "In the Historical Association alone I feel his loss to be irreparable," wrote Alexander Starbuck, NHA president from 1903 to 1927.

A relentless and meticulous researcher, Sharp undertook an extensive study of the Nantucket whaling fleet, a project that he failed to complete due to his untimely death. Sharp combined exacting research techniques with the creativity and writing style of a novelist. In his article entitled "A Captain of the Vanished Fleet," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1907, he revealed not only his extensive knowledge of early whaling but his grasp of the human side of this often dehumanizing industry. His main character, a whaling captain, he introduces as "a whale man born when Nantucket was at a standstill, cold and hungry . . . as its forefathers had been during the War of the Revolution." His close friend William Macy believed Sharp to be "one of the few real authorities on whaling and everything connected to it." And many applauded his ability, as Macy explained, to actually visualize life on an old-time whaleship better than anyone who had never actually been on a whaling voyage. "He actually lived it," Macy said during his address at the NHA's Annual Meeting in 1915. "He knew every rope and every spar. And this was his attitude toward everything in our history. It was not a matter of exact dates or statistics with him-it was the thing itself, not the dead dry bones, but the actual living, human side of it."

The pages of this issue of Historic Nantucket contain wonderful stories of Nantucket artists, soldiers, whalers, fishermen, and spiritual and cultural leaders. Some were born on Nantucket. All eventually moved here. Undoubtedly Sharp and his wife (who in later life also served on NHA committees) would have moved here and continued to work alongside so many individuals-from home and away-who gave, and continue to give, their abilities and resources to the historical association's cause. Place of birth or primary residence was not important to Sharp and island residents respected him for that. In the end they also thanked him: "He saw only the best in us," William Macy concluded, "and so we gave our best to him."

Long may the NHA partnership between Nantucket and seasonal residents continue.

----- Frank D. Milligan