Doris West Nevin of Chilmark, whose father at his death in 1949 was the last whaling master living on Martha’s Vineyard, died on May 8 at Fayetteville, Ga. She was 93.

In 2005 Mrs. Nevin was stricken with three tick-borne diseases (babesiosis, erlichia and Lyme disease). She was airlifted to Boston, near death. Her recovery testified to the Vineyard toughness of her constitution. For five years afterward, she lived in an assisted living facility near her oldest son, Channing Ellsworth Nevin, in Georgia.

Doris was the eldest child of Captain Ellsworth Luce West (1864–1949) and Elsie Crowell West, née Athearn (1889–1981), both of Chilmark. The seafaring adventures of Captain West are recounted in his memoir, Captain’s Papers. He told the story of his life to Eleanor Ransom Mayhew, and the book was published posthumously in 1965.

Captain West’s father, William Clement West (born in 1819), had joined the California gold rush like many another Vineyard man, but unlike most ’49ers he returned with a poke of gold, with which he bought good farm land along Middle Road in Chilmark.

He married Abbie Allen Luce (1828–1890), and the future Captain West was born in 1864, the youngest of their children. (His younger brother Clem later ran a stagecoach between the towns and up to Gay Head, after which Ellsworth’s grandson, Wayne West, named Stagecoach Taxi. His sister Mary Elizabeth was mother of the late Marguerite Gertrude Simpson Smith, and great-grandmother of Nelson Smith, Sr. of Edgartown.)

On Christmas Day, 1865 William, the father, was showing a hired hand what he wanted done with a hole being dug when a rock rolled in on him, compressing his chest. He died while the man was running to the neighboring farm for help, and Mrs. West was left a widow with the youngest of her five children just 18 months old. But the hardship of widows was familiar on the Vineyard, where many a husband was lost at sea.

Ellsworth grew up farming and fishing and listening to the tales of old salts on the porch of Sanderson’s Store — now Alley’s General Store — in West Tisbury. In 1882 he shipped out as an 18-year-old “green hand” on a whaler, and three years later brought his earnings back to his mother.

By 1890 he was a first officer, and on returning from the Arctic to San Francisco on the steam whaler William Lewis, he learned that his mother had died, so he came back home to visit family. He said he was glad he did, for he met the petite and pretty Gertrude Eager of Newton, the new teacher at the Menemsha school. (Doris was a student there in the 1930s, and her granddaughter Katrina attended classes in the same old schoolhouse in the 1990s, before the new Chilmark school was built.)

Gertrude’s father required the couple to wait a year before they could marry, but after marriage they were very close. She sailed with him on many voyages, learned navigation with him to help him get his captain’s papers and was fluent in reading semaphore flags on distant vessels. Captain West retired from whaling in 1899.

Seeing whaling decline, between 1900 and 1910 Captain West carried passengers, mail and freight to the Yukon Klondike gold digs on the Corwin, with Gertrude as the purser. The couple had no children, and Ellsworth and Gertrude ultimately returned to the Vineyard, living first in Edgartown across from the Congregational (now Federated) Church and later on a farm he bought on Middle Road.

Gertrude died in September 1917. During her long illness, she was nursed by Elsie Athearn Crowell, a young widow who had a six-year-old daughter, Melba. After the death of his first wife, Ellsworth married Elsie; they always celebrated their anniversary on the Fourth of July.

Their first child, Doris, was born August 13, 1918, only a month after her parents’ wedding. It’s a small Island, and there are those in Chilmark who still recall the gossip that puzzled Doris as a child. Ellsworth and Elsie had five more children: Albert (a pilot in the war, who owned the Old Colony auto dealership), Robert (farmer and carpenter, with his father’s gift for stories), the twins Helen Drake and Elizabeth (Liz) Bettencourt, and Eileen Caldwell, the last sibling still alive.

As they grew up, the children heard fabulous stories of their father’s nautical past, which stood in sharp contrast to their life on that farm on Middle Road. They sold berries, milk and produce to summer folk down-Island. When low-lying portions of Middle Road were being built up, Ellsworth sold sand and gravel dug out of a hillside to the west of the farmhouse, and he sold off portions of land to meet expenses during the Depression.

