From Gazette editions of May, 1960:

There is a persistent legend, which, if it cannot be proven, certainly never has been disproven — this is the Hammett legend. The Island family of Hammett, well known on the Island from about 1700 to 1900, has produced master mariners, soldiers, adventurers and merchants of every variety. Island Hammetts served in the Revolutionary War, sailed in whaleships, prospected for gold in California, served in the Civil War, and were known in the profession of book-publishers, writers and politics.

Through the two centuries and more that members of the Hammett family or their descendants by other names have lived on the Vineyard, the legend of the founder has persisted, and the few people who possess Hammett blood today, still believe in that legend.

The founder of the Island family was Edward Hammett, who came to the Island as a very young man, in response to a request from Vineyard authorities to furnish a man who could process wool. Mr. Hammett was a weaver by trade and he was able to process the wool from the sheep to the woven material, although it is not of record that he was a dyer.

Locating in what is now known as North Tisbury, where he acquired a considerable acreage, he lived on a farm which he operated bordering upon that part of the Old Mill River which flows across the road in North Tisbury to curve down through various properties on its way to the Mill Pond in West Tisbury.

Exactly how the legend became known cannot be told. Presumably Edward first told it himself. This was to the effect that he was the son of an Algerian pirate and an English woman who had been captured in a sea raid; that he had lived among the pirates in Algiers until he was a youth, when his mother had found means to aid him escaping to her own people.

There, he said he had served his apprenticeship, after which he had arrived in America, and marrying the daughter of a family which had been massacred by Indians, he came to the Island and became the father of eleven children.

No one has ever attempted to describe Edward Hammett, but from such records as remain, it would appear that he was a self-sufficient type, who would not be driven into anything against his will. He was a clever craftsman who took pains to teach his trade to his children and grandchildren, for weavers, spinners, dyers and combers of wool existed in the Hammett family as long as any of the name remained on the Island.

He figured in various public matters and was a man of strong sales resistance. In 1740, when the first public highway was laid out through West Tisbury, he was the last man to give his land for the road, and this only after “a committee has been appointed to deal with him,” as the record states.

The historian Charles Banks was not able to discover any family back of Edward Hammett. The Island Hammett had said that his name was Hamed, and that it had been Anglicized to Hammett.

Evidence supporting the legend of the pioneer cropped up now and then through the generations of Hammetts that followed him. Sharp-featured men of swarthy skin, with coal-black beards and mustaches and fiery dispositions, were scattered through all the generations. Adventurous men who feared little or nothing and were willing to risk life and limb at any sort of venture; such were the traditional Hammett men.

Perhaps it is an old wives’ tale, but it would be difficult to induce any of the Hammett blood to believe it. They knew all too well their own natural impulses, and that they correspond with what everyone knows of the pirates who live along the seacoast. Although the majority of Island Hammetts were Baptists, and are not known ever to have inclined toward the Moslem belief, there were various of the clan who were fatalists, and who believed implicitly in predestination and that a man’s fate was written upon his forehead on the day of his birth.

There is not today a person living on the Island who was born to the name Hammett, but there are elsewhere, in small numbers acros the country, and there are female descendants much more numerously distributed: all from the seed of Edward, whose name was Hamed, he said.

Compiled by Cynthia Meisner

library@mvgazette.com