Antiques.

I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut--anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees--and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose--or poetry, in other words.

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889

Connecticut is the third smallest state in the Union, just behind Rhode Island and Delaware. As early as 1760 Connecticut was compared to "a cask of good liquor, tapped at both ends, at one of which Boston draws, and New York at the other, till little is left in it but lees and settlings." Nonetheless, Connecticut Yankees were people of steady habits, vigorous conservatism, acrid humor, and intense self-discipline, which amply made up for the alleged lees and settlings judged to be their lot. They were a migrant people who took advantage of their many harbors and river ports to distribute their bountiful crops to ports up and down the East Coast and to the West Indies.

Among the Connecticut towns to profit by seafaring initiative was Stonington Borough, a narrow rocky peninsula jutting southward into the Atlantic Ocean. In the last half of the eighteenth century its traders recognized emerging opportunities in fishing and coastal commerce, bringing prosperity that was enhanced during the first half of the nineteenth century by sealing and whaling. Sealing voyages to the region south of Cape Horn could last three years. Edmund Fanning and Nathaniel B. Palmer were particularly successful sealers, the former bringing back a net profit of $53,000 after a single voyage at the turn of the century, and the latter, aged about twenty, ranging south of Cape Horn to the South Shetland Islands and the Antarctic on the small sloop Hero. In 1829 Benjamin Morrill, accompanied by ...