The Edge of Maine (8 page)

A
t the mouth of Maine's most storied river, Popham Beach curves three miles southwest. Winter gales reshape its crescent contour, piling and gnawing the surf-slammed dunes at the high tide line, and summer breezes comb the dune grass into cowlicks garlanded with beach rose, but despite the sand's mutability, the grandeur of this shoreline's scale is fundamental. You'd have to travel to the Bay of Fundy or to the south coast of Brittany to approximate so theatrical a tidal effect. As I write this in 2004 the high tide line at Popham Beach is mere feet from the dunes, which took a grievous beating last winter, but at low tide the fine sand shimmers almost to the horizon and one can walk a quarter-mile to Fox or Wood Islands. Popham is often foggy, even when the sun shines half a mile inland, and when mist obscures the islands offshore—Pond Island lighting the entrance of the Kennebec and nearby Seguin horning its “keep away!”—it's almost possible to imagine what it was like in 1607 to close in on this turbulent, bristling coast aboard the
Gift of God,
threading through breaking surf without detailed charts or navigational aids except for a compass. The tidal set here-abouts—a consequence of water ebbing every six hours from the Kennebec at as much as six knots—could drive a stranger on any number of nearby ledges, not least of them Seguin Ledge, rather than helping entrance to the mouth of the river known by Indians and settlers as Sagadahoc.

The
Gift of God,
commanded by George Popham, was accompanied by the
Mary and John,
under Raleigh Gilbert, nephew of Sir Walter Raleigh. The 120 settlers—noblemen and vagrants, all men and boys—had sailed from England on May 31 with the blessing of James I, who had authorized the establishment of two Virginia colonies: the southern in Jamestown.
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After a layover in the Azores, the settlers of the northern Virginia outpost arrived at Sabino Head at the mouth of the river on August 19. They named their colony Fort St. George and raised over it the emblem of England's dragon-slaying patron saint, a flag bearing the red cross on a white field. The newcomers immediately found plenty to eat. Fish, of course, crowded the mouth of the river: striped bass, bluefish, flounder, fat salmon, haddock, sturgeon, lobsters, and huge cod. Oysters were so abundant that mounds of shells, the detritus of hundreds of years worth of Native American feasts along the banks of the nearby Damariscotta River, tower twenty-five feet high. These cliffs each contain an estimated forty-five million cubic feet of oyster shells. Along the Kennebec, Popham and his crew routinely found oysters almost a foot long. The soil too was rich, and onions and grapes, walnuts and hops, peas and barley flourished. These newcomers were no dreamers yearning to build a city upon a hill but venture capitalists. The leery colonizers' first project on going ashore was to engineer their escape, building a pinnace—a small schooner which they named the
Virginia of Sagadahoc.
Pangloss would celebrate this urgent shipbuilding enterprise as the fruit of curiosity: The fifty-footer was shoal enough to carry explorers into bays and up rivers. A realist would understand that the
Virginia
was built to carry the newcomers the hell away from fog, tidal rips, and “the sea vomits” should elsewhere beckon.

