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Some members of the colonial Coffin family were whalers, agents, merchants, and traders who were prominent during the triangular trade in the United States and Canada. Coffin ship owners, captains, masters, and crew men operated triangle and bilateral trade ships out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, US eastern seaports, and Canadian seaports from the 17th to 19th centuries.
Several members of the family gained wider exposure due to their discovery of various islands in the Pacific Ocean.
Tristram Coffin, born in 1609 in Brixton, Devon, sailed for America in 1642, first settling in Newbury, Massachusetts, then moving to Nantucket.[1][2] The Coffins, 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 whaling ships (whalers) and a trade vessel.[1] In 1763, six Coffin men were captains of Nantucket ships which sailed as far as South America and Greenland.[3]
On 31 May 1823, the British whaler Transit arrived in Batavia, on the island of Java, having lost its master, Captain Alexander, to a whale near Christmas Island. James Coffin was on Java at the time and was appointed as captain.[4]
Later that year, while working in the central Pacific, James is said to have discovered Enderbury Island in the Phoenix group, naming it after the London whaling firm Samuel Enderby & Sons.[5] However, when he described his own discoveries of the Bonins to Arrowsmith and other geographers, he did not mention Enderbury.[6]
On September 12, 1824, he discovered the southern group of the Bonin Islands.[7]
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.[8]
Alternative sources claim the island was sighted by whaler Joshua Gardner, also reported to have captained Ganges in 1825.[9]
Some sources report that in 1823 or 1824, a "Reuben Coffin" was captain of an American whaler named Transit, out of Nantucket, and was responsible for the discovery of the Bonin Islands.[10][11][12] Anchoring unchallenged off Haha Jima, he claimed the islands for the United States, naming them "Coffin Islands".[13]
Owen Coffin (1802–1821) was a teenaged sailor aboard the Nantucket whaler Essex when it set sail for the Pacific Ocean on a sperm whaling expedition in August 1819. In November the next year, a whale rammed and breached their hull in mid-Pacific, causing Essex to sink. Following months in a small whaleboat, members of the near-starving crew finally concluded a member must be sacrificed. They drew lots, which Coffin "lost," and he was shot and eaten.
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