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This is another wonderful place. Touristy and busy, sure - but full of its own character and not at all manufactured or falsified.

In the morning we went down to the Surfside beach and watched the boys get hammered by some enormous Atlantic waves. The water rolled in, dark-grey and bottle green, before thrashing itself into white rags upon the shore.

Fabulous and invigorating, but not sustainable. Houses, and indeed a lighthouse, have been threatened by the erosion of the ocean-facing coast. The lucky ones have been moved, but some landowners have ended up possessing nothing more than a sandy bluff a few decades on.

We couldn't last until lunch. We went into Nantucket Town and gawped at the beautiful houses, nearly all covered in the island's distinctive grey wooden shingles. The town is pretty and dotted with designer boutiques as well as souvenir and gift shops, but it is the island's previous prosperity that built the picturesque streets and homes, and underpins its modern attractiveness.

Settled from mainland Massachusetts in the 1650s, the islands had been inhabited by the Wampanoags and other Native Americans for over a thousand years. The name Nantucket means the 'Faraway Land'. The waters around the islands were rich with sperm whale and the Europeans hunted them and became rich from trading in the resources they harvested from the creatures. By the early nineteenth century Nantucket was the centre of the global industry of whale hunting and - the local waters having long since been emptied of cetaceans - their ships sailed all over the world.

It was in the Pacific ocean, in 1820, that a whaling ship called the Essex from Nantucket was rammed and sunk by a giant sperm whale. Twenty-one men made it off the ship in three longboats. Eight were eventually rescued 95 days and 1,500 miles later, but not before they had been forced to resort to cannibalism. They returned to Nantucket and some even went back to sea on other whaling ships. Later a young sailor named Herman Melville heard the story whilst serving on a whaler and resolved to write it up.

Moby Dick was published in 1851, but at the same time Nantucket's whaling industry was being fatally undermined. A fire in the town was devastating in 1846 and the Californian Gold Rush tempted away a high proportion of islanders. The harbour was silting up and then, in the early 1850s, oil was struck in Utah. The cheapness and availability of oil and kerosene killed whaling in Nantucket.

Today the island thrives on the summer season that brings thousands of temporary residents and thousands more tourists from the mainland. The Nantucket Whaling Museum, where we spent the afternoon (can you tell?), is a perfect example of how the island's rich history has been recycled and repackaged to nourish the visitors. It was fascinating although often disgusting - but I'll spare you the gory details.