Doris adored her father and loved being his “right-hand man” as he worked around the farm. When she was perhaps four or five, and a guest was visiting, she wanted to help with dinner preparations and was interrupted while holding a rooster by the neck in one hand and a hatchet in the other. When she reached her teens, her mother insisted she no longer help with the farm work.

She did well in school and won numerous athletic contests. After she graduated from high school, she drove her Model T to work at Issokson’s Cleaners every day. She could only afford used tires, thin of tread and vulnerable to rocks and limbs in the road. She got a lot of experience fixing flats.

During World War II, Doris married Edwin (Doc) Nevin, the son of Dr. Clement Channing Nevin of Edgartown (1882–1944). The Nevin family, from Pennsylvania, came to the Island in the 19th century, and would become prominent in different fields on the Vineyard:

Edwin Henry Nevin had been pastor at the Congregational (now Federated) church for a few years in the 1700s. His son William Channing Nevin married a New Bedford woman, Anna Josepha Shiverick, and they lived in a home on Pent Lane that her father, Dr. Clement Shiverick, gave her as a wedding gift.

Their son, Dr. Clement Channing Nevin, was graduated from the medical school at Yale in 1902, and he set up his practice in the front rooms of the Shiverick House. He married an Edgartown woman, Margaret Dexter Worth, and had two children, Ruth (who married the late K.T. Galley of Edgartown) and Edwin. Dr. Nevin used to play his violin in the cupola, a marvelous old instrument that his great-granddaughters now play. After he died in 1944, his practice was taken over by his brother Bill’s son, Robert, for many years a well-known physician in Edgartown and across the Island.

Edwin was stationed in the Army Signal Corps, near Redwood City, Calif., when Doris took the long train trip alone across country to join him. He almost shipped out to the Pacific, but his commanding officer intervened. The troopship on which he was scheduled to sail was torpedoed. Doris and Edwin’s first son, Channing Ellsworth, was born in San Francisco in December 1943, and Bruce Edwin was born 13 months later in January 1945. After the war ended, the family drove their 1937 Plymouth sedan across the country, home to the Vineyard.

Economic prospects on the Island were limited. The family moved to the mainland only a year or so later when Edwin got a job with the radio station WLLH in Lowell. In 1952 they sold their house in Wamesit for a house trailer, and after a year of travel with their two young boys they settled in Florida, first near Orlando, where Doris’s sister Eileen still lives, then in Bartow.

Edwin and Doris were expert archers, competing in many tournaments, and Doris was secretary-treasurer of the Wamesit Archers and later of the Florida Archery Association. She also took up amateur radio with Edwin. They maintained their Island roots, making a summer visit every few years, a week’s driving for a week’s stay with family.

In 1976 Doris and Edwin built a house in Edgartown, where Bruce and Sarah lived as newlyweds until 1980, doing the finish work and managing the rental of the upstairs rooms. After Edwin’s retirement, he and Doris built a log house off Middle Road, returning every summer, and this remained her summer home after his death in 1994.

Doris’s story is featured in the second volume of Vineyard Voices, a collection of oral histories collected by Linsey Lee and published by the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Edgartown. She got together most every year with alumnae of the Menemsha School, class of 1938, and several years hosted gatherings of her extended family.

She was an assiduous recycler of cans and bottles and regularly had a table at the Chilmark Flea Market. She was preparing to sell her lot and trailer in Florida and live full-time on Middle Road when those tick bites laid her low. During her convalescence, she often regretted chasing off the turkeys that came to eat the seeds she put out for birds, remembering that they eat their weight in ticks. Hers was a generous heart, and she lived her long life as fully as she was able. Her perseverance and true New England grit are an inspiration to us all. Pamela, daughter of her brother, Al, wrote recently:

“When I heard my Aunt Doris had passed away, I told my husband. He asked me, do you think she had a good life? Without hesitation, I said Yes! Even though she endured health issues and hardships, I always felt she ‘got it’ when it came to living a life well. She loved her family and friends, and they returned that love. She didn’t need all the fancy trappings. She enjoyed the simple pleasures — going after blueberries, trout fishing in Chilmark, spending time with family and good friends at her property near her childhood home. I always felt she was one of the lucky ones, who could appreciate the sound of pinkletinks on a warm summer night.”

Mrs. Nevin is survived by her youngest sister, Eileen; her two sons, Chan and Bruce; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial gathering of friends and family in the late summer or early fall.