HISTORICAL SKETCHES. 177 



committed other diabolical acts " in the name of the 

 Lord," have enough to answer for, is certainly true; 

 but that Thomas Macy,* Edward Starbuck, Tristram 

 Coffin, and the rest "fled" from persecution, is sheer 

 nonsense. 



In the first place, they were not " Quakers "; and in 

 the second, they did not flee. Mr. Alexander Star- 

 buck, of Waltham, Mass., who has certainly given the 

 history of Nantucket as much study as any one now 

 living, says: — 



" That our ancestors fled from persecution to enjoy 

 on the island that civil and religious liberty the Col- 

 ony of the Massachusetts Bay denied them, is very 

 pretty poetry, but an historical absurdity." 



Thomas Macy went back to Salisbury, and lived 

 there in 1664, as the following from a letter written 

 to a gentleman in Nantucket by the historian Joshua 

 Coffin, in 1831, shows conclusively. This letter says: 



" Thomas Macy was a merchant, an enlightened man 

 and much too wise to apprehend any danger to his 

 person or property from any person or persons, either 

 legally or illegally. . . . The idea that his property was 

 forfeited is not correct. It will perhaps be new to some 



* John G. Whittier, one of America's best of men and great- 

 est poets, whose works the humble compiler of this book always 

 reads with profit and delight, has, with a strange disregard of 

 recorded facts, in his "Exiles," made Thomas Macy flee in a 

 light wherry with his wife to Nantucket, in 1G60. If the genial 

 and kindly poet will take the trouble to examine the records of 

 the town of Salisbury, or even read this unpretending volume, 

 he will no doubt be disabused of the idea that Thomas Macy 

 " fled." 



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