There’s a persistent story in the Northeast that the wives of whalers might once upon a time have been given dildos by their husbands before long whaling voyages. There’s even a cute euphemism for them: such a dildo was said to be called a “He’s-at-home”. The singular plaster dildo pictured above is not proof entire that the story is true, but it was found bricked up in the chimney of a Nantucket house with other old artifacts:
In the box were the other antiques the mason had found with the dildo: six charred envelopes from the 1890s addressed to Captain James B. Coffin; letters from the same James B. Coffin to Grover Cleveland and Assistant Secretary of State Edwin Dehl; a dirty and frayed shirt collar; a pipe that still smelled of tobacco when I fit my nose in the bowl; and a green glass laudanum bottle. These items must have been hidden in the chimney by James’s wife, Martha “Mattie” Coffin, sometime between when the letters were dated and when she died in 1928. The fireplace was later sealed up, and a closet was built in front of it.
This long and sensitive essay explores the history of this particular dildo, and presents what sound like painstaking efforts to confirm the popular historic lore around lonely wives left behind by the whaling fleets. I say efforts because, at the end of it all, the author is left without much more than this peculiar artifact, finding no others, nor any contemporaneous accounts, in a region chock full of well-curated, if perhaps also prudish, historical museums:
At first glance, the he’s-at-home might be an example of bad fact-checking, the old whaling dildo being too juicy a detail to disregard. The books on Nantucket’s history that discuss he’s-at-homes all reference each other in their bibliographies; echo-chambers of research should raise red flags. The thought that I’d had while standing beside Connie’s chimney weeks before rose again: What if this was all a big joke? What if the he’s-at-homes were part of the island’s oldest gossip, started back in the 1800s and washed ashore 150 years later in a smattering of books and a monologue, spread through the island’s collective consciousness, and now accepted as historical fact?
The entire essay is worth your time, if only for how well it illustrates the perils of trying to research a taboo topic in conservatively-kept archives.
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