They have been occupied for more than 400 years, first by fishing communities and more recently as the site of private homes, a large seasonal hotel and a marine research facility.

The first recorded landfall of an Englishman was that of explorer Captain Christopher Levett, whose 300 fishermen in six ships discovered that the Isles of Shoals were largely abandoned in 1623.

[3] "The first place I set my foot upon in New England was the Isle of Shoals, being islands in the sea about two leagues from the main," Levett wrote later.

The place is found to be a good fishing-place for six ships, but more can not be well there, for want of convenient stage room, as this year's experience hath proved.

[citation needed] She hosted an arts community on the island frequented by authors including Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Impressionist painter Childe Hassam.

[8] Having executed his last drawing three days previous, the Boston painter William Morris Hunt drowned there in 1879, reportedly a suicide.

I succeeded in reading no word for three days, and then took Goethe's Gedichte out on my walks, and with them in my memory, the smell of the laurels and pines in my nose, and the rhythmic pounding of the surf upon my ear, I was free and happy again.

It is a religious and educational conference center, owned by the Star Island Corporation, which is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ.

During the summer, the island hosts a number of week-long and shorter conferences which make use of the Oceanic Hotel, Gosport House, the over 200-year-old chapel, and several buildings dating back to the original village.

It is allegedly the site of Blackbeard's honeymoon,[13] later for the shipwreck of the Spanish ship Sagunto in 1813, and then for the notorious 1873 murders of two young women.

The latter is recalled in the story, "A Memorable Murder", by Celia Thaxter, in the 1997 novel, The Weight of Water, by Anita Shreve (and in the 2000 film), and in the song, "The Ballad of Louis Wagner" by John Perrault.

The original breakwater was built around 1820 by Captain Samuel Haley, who is reputed[vague] to have paid for its construction with proceeds from four bars of pirate silver that he found under a flat rock on the island.

Seavey Island has been the site of a tern restoration project conducted by the Audubon Society of New Hampshire in recent years.