Nantucket is a tiny island off the coast of the famous Cape Cod peninsula in Massachusetts and was once the whaling capital of New England. The island welcomes summer visitors with its beaches and gray cedar-shingle buildings, which make it easy to envision the island’s distant past as a whaling hub in the 19th century.Nantucket’s permanent population sits somewhere around 14,000, but the number of inhabitants grows significantly to over 80,000 in July and August when the island is most idyllic. Many Nantucket hotels reach maximum capacity in the summer.