Jumping forward to the “Great Migration” (1630–40), the situation of a settler aboard the
Angel Gabriel
illuminates the Pophamites's dilemma. This fellow was one John Bayeley, and a historian researching the colonial history of the Bayeley family could not at first fathom why this weaver had abandoned his beloved wife, son, and daughters in England for the remaining sixteen years of his life after arriving off Pemaquid Point, on August 14, 1635, following a passage of forty-two days from Milford Haven, Wales. The
Angel Gabriel
was a square-rigged bark of 240 tons, armed with more than a dozen cannon and a hundred or so passengers who, according to the journal of their contemporary Richard Mather, were mostly “loving and godly Christians.” They had had a rough and eventful crossing, encountering a Turkish pirate. They killed and boated a porpoise for “marvelous merry sport” at the end of June, the day after the Sabbath, and for this “delightful recreation [of] taking and opening ye huge and strange fish” the shipmates thanked their Maker. Soon smallpox infected those aboard the
Angel Gabriel,
and rough seas tossed them and storms lashed them and seasickness discouraged them.
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But they found their ledge-strewn landfall and dropped anchor. Shortly after midnight of that August 15 the wind veered from the southwest to northeast and up blew a hurricane. Settlers along the coast recorded that crops were mowed down, the tide surged to twenty feet above the normal high in Boston. Indians climbed trees to save themselves from drowning, and many of these great trees were snapped like toothpicks. Increase Mather's
Remarkable Providences,
making later use of his father Richard's journal, tells that the furious storm “threw down (either breaking them off by the bole or plucking them up by the roots) thousands of great trees.” William Bradford, of Plymouth, rated it “such a mighty storm of wind and rain as none living in these parts, either English or Indian, ever saw.” The
Angel Gabriel
was hurled on the rocks of Pemaquid and smashed to toothpicks. Only five, at most seven, among the company died; the rest were carried by caprice ashore but all lost their livestock and provisions and family heirlooms. At great cost each comeoverer had brought a year's supplies. In addition to cattle, these included farming tools, flour, gunpowder, musket shot, household furnishings, and even upper body armor (in case the French got up to mischief). John Bayeley refused ever to board a boat again. His report of his experience, carried to his wife in England, was so persuasively discouraging that she followed his example. He brings to mind the legendary ambition, as old as Homer's
Odyssey,
provoked in weather-beaten seafarers who have experienced enough water, to row ashore, shoulder an oar, and walk inland until someone, spying the oar, asks “What's that thing?” Jolly legends, in the form of sea chanteys or fo'c's'le gams, promise that the oar-ignorant place is a sweet paradise, Fiddlers' Green, where fish jump into your frying pan, the skipper brews tea for his crew, the girls are all pretty, the beer is on the house, and bottles of rum lie around on the ground, ripe as pumpkins for the plucking.

Back at Popham Colony, years before the
Angel Gabriel
was lost, the inhabitants knew all too well what an oar was. They had reached their landfall in search of gold, silver, and—as always—a northwest passage to China and the Indies. As the summer gave way to autumn, and leaves fell from the hardwoods, and frost nipped shrewdly inside the settlers' straw and mud huts, the newcomers dreamed of heading south to Virginia or back to England. Those first colonizers might be regarded as Mainers think of summer folk “from away,” fair-weather friends lately titled “rusticators.” Historians divide as to whether the winter of 1607–08 was insufferable or merely ghastly. The late Robert P. Tristram Coffin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and himself a descendant of early Maine settlers, was unimpressed by the meteorological record: “The winter was one of the robust kind, such as only Maine can grow. These first Kennebec men took in their belts and scrabbled for food. It was hard sledding.” Bill Caldwell's estimation in
Rivers of Fortune
is more dire. The 120 settlers had raised their flimsy shelters in the face of the winter's winds and the winter “was especially cold.” He is supported in his judgment by John Davies, who had the advantage of experiencing that winter and the disadvantage of having no other Maine winters to which to contrast it. Davies, comparing Popham with the “extraordinary frost felt in most parts of Europe,” describes the Maine winter as “extremely unseasonable” and “vehement, by which no boat could stir on any business.” It was surely colder than they had expected: Fort St. George lay along the latitude (forty-three degrees north) of the south of France, but Cannes it was not. Louis B. Wright, in his
Atlantic Frontier,
tells that the English insisted on believing that the climate of Maine was “salubrious and that all the fruits and spices of England would grow there.” Louise Rich quotes from a Popham colonist's diary of January 18, 1608: “There was in the space of seven hours ‘thunder, lightning, rain, frost, snow in all abundance, the last continuing.' They assumed that this was typical, and they were right.”

