title: Nantucket Memories: That Far Away Island - As Seen Through Postcard Images
author: Laszlo Felsobuki Nagy
description: Laszlo F. Nagy has been collecting postcards since the early 1970s. He and his wife live in New York's Hudson Valley.
zlib_text: **Serpent**
  
   **Serpent**
  
  Serpent
  
   **Serpent**
  
   **PROLOGUE**
  
  July 25, 1956
  
  South of Nantucket Island
  
  SO QUICKLY DID THE PALE SHIP appear, she seemed to spring whole from the
  depths, gliding like a ghost across the silver pool of luminescence cast by
  the near full moon. Tiaras of porthole lights glittered along her bone-white
  sides as she raced eastward in the warm night, her sharply raked bow knifing
  through the flat seas as easily as a stiletto cutting through black satin.
  
  High in the darkened bridge of the Swedish American liner Stockholm , seven
  hours and 130 miles east of New York City Second Mate Gunnar Nillson scanned
  the moonlit ocean. The big rectangular windows that wrapped around the
  wheelhouse gave him a panoramic view as far as he could see. The surface was
  calm except for a ragged swell here and there. The temperature was in the
  seventies, a pleasant change from the heavy humid air that weighed over the
  Stockholm that morning as the liner left its berth at the Fifty