Kith and Kin to Noble Benjamin: Mary Morrell of Nantucket
Mary Morrell (c. 1620–1704) crossed the Atlantic as a teenage indentured servant, was bought out of her bond for twenty pounds by a young Norfolk man who never regretted the price, and became — through her daughter Abiah Folger — the grandmother of Benjamin Franklin. Herman Melville set her in Moby-Dick. This is her story, and the line that runs from a Nantucket marriage to the founding of a republic.
1. The woman Melville named
In the twenty-fourth chapter of Moby-Dick, defending the dignity of whaling against the men who sneered at it, Herman Melville reaches for a name: “The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel; afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and harpooneers — all kith and kin to noble Benjamin — this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.”
It is a remarkable thing to be remembered for: not a throne or a battle, but for being the root of a family tree. Mary Morrell (c. 1620–1704) left no writings, sat for no portrait, and even her own parents are unknown to us. Yet from her descend the Nantucket whaling dynasties Melville was writing about — and, through one of her grandsons, a man who helped invent a country. This is the story of how a girl bound into service in England became the ancestress of Benjamin Franklin.
2. The Abigail, 1635
She was born in England around 1620, traditionally placed in or near Norwich in Norfolk — a county that has carried the Murrell name for centuries — though no parish record fixes it, and her parents are genuinely unknown. Later genealogists have proposed names for them, but every such claim falls apart under examination. What is reasonably certain is that as a girl of about fifteen she was an indentured servant: bound, like thousands of poor young English emigrants, to serve a fixed term in exchange for her passage and her keep. Her place was in the household of the Puritan minister Reverend Hugh Peters, and in October 1635, in the great wave of Puritan migration to New England, she crossed the Atlantic to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The ship is usually named as the Abigail. A note of caution belongs here — the careful modern reconstruction of the Great Migration confirms only that her party reached New England in the mid-1630s and stops short of naming the vessel — but the Abigail is the traditional account, and by that account it carried more than passengers. For on the same crossing was a young man from Norwich named Peter Folger.
3. The twenty pounds
Peter Folger (1617–1690) was about eighteen, the son of a Norwich craftsman, schooled at the grammar school there in mathematics and writing, crossing with his widowed father to make a life in the colony. On the voyage he met Mary and — so the story runs — fell for a girl he could not simply marry, because she was not free. Her indenture belonged to Hugh Peters, and to win her it had to be bought.
So he set out to buy it. For nine years Peter Folger worked — as a weaver, a miller, a surveyor, a shoemaker, a schoolmaster — saving all he could and borrowing the rest from his father, until he had raised the price of her freedom: twenty pounds, a very large sum in the 1640s, the better part of a decade’s savings for a working man. He paid it to Peters, and in 1644 he and Mary married. Of that money, Folger said afterwards, it was “the best appropriation of money he ever made.”
4. Nantucket, and the line down to Franklin
The Folgers settled first at Watertown, then moved in 1660 to Martha’s Vineyard — today one of the most exclusive summer retreats in America, but then a raw frontier, where Peter learned the Wampanoag tongue and worked as interpreter, surveyor, and schoolmaster among settlers and native people alike. In 1663 he crossed to Nantucket as the hired interpreter for Tristram Coffin and the island’s first English purchasers, and stayed to become one of its founding settlers — the surveyor who helped measure and lay out the town, and its miller and schoolmaster besides. He and Mary had nine children, and the island would carry the family name into history.
The only one of those nine born on Nantucket itself — among the very first English children of the island — was Abiah Folger, born in 1667. At twenty-one she went to Boston, and there in 1689 she married a recently widowed tradesman from Northamptonshire, a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler named Josiah Franklin. She raised the children of his first marriage and bore him ten more of her own; the eighth, born in Boston in 1706, was her youngest son, Benjamin Franklin — the last-born’s name, as it has so often been. Mary Morrell, the indentured girl off the Abigail, was his grandmother.
Franklin never forgot the plain stock he came from. Years on, he raised a stone over his parents in Boston and wrote their epitaph himself, recording that Josiah and Abiah, “without an estate or any gainful employment, by constant labour and honest industry, maintained a large family comfortably” — he a prudent man, she “a discreet and virtuous woman.” The line that would reach a Founding Father began, and long stayed, among ordinary working people.
