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bequests to some relatives, Gideon passed along his estate, including his interest in the whaling company, to his daughters, Abby and Sylvia. This not only enriched Robinson, it consolidated his control. Thomas Mandell, a longtime employee, was a minor partner. As a woman and an invalid, Sylvia, despite her considerable financial interest in the company, had no role in its daily operations. Edward Robinson had virtually full control over the most powerful whaling company in the country. An anonymous New Bedford writer, quoted by Howland genealogist William Emery, called Robinson “the very Napoleon of our little business community” in 1852. “If his life and faculties are spared to him to old age, he will be one of the richest men in New Bedford, and his daughter will be an heiress of immense wealth, both from her father’s and the Howland side.”

TWO

AUNT SYLVIA

For a figure who would one day garner the title “Witch of Wall Street,” Hetty was a particularly lovely young woman. She was tall and full-figured, with large blue eyes, a long, straight nose, prominent chin, and generous brown hair. Her favorite place was still with her father in the counting house or on the docks, and at times she used waterfront language that shocked genteel souls. Aunt Sylvia, in particular, fretted over Hetty’s lack of preoccupation with feminine things, and worried that, even by the modest standards of Quaker dress, she stood out as unfashionable.

When she was about twenty, perhaps at Sylvia’s urging, Hetty spent a month in New York as the guest of Henry Grinnell, her mother’s cousin. New Bedford’s prosperity was well known throughout the country, and the wealthy of New Bedford found access into the upper circles of New York business and society. Born in 1799, Grinnell had left New Bedford for New York as a young man, joined a mercantile business started by his brother, and established himself as one of the city’s most prominent merchants. A worldly man and an adventurer at heart, Grinnell financed several Arctic expeditions and served as the first president of the American Geographical Society.

Theirs was a lively house of six children (three more had died young). Daughters Sarah and Sylvia instructed Hetty on New York society and introduced her to their friends. Despite Aunt Sylvias misgivings, Hetty had picked up a thing or two at Mrs. Lowell’s school and could behave like a lady when she wanted. She attended balls, luncheons, parties, and concerts, and she turned the heads of young men, not just because of the money she stood to inherit, but because of her beauty. By all appearances she enjoyed herself enormously. In later years she remembered in particular one glittering affair—a dinner at Saratoga Lake, at which Martin Van Buren, the former president, and his son honored visiting English royalty, including Lord Althorp, who later became duke of Northumberland.

In 1860, Hetty wore a low-cut white ball gown with a pink sash and lace trim to a ball held at the New York Academy of Music. She wore pink slippers, long, white, kid gloves, and gold earrings. She carried an ostrich feather fan. The reason for the ball was a visit by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII of England, who was in the midst of an extended tour of North America. At the ball, Hetty had herself introduced to the prince as “the Princess of Whales.” The prince appreciated the joke. He laughed and told her, “I’ve heard that all of Neptune’s daughters are beautiful. You are proof of that.” They danced twice.

With her social connections, her looks, and her family wealth, Hetty, had she chosen to do so, could have shed the straitlaced provincialism of New Bedford and entered seamlessly into a life of ease in New York society, of summers at Newport and winters on Fifth Avenue. After a short stretch as a debutante she might have married a steel prince or a railroad king and spent her life raising her children with the help of French nannies. She might have organized fashionable balls to benefit the poor, held choice seats at the opera, and ridden elegant