Nantucket museum honors lifesavers

Nantucket’s rich history is by its maritime nature one fraught with disaster, given that the waters sailors love to ply around the island are, in stormy weather, some of the most deadly in the Atlantic.

Paying homage to that danger – and to the spirit of mankind that flies in the face of that danger to rescue those gripped in it – is the newly renovated Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, benefitting from a $3.1 million expansion and opening in 2009 for its first full season, having been closed part of 2008 for the work that more than tripled its size and put the museum’s holdings into a more cohesive display.

In 1968, island resident Bob Caldwell built a boathouse to store his growing cache of lifesaving and shipwreck memorabilia and there it stayed for decades, stuffed and stacked here and there, until the museum merged with the Egan Maritime Institute in 2004, which raised money through donations for the expansion.

The finished project is a fascinating display of things like antique breech buoys that saved sailors from grounded wrecks, a large collection of photographs showing the daily life of the island’s light station keepers and surf men, and one of the most compelling displays, a lighted relief map showing some of the more than 700 documented shipwrecks around the island.
“The wrecks are from 1870-1910, the peak of maritime transportation,” says curator James Lansing. “Some said it was like the ocean version of Route 95.”

Displayed here are the stories of five of those wrecks: The Nantucket Lightship 117 in 1934; the Mary Anna in 1871; the T.B. Witherspoon in 1886; the H.P. Kirkham in 1892; and the W.F. Marshall in 1877.

Making the museum appealing to children is the story of Marshall, a black Newfie rescued from the Marshall, and whose image in little doghouses throughout the museum guide kids through it. Also popular is a hand-cranked miniature breech buoy system, so kids can see exactly how the system worked: A basket and rope-and-pulley system plucked people off grounded vessels.
Very popular was one display, “Madeket Millie,” an exhibit honoring the life of Mildred “Madeket Millie” Jewett, an unofficial coast watcher for the Coast Guard who was so valued for her devotion that the U.S. Coast Guard made her an honorary commissioned warrant officer, and scattered her ashes from a helicopter when she died in 1992.

And not to be missed is a continuously playing video about the historic rescue of the Kirkham crew by the Coskata Lifesaving Station surf men, a grueling rescue involving a row of some 15 miles through storm-tossed waters and taking 26 hours to complete. Not a single life was lost. The film’s title is the Coast Guard motto: “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back,” dedicated to the brave men of the U.S. Life-Saving Service – which became the modern Coast Guard.

“These were very proud men, they were all about values,” Lansing says. “This is what people did to help others.”

Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, 158 Polpis Road, 508-228-1885, www.nantucketshipwreck.org; admission free for members, $5 for non-member adults, $3 for non-member children, fee includes admission to historic Coffin House in downtown Nantucket.