Nantucket Legacy is a series about the rise and fall of the whaling period of Nantucket. In the first novel Phoebe’s Light, Phoebe is a Quaker girl who travels on a whaling ship away from the island of Nantucket with her husband Captain Phineas Foulger. As she leaves, her father gives her an old sheepskin journal from her noble great-grandmother and sends along a “minder” named Matthew Mitchel. As she reads the journal she discovers a secret that will affect everyone on the ship and questions whether she should reveal the secret of her ancestor.