Land" from "the Vineyard," and then transformed his children into fishes. His wife lamented this cruelty, and he seized and threw her over to the mainland on Sakonnet Point, where she still lies, a misshapen rock. Then the disgusted giant vanished forever. The Norsemen first named the island Nautikon, appropriately meaning the "Far Away Land." From this, on an early map, it appears as Natocko, then as Nantukes, and finally it became Nantucquet, from which the present name is derived. When Gosnold came along in 1602, he first saw its great eastern promontory, Sankaty Head, describing the island as covered with oak trees and populous with Indians. After the original grant was made to Thomas Mayhew, he sold it in 1659 to the "ten original purchasers" for £30 and two beaver hats, one for himself and one for his wife, he reserving one-tenth. These purchasers colonized the island, Thomas Macy, a Quaker who fled from Puritan persecution in New England, beginning the first settlement, and Peter Foulger, who came there somewhat later, had a daughter, who was the mother of Benjamin Franklin. John G. Whittier, the good Quaker poet, thus sings of Macy's flight to the island: "Far round the bleak and stormy cape The vent'rous Macy passed, And on Nantucket's naked isle Drew up his boat at last." Macy landed at the site of the town of Nantucket, then the Indian village of Wesco, or the "White Stone," which lay on the shore of the harbor, and afterwards had a wharf built over it. The whale fishery, which made Nantucket's prosperity, began early, in boats from the island, and the population had increased by the Revolution to about forty-five hundred, Sherburne, as it then was called, being the chief whaling port in the world, with one hundred and fifty whale ships. The island was covered with trees, but they were all destroyed during the Revolution, and it was then made almost a desert, losing also the greater part of its population and much of the fishery fleet. There was a revival subsequently, and Nantucket reached its maximum prosperity in 1840, with nearly ten thousand population. Afterwards came the final decline of whaling, and the sandy, almost treeless island now has about three thousand people, who depend for a living chiefly on the summer visitors. It is without a whaleship, but it has many snug cottages, and those going for health and rest can well say, with Whittier: "God bless the sea-beat island! And grant forever more That charity and freedom dwell, As now, upon her shore."