VERO BEACH — For years, scores of Vero women summering on Nantucket have bought the island’s famous Lightship baskets to carry as purses. Now, a Nantucket basket weaver has moved to Vero and is offering her classes – and her baskets – here.
Author of two books on Nantucket Lightship baskets and a third book on scrimshaw, Martha Lawrence has made hundreds of the simple, tightly woven vessels.
She shares her 34 years of expertise to weavers in Vero Beach, offering classes in her home and the baskets on her website.
The baskets, often adorned with ivory on their covers and made into compact purses, are highly collectible; antique and even new baskets can run in the thousands of dollars.
Lawrence, whose marriage to Vero resident Bruce McDonald brought her to our shores about a year ago, singles out a simple source of pleasure in terms of the esthetics of the 19th century craft.
“I do love symmetry,” she says.
That passion, along with patience and respect for tradition, are the secret ingredients for excellence in Nantucket Lightship basketry.
Famed for their hardwood bottoms and staves and tight rattan weave, the baskets are a tradition that began 157 years ago aboard a ship that served as a lighthouse off Nantucket’s coast.
The lightship tenders, all men, wove the baskets during the long months that they were confined to duty.
In the 1940s a Philippine immigrant to Nantucket added a woven lid to the basket’s basic design to create the island’s iconic handbag.
“In the 1950s in Nantucket, everybody carried one,” Lawrence says.
Often decorated with ivory carvings and fittings, the handbags are coveted throughout the world; Lawrence’s baskets are found on the arms of fashionable women from Nantucket to Tokyo.
The master craftsperson grew up outside Boston and spent her childhood summers on Nantucket, where her Scottish-born grandfather, William Crichton, had a studio.
A carpenter by trade and a sculptor by avocation, Crichton’s retirement from industry gave him the leisure to carve.
He specialized in ship mastheads that featured stalwart the spicy smell of wood burning in the little stove that heated the shop, sweet pipe smoke and the fragrance of pine chips that littered the floor around her grandfather’s creations.
Years later, when she learned to carve the wooden forms for her baskets, she felt a connection to her grandfather.
“I enjoyed that link, and I do enjoy the link to the men on the lightship,” she says.
But for the child growing up in Dover, carving and lightship lore were still hidden in the future.
After college in Boston, she married a young man from Nantucket and settled down as a stay-at-home mom. The desire to earn extra money prompted her decision, in 1980, to weave baskets and sell them.
She found an able teacher in Reggie Reid of Nantucket, an elderly jack-of-all-trades whose duties included the care of Nantucket’s town clock. He agreed to induct her into the mysteries of the Nantucket basket.
“I’d leave my home in Dover and go down to Nantucket for a few days to work with him,” she says.
Lawrence mastered her craft, spending long hours creating baskets on her own, closely following a storied tradition.
Lawrence explains that Algonquin Indians passed their method of weaving baskets from wood splints on to Nantucket’s earliest white settlers.
Rattan as a basketry material came later, when whalers from Nantucket took to pursuing their prey in the Pacific Ocean.
They found rattan, a vine-like plant, in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, and brought it home to Nantucket.
The Nantucketers combined rattan with their baskets’ solid wood bottoms and hardwood staves, weaving them around wooden forms that were removed upon the basket’s completion. The technique ensures consistency in shape and capacity.
The method is so precise that an expert can create a graduated series of baskets that nest with snug accuracy, like the set of eight Lawrence herself made, that exemplify basket-weaving prowess.
The Nantucket Lightship basket was born in 1856, when a crew of 10 men and their captain boarded a ship equipped with two beacons that was anchored 30 miles off Nantucket.
Every night, the beacons were lit and hoisted on tall masts to warn ships of dangerous shoals that lay in the shipping route between New York City and Europe.
“It was a terrible, terrible life,” says Lawrence.
For eight months at a time, crewmembers were subjected to storms, frigid winters, and mind-numbing tedium. The men relieved their boredom by weaving baskets.
“My theory is that maybe it brought a bit of symmetry, balance, calm, into that wild place,” says Lawrence.
By the 1890s, Nantucket’s tourists delighted in acquiring the baskets, then woven by retired lightship keepers and a select few who had learned the craft.
The craft was dying out when Jose Reyes, a native of the Philippines, came to the island in the late 1940s with his American-born wife.
After befriending one of Nantucket’s last traditional basket makers, Reyes began to weave, covering the baskets for use as handbags.
Lawrence bought one of his creations from Reyes in 1969. Thirteen years later, she began weaving the baskets herself.
The carved ornamentation on the purses’ lids was another of Reyes’s innovations.
His friend, Charlie Sayle, carved whale-shaped ebony brooches to sell to tourists, says Lawrence.
“Supposedly Charlie’s wife said, ‘Wouldn’t one of your little wooden pins look cute on the top of those baskets.’ And that’s how they started to become adorned.”
With Nantucket’s history of scrimshaw carving, ivory soon became the material of choice for basket decoration.
“Sometimes you can’t find the basket for the ivory anymore,” says Lawrence.
Al Doucette of New Bedford, MA, carves the ivory whales and shells that adorn the purses that Lawrence makes. He is in his 80s; Lawrence has known him for 40 years.
Lawrence has sold her baskets in galleries and through her website.
They also sell in Japan, after a Tokyo-based agent who read her book came to the U.S. eight years ago to meet her, and on a handshake, agreed to sell her works.
In addition to creating and selling her work, Lawrence loves to teach.
She gives workshops in her house and plans to offer more after the turn of the year.
“One of the things I tell my students is that it’s the sum of many, many details that make a basket beautiful. And it’s very important to be paying attention to all those details,” Lawrence says.
It took years to refine her technique, Lawrence adds.
How long did it take her, after her first lesson, to master the craft?
“I have yet to,” she says with a smile.
For more information, visit www.NantucketLightshipBaskets.com