The poor newcomers couldn't even entice their firewood to burn: It was as green as their horns. For whatever additional reasons—failure to find gold or silver, the ravages of scurvy, fear of the natives or the belligerent French, ice floes piling up on the river, the unwelcome sight of snow crusting the beach that seemed so pretty in August—more than half the settlers sailed away “in disgust and disappointment” aboard the
Virginia of Sagadahoc
as soon as the spring thaw set them free. George Popham, brother of England's Lord Chief Justice, “unwieldy with fat,” “timorously fearful to offend,” and almost eighty when he arrived at Fort St. George, had died during the Maine winter, and news came from England that the second-in-command, Raleigh Gilbert, had inherited a fortune, which he was impatient to commence enjoying.
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Back in England the escapees told such scarifying tales of winter hardship and native savagery that “all former hopes were frozen to death,” in the words of Gorges. In the bitter aftermath of the fiasco came blame and lawsuits and what economic historians of market manias and cutthroat speculation term “revulsion.” Colonists gave a pass to New England till a dozen years later, when the
Mayflower
carried Pilgrims to Plymouth. The fifty-five left behind in 1608 are lost to history. Coffin doesn't much fret about them: “They were tough customers and could have made their beds anywhere.” Their contemporary John Aubrey declared that the colony was a gang of vagabonds “stocked out of all the gaols of England.” Gorges was disgusted with the crew he sent out to make his name and fortune. They split into squabbling factions, each slandering the other, “even to the Savages.” Indeed, in Gorges' distempered view, the English were “worse than the very Savages, impudently and openly lying with their Women” (that would be the Indians' women) and “teaching their Men to drinke drunke, to swear and blaspheme in the name of God.” The Abnaki, in their turn, were bored unto numbness by frequent Church of England sermons, which they were forced to endure in return for lunch or dinner at the fort.
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The colonizers liked to march around on a hot late summer day in armor, to intimidate their put-upon neighbors. These miscreants were disinclined to honor the niceties of fair play in their trade with the Abnaki (two shillings in beads were traded for beaver pelts to be sold in London, to make hats much in fashion, for one hundred pounds sterling). When the colonists were not in the bartering vein, they shut the gates of their fort and sent dogs to threaten the Abnaki who had come to trade. These Indians, believed by the pinchfist settlers to be “exceedingly subtle and cunning,” knew themselves as the Dawn People and valued generosity as their chief social virtue. Justly stung by sellers' remorse, they evidently raided the settlers' food supplies and burned down the stockade.
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Three years later the ruins of Fort St. George were visited by a Jesuit priest, Father Pierre Biard, who recorded the Abnaki's ill-use by the settlers, whom they claimed to have driven away owing to the “outrages they had experienced from these English.” (For their part, the Jesuits used as a platform for their program of conversion an inventory of the Lord Jesus Christ's grievances against the English. The Abnaki were taught that Jesus was French, as was of course the Virgin. The English crucified Him and those who would serve Him would condemn and attack the English.) The customs of the Abnaki were vividly captured a few decades later by John Josselyn, an English naturalist and systematic visitor to this part of the coast. He described the natives as tall, with good posture and very white teeth, clean-shaven and keen of sight. He reports their purposeful transience, “always removing from one place to another for conveniency of food … I have seen half a hundred of their Wigwams together in a piece of ground and … within a day or two, or a week, they have been all dispersed.” He described the Abnaki diet—including bear meat and venison and eggs and roasted lobsters and dried moose-tongues, “which they esteem a dish for a Sagamor.” The Abnaki “have prodigious stomachs, devouring a great deal … never giving over eating as long as they have it, between meals spending their time in sleep till the next kettleful is boiled…. If they have none of this, as sometimes it falleth out (being a very careless people not providing against the storms of want and tempest of necessity) they make use of Sir Francis Drake's remedy for hunger, go to sleep.”

The Popham colonists were hungry but too cold to sleep. Yet they would leave a legacy. The
Virginia,
the first ship built on the Kennebec, was a harbinger of many more to come. By the mid-nineteenth century Maine's busiest river would send more ships to more ports around the world than any place on the planet. The reason is not difficult to divine. The Popham colonists included at least one shipwright well equipped with axes and knives, also saws and adzes, scrapers, mauls, and caulking irons used to pound tarred hemp into the seams between a ship's planks. But the vein of plenty the settlers discovered right before their eyes, and more precious than the silver mines they sought, was the river realm's astonishing vegetation; they came ashore in the midst of a shipwright's Eden, with great stands of white pine (called “hackamack” by the Indians and juniper by the newcomers), perfect for masts. For keels there was oak; for ribs and stems and decks there was a bounty of cedar, spruce, maple, and elm.