The Edge of Maine

Norumbega

Edging Up On It

Anchored: Ragged Island

Chilly Welcomes

Cruising: Seguin

The Gallant Kennebec

Castine (Revisiting)

Elegies, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Repairs

Rustication

Cruising: Pulpit Harbor

The View from Our Dock

A Note to the Reader

J
ohn Milton, in Book Ten of
Paradise Lost,
specifies the climatic consequences of man's disobedience to God. Global warming was bad enough, but more theatrical were those cosmic wintry blasts that felled trees and enraged the sea. Freezing winds blew from as far away as frostbit Siberia's northeast coast and marvelous Norumbega:

City and kingdom, Norumbega—set at the tidehead of Maine's Penobscot River—rivaled the gold-encrusted capitals of the Inca and Aztec Empires for the fabulous wealth and ingenuity of its people. Samuel Eliot Morison writes that the place-name is Algonquin for “quiet place between two rapids,” but “quiet” is an inapt modifier to describe the astonishing settlement's nature and achievement. It was discovered during the sixteenth century by a series of European explorers ranging Maine's coast and rivers; they competed with one another for the extravagance of their reports. Pierre Crignon, writing in 1545, extolled Norumbega's “docile” inhabitants, “friendly and peaceful. The land overflows with every kind of fruit; there grows there the wholesome orange and the almond, and many sorts of sweet-smelling trees.” Fourteen years later Jean Alfonce's account of his visit,
La Cosmographie,
offered a more vivid picture of “Norombegue”: Here were “clever inhabitants and a mass of peltries of all kinds of beasts. The citizens dress in furs, wearing sable cloaks.” Conveniently they spoke a language “which sounds like Latin.” Moreover, unlike your commonplace dusky savages, “they are fair people and tall.”
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But wait: There's more! Morison tells of David Ingram, an English sailor stranded in the Gulf of Mexico in 1567 by the explorer and slave trader Sir Jack Hawkins; Ingram tramped from Yucatan to Down East. In 1569 he was rescued in Newfoundland and returned home to enjoy free drinks telling in many a tavern of his discoveries. This Sinbad's description of Norumbega made so deep an impression on his audience that Richard Hakluyt published Ingram's account in the 1589 edition of his
Principal Navigations.
An impressionable reader—Sir Humfry Gilbert—interviewed Ingram and as a result raised money for an expedition to visit the northwoods Shangri-la. It should have been easy to find, a village half a mile long with streets broader than London's broadest. Norumbega's citizens wore gold and silver hoops on their arms, and these were “garnished with pearls, diverse of them as big as one's thumb”; the natives used these pearls as small change. The women wore plates of gold as armor and counted their gemstones by the bushel. The Norumbegans' round (but somehow turreted) dwellings were supported by “pillars of gold, sylver and crystal” and wallpapered with fur. Elephants lived among penguins and flamingoes, and the happy inhabitants displayed rubies four inches in circumference. Gilbert assured his investors that the pub-crawling Ingram had attested to finding gold nuggets as big as his fist, scattered for the taking (Ingram evidently had forgotten to take any) in small brooks nearby.

Gilbert crossed from England but never found the Penobscot River, let alone Norumbega. In 1604 Samuel de Champlain sailed up that river to the head of navigation. He decided that Ingram was a bullshit artist. He found himself not in what Morison titles the “New Jerusalem” of fevered legend but among a dreary hodgepodge of aboriginal huts in the neighborhood we call Bangor.

Ah, Bangor! Storied hometown of lumberjacks, fur traders, sailors, muggers, tavern keepers, confidence men, and whores: In this very place chewing gum was invented in 1842. Myth has a stranglehold on the little city: Hank and Jan Taft's
A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast
attests that there's a “birth certificate on file at the Chamber of Commerce” to assure the gullible that Paul Bunyan was born in Bangor on February 12, 1834; the city erected a statue of Bunyan thirty-one feet tall, his exact height in real life, on lower Main Street. Thousands of sailing ships delivered freight to Bangor every year during the boom of the 1860s, and millions of board feet of white pines felled nearby drifted down the Penobscot during river-jamming spring drives.

The marvels of Bangor have exerted a powerful pull. In 1977, a Bavarian brewery worker, en route by charter flight from Hamburg to San Francisco, disembarked at Bangor during a refueling stop. Erwin Kreuz had been aloft all night, and had consumed much of the fruit of his labors; he later confided that he was a seventeen-beer-a-day man. He spoke no English but for three days he toured Bangor in search of the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge that he found, fording the Penobscot River, made a poor impression on him, but otherwise he liked the town just fine. Like San Francisco, it had water nearby, and hills, and a hotel—Bangor House—where he slept. His navigational error was discovered after a taxicab driver demurred angrily at Kreuz's command that he be driven to “downtown San Francisco,” and a tavern waitress who had served the bewildered tourist put him together with a German-speaking Czechoslovakian immigrant. The situation was publicized, and the
San Francisco Examiner
treated the German to a visit to the genuine City by the Bay. Despite attending a rodeo at the Cow Palace and being given an honorary Chinese name by residents of Chinatown, Kreuz confided to San Francisco's mayor George Moscone that he preferred Maine's version of a port city.

The adventurer received marriage proposals from grateful Down Easters and was made an honorary member of the Penobscot Indian tribe. Now he's welcome to visit the “quiet place between two rapids” whenever he pleases. Upon arriving home at the Frankfurt airport, the returning explorer boasted to an international press contingent: “If Kennedy can claim, ‘I am a Berliner,' then I am a Bangor.”