Wiliam Rotch of Nantucket
A Quaker Hero
William Rotch: MEMORANDUM
(an Autobiographical sketch)
INTRODUCTION
The career of William Rotch during the years covered by this Memorandum is a stir-
ring but little-known chapter of AmericanQuaker history.
Born in 1734, by the time of the Revolution he had built the largest business in the
Quaker community of Nantucket Island. His ships sailed to most civilized ports on com-
mercial and whaling voyages. The trials he and the islanders underwent during the Revo-
lutionary War are described here in a remarkably quiet, understated style.
(This story is also told from a different angle in my Quaker Nantucket and the American Revolution, also
published by Kimo Press. And for more about William Rotch and his family papers, in the Sturgis Library in
Barnstable, Massachusetts, click here.)
Rotch’s account continues past the war to tell of his years of work trying to save
the whaling industry,first by moving it to England, where the main market then was, and
thereafter to France. Driven out of France by another revolutionary war, he returned to
his beloved island. He declines to say that the passage of time, political and personal
antagonisms had by 1795 made him unwelcome by many Nantucketers; he allows only that after
a year he moved to New Bedford, where he lived until his death in 1828. Under his influence,
New Bedford became both the center of world whaling, and a focus of Quaker culture
in New England. In his later years Rotch served on the Executive Committee of New Eng-
land Yearly Meeting, and was a patron of the Providence Friends School, now named after
Moses Brown, another great Quaker of his day.
A sketch of Botch in his later years was penned by Daniel Rickets in the late nine-
teenth century in "New Bedford of the Past," based on his recollections from a half-century
earlier. Here is part of it:
"It is a meeting day of the Friends. In front
of the house is seen a plain but handsome
coach, with a sleek and tine looking pair of
bay horses, a colored driver of respectable
appearance, and another servant at the open
carriage door. The door of the mansion opens,
and a courtly, venerable looking gentleman
appears, an advanced octogenarian, tall with
silvery locks, his dress of the true William
Penn order--a drab beaver, drab suit, the long
coat and waistcoat, knee-breeches with silver
buckles, and shoes also with silver buckles--
his step a little faltering but still grace-
ful, and becoming one who had stood before
ministers and kings in the Old World... .Let
us see him in his carriage, sitting with pat-
riarchal dignity, and follow him to the old
Friends Meeting House. ... Seated in the
ęgallery,-- or high seat, at ‘the head of the
meeting,’ his very presence seems calculated
to inspire a respect for the principles of
peace he so truly inculcated both by precept
and example."
Augustine Jones, writing in The Friend
in 1901, had this to say of him:
"We owe vastly more to the heroes of in-
vention and of enterprise, who have clothed
and fed the multitude and spread before the
entire world the light of modern civilization,
than to the whole race of violent men who
have changed again and again the map of the
world, whose vainglorious chronicles are the
staple of history, far beyond their merit or
usefulness... .Hero worship would have been
very distasteful to that group of noble men,
which included.. the Rotches and many others;
but we cannot forget the worth lost in them;
we may well seek with all our hearts to emu-
late their careers in following the Lord Jesus
Christ in the obedience of faith."
And, now, William Rotch tells his own story.
--Charles Fager
QUEST, P.O. Box 82, Bellefonte PA 16823
E-mail: quest@quaker.org