Instead of toasting a person’s health, a Nantucketer offered invocations of a darker sort: Death to the living, Long life to the killers, Success to sailors’ wives And greasy luck to whalers. Despite the bravado of this little ditty, death was a fact of life with which all Nantucketers were thoroughly familiar. In 1810 there were forty-seven fatherless children on Nantucket, while almost a quarter of the women over the age of twenty-three (the average age of marriage) had been widowed by the sea.
