Nantucket is an island located about 50km south of Cape Cod, nicknamed "The Little Grey Lady of the Sea", which refers to the island as it appears from the ocean when it is fog-bound. Now it is a tourist destination and summer colony, but it was, in the the first half of the 19th century, an important center of the whaling industry. The ever-shifting battalion of sandbars, or shoals, lurking beneath the waters that surround the island have caused between 700 and 800 shipwrecks in recorded history.
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