Nantucket lightship and friendship baskets.(Design notes)

The nation of Nantucket" is how the American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described the island in his journal for the years 1847 and 1848. Located thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts, Nantucket's remoteness enabled its inhabitants to develop their own mores, laws, government, skills, and crafts. The Nantucket basket is a superb example of the island's craftsmanship.

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In the eighteenth century Nantucket developed a need for a wide range of baskets. Islanders familiar with the local Algonkian wooden splint baskets began to duplicate and adapt them to form stronger baskets by replacing the woven bottoms with sturdy planks of wood, thus creating the Nantucket lightship basket.

The basket takes its name from the floating lighthouses that were installed on the treacherous shoals located approximately twenty miles southeast of the island. The first, Lightship Number 11, was placed in June 1854, followed two years later by Number 1 Nantucket, New South Shoal. When the captain and a ten-man crew boarded the New South Shoal, they brought with them the molds (blocks) to make open baskets. After 1905 Nantucket Islanders no longer served on lightships. Although basketmaking ceased on board ships the craft continued on the island.

While making traditional Nantucket lightship baskets was carried on by generations of born and raised Nantucketers, Jose Reyes, who was born in the Philippines and immigrated to the island after World War II, came up with the idea of making a covered basket to be used as a lady's purse. To differentiate his baskets, he dubbed them "friendship ...