PETER FOULGER

I had never heard of Peter Foulger (or Folger) - nor could I find anything filed about him - until a letter arrived at our newspaper office from America. It asked if any readers had information about him, the request coming from a research assistant at the Peter Folger Museum on faraway Nantucket island. Peter was a 17th century Norfolk man - or perhaps part-Suffolk - and famous enough to have a museum named after him, and yet he still remains largely unknown over here.
The only obvious additional detail I could supply was that a lot of Foulgers still live in Norfolk, but I did - thanks to help from correspondents - manage to send a few more items of information back to Nantucket, once famous for its whaling fleet.
Peter Foulger seems to have been born around 1617/18 in Norwich, or south Norfolk, but in any event with family connections with the Diss, Frenze, and even Wymondham areas. But in 1635/37, and largely because of their religious and social convictions, Peter, then aged about 18, and together with his father and mother, sailed to America with the idea of joining other free-thinking groups in Massachussetts at either Martha's Vineyard or Salem. Anyway, they may have sailed on the vessel Abigail, or more likely the Defence, and it was on board that he first met his future wife, Mary Moril, or Morrell, then a serving girl with a party led by the Rev Hugh Peter.
Serious, pious and bookish, Foulger quickly adapted to his new and still unstable country, his secretarial skills enabling him to make rapid progress. By the time he was a prominent citizen of Edgartown, on Martha's Vineyard, he also first visited Nantucket, some time before 1660, but indeed surveyed the island in 1660/61. Two years' later he was granted a half-share by the island's freeholders who needed a surveyor, interpreter and Indian teacher, whereupon he and his family moved there.
Foulger was guided by strong personal beliefs, and he became an important part of the island's history. American Puritanism had developed a bigoted and hard-line form, and Peter turned away from it. Instead, he did his work, taught Christianity to the island's Algonquin-speaking Wampanoag people, and was largely instrumental in maintaining a balanced peace between the island's Indians and the white settlers, something many other settlements found beyond them.
In 1665 he intervened in a Native dispute involving the Indian king, Philip, and a Nantucket Indian named Gibbs, which he successfully resolved; and in 1676 wrote a pamphlet, A Looking Glass for the Times, later described as a defence of liberty and conscience 'in homespun verse, written with a good deal of decent plainness and manly freedom.'  By this time Peter was minister to the island's Christian Indians. In 1685, when he was about 70, he was even imprisoned briefly following a row with the Nantucket town fathers over the voting rights of the half-sharemen.
Peter Foulger became a major figure in the Salem/Martha's Vineyard/Nantucket area at a time of great transformation as New England was beginning to find its feet. And change is still happening on the island. The words Peter Folger Museum are still written in stone across the front of the building named after him - or they were when I visited a few years ago - but the museum itself has been largely incorporated into the town's whaling museum. Nowadays, if you want to find Peter Foulger on Nantucket you need to visit the island's archive office.
It is also worth mentioning that Peter and Mary were prolific parents having had, I think, nine children. Peter died in 1690 at about the time his youngest daughter, Abiah, married a widower, Josiah Franklin, a candle and soapmaker in Boston, Mass. They had many children, too, one of whom was the brilliant and famous Benjamin Franklin.