Away Off Shore by Nathaniel Philbrick

Author:Nathaniel Philbrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

On a foggy Saturday night in June, 1795, three men, using keys they had manufactured out of pewter spoons, broke into the newly opened Nantucket Bank on Main Street. It was exhausting, back-breaking work, but in a few hours they had cleaned out the vault of more than $20,000 in gold coins, lugging the clinking sacks through the black, unlit streets of town to a sloop tied up at the waterfront. By the time the break-in was discovered on Monday, the thieves were long gone.

A community that prided itself on the fact that most homes had no door locks was ill-equipped to deal with a robbery of this magnitude. (When told about the bank robbery, a Nantucketer in Hudson joked that “they must have left their latch string outside.”) Although the robbery had occurred during the sheep shearing festival—an annual event that flooded the island with “strangers”—most Nantucketers were either unwilling or unable to believe that someone from the world beyond their own island could have stolen the money. And with no real evidence, each individual’s opinion on the bank robbery became a litmus test for his or her political, religious, and personal loyalties as townspeople continued to “throng the streets” for days, speculating about who had stolen the money.

On July 9th, Joseph Chase, the bank’s president, met with William Coffin, a fellow board member of the bank, at the lower section of town square. They had much to discuss as they strolled toward Old North Wharf. The first suspect to emerge from Chase’s investigation into the robbery was the bank’s cashier, Randall Rice, a Rhode Islander who had married a local girl and, besides working for the bank, owned and operated a slaughterhouse while also doing some legal work on the side. Rice had initially come under suspicion when Walter Folger, Sr. (a leading candle manufacturer, amateur phrenologist, and Democrat), claimed that Rice, a Federalist, “looked guilty.” Now, as the two bank directors walked along the waterfront, Coffin was hopeful that Chase and his investigators had come up with something more substantial. He was to be rudely disappointed.

Not far from Rice’s slaughterhouse at the foot of Old North Wharf, Chase turned to Coffin and said, “You are pointed out by Stafford, the conjuror, and by God I think you guilty.” Dumbfounded, Coffin was initially at a loss to respond to the charge. But as he began to deny all connection with the robbery, it soon became clear that Chase had already made up his mind. By August the president had consulted a Providence astrologer who described one of the four people who robbed the bank as “a quarrelsome fellow, a big bony man with rough face and sandy hair.” This, Chase and the Democrat bank directors agreed, was William Coffin.

Although it was not much consolation, William Coffin was not alone. His best friend, Albert Gardner, a merchant and coasting captain (not to mention a Federalist), was also accused of taking part in the robbery. Rumor had it that Coffin and Gardner had planned to use the money to corner the whale oil market on Nantucket.

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