5. Noble Benjamin
What that grandson became needs little introduction, but it is worth setting down what Melville meant by “noble Benjamin.” Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) ran from a Boston apprenticeship as a teenager and made himself, by industry and wit, into the most famous American of the eighteenth century. He was a printer and publisher — the Pennsylvania Gazette, and Poor Richard’s Almanack with its plain proverbs; a self-taught natural philosopher whose work on electricity (the kite, the lightning rod, and the very words positive, negative, and battery) won him the Royal Society’s highest honour and a fame across Europe that few colonials had ever known; and a tireless civic builder who founded America’s first lending library, its first fire company, a hospital, and the university that became the University of Pennsylvania.
But it is in the making of the United States that his hand lies heaviest. He sat on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and signed it — warning his fellow signers, by tradition, that they must now “all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Then, at the age of seventy, he did the thing that may have counted for most of all. He sailed to Paris as the new nation’s envoy and, through years of patient and charming diplomacy, secured the French alliance of 1778 — the money, the soldiers, and above all the fleet that turned a colonial rising into a war Britain could actually lose. Without the French power Franklin won, there is no victory at Yorktown. When the fighting was done, he was among those who negotiated the Treaty of Paris of 1783, by which Britain at last acknowledged American independence.
He remains the only man to have signed all four of the republic’s founding documents — the Declaration, the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, the 1783 peace with Britain, and, in 1787 as the oldest delegate in the room, the Constitution. The girl once bought out of bondage for twenty pounds had, three generations on, a grandson at the very centre of a nation’s founding — and on the far side of a war fought to break free of the country she had left as a servant.
6. Kith and kin
Melville did not reach for Mary’s name for Franklin’s sake alone. Her children married into the founding families of Nantucket, and through them she became ancestress of the island’s great whaling dynasties — the Folgers, Coffins, Macys, Husseys, and Starbucks — the families whose harpooners crewed the ships that carried the American whale fishery into every ocean on earth. That was Melville’s point in calling them all “kith and kin to noble Benjamin”: the men darting the iron from the masthead were cousins to the sage of Philadelphia, and whaling was therefore no low trade but one stitched into the founding stock of the republic. One ordinary woman’s descendants ran from the try-pots of Nantucket to the court of Versailles.
And the line did not stop at Franklin. Among Mary’s own descendants were his son William Franklin, the last royal Governor of New Jersey, and — generations on — J. A. Folger, the young Nantucketer who sailed for the California gold fields and founded the coffee company that still carries the name. Through the wider web of intermarried island clans — Coffins, Macys, Husseys — the same Nantucket stock produced the pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell, the abolitionist and women’s-rights leader Lucretia Coffin Mott, and R. H. Macy of the great New York store. For an island that never held more than a few thousand souls, it was an extraordinary yield — and much of it traces back to a girl who arrived with nothing but an indenture.
7. The grandfather’s looking glass
There is one last inheritance worth naming, and it is not of blood but of temper. Mary’s husband Peter Folger was not only a surveyor and schoolmaster but a writer, and in 1676 he printed a plain rhyming tract called A Looking Glass for the Times. In it he did a brave thing for a New England layman of his day: he pleaded openly for liberty of conscience, took the part of the persecuted Baptists and Quakers, and argued that the wars and disasters then falling on the colony were God’s judgment on it for its own intolerance — calling, in verse, for the repeal of the “uncharitable laws.” He was a stubborn man, and it cost him; he would later sit in jail over a quarrel with the authorities, describing himself in one document as “a poore old Man.”
His grandson read it. Benjamin Franklin recalled the poem in his memoirs — written, he said, in the “home-spun verse of that time and people” — and admired its plain, manly freedom. It is hard not to see the line continuing there too: the large, easy tolerance that became one of Franklin’s defining qualities, and through him part of the temper of the republic, had a grandfather on Nantucket who had argued for it in rhyme a generation before the boy was born. The indenture bought for twenty pounds carried more across the Atlantic than a bloodline.