Coffin (whaling family)

The Coffin family were a group of whalers operating out of Nantucket, Massachusetts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Some members of the family gained wider exposure due to their discovery of various islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Tristram Coffin, born in 1609 in Plymouth, England, left Brixton, Devonshire, England, for America in 1642, first settling in Newbury, Massachusetts, then moving to Nantucket. The Coffin family, along with other Nantucket families, including the Gardners and the Starbucks, began whaling seriously in the 1690s in local waters, and by 1715 the family owned three whalers and a trade vessel. In 1763, six men of the Coffin family were captains of ships sailing out of Nantucket, and travelling as far as South America and Greenland.

On 31 May 1823, the British ship Transit arrived in Batavia, on the island of Java, having lost its master, Capt Alexander, to a whale near Christmas Island. James Coffin was on Java at the time and was appointed as captain.

Later that year, while working in the central Pacific, James is said to have discovered Enderbury Island in the Phoenix group, naming it "Enderby's Island" after the London whaling house Samuel Enderby & Sons. However, when he described his own discoveries of the Bonins to Arrowsmith and other geographers, he did not mention Enderbury.

Some records suggest that Joshua, while captaining the whaler Ganges, sighted and named Gardner Island in the Phoenix Group in 1825, probably naming it after U.S. Congressman Gideon Gardner, the owner of Ganges.

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