Nantucket, Massachusetts — The Basket a Government Ban Changed

By Porter Lang

The basket most associated with this island wasn’t invented in a workshop. It was invented on a boat. Starting in the late 1860s, crews aboard the South Shoal Lightship, anchored offshore to warn ships away from Nantucket’s dangerous shoals, needed something productive to fill the long stretches between watches. Thomas S. James, a former whaler serving aboard, brought basket-weaving skills learned at sea, and the craft spread through the crew from there.

The technique that resulted is specific enough to name precisely: a wooden mold sets the shape, rattan staves run vertically, thinner cane weaves horizontally between them, and a solid wood base — early examples used oak, ash or hickory for the staves, pine or mahogany for the base — finishes it off. By 1894, one written account put local sales at roughly five hundred baskets a summer just from Nantucket’s own stores, sold largely by the same crews who’d made them offshore.

The craft’s offshore chapter ended by government order. The US banned basket-making aboard lightships sometime before 1916, and production moved permanently onto the island itself. It found its most significant modern figure after the Second World War, when José Formoso Reyes began making baskets with hinged lids, new shapes, and carved ivory or wood ornament on top — the style that became known as the “Friendship basket,” a covered purse rather than an open utility basket, and the form most people picture today when they hear the term.

The island beyond the baskets is a genuinely preserved 19th-century whaling port — cobblestone streets, grey-shingled houses, a harbor that’s shifted from whaling to fishing to tourism without losing its working edge entirely.

Sephari doesn’t yet have sourced, checked profiles of Nantucket’s current basket makers — a craft this collectible and this easy to counterfeit deserves real verification of maker and materials before we point anyone toward a specific name.

Nantucket makers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/