Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast. Samuel Adams Drake
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CHAPTER I.
NEW ENGLAND OF THE ANCIENTS.
"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and with garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of Old, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest."
Longfellow.
In many respects the sea-coast of Maine is the most remarkable of New England. It is serrated with craggy projections, studded with harbors, seamed with inlets. Broad bays conduct to rivers of great volume that annually bear her forests down to the sea. Her shores are barricaded with islands, and her waters teem with the abundance of the seas. Seen on the map, it is a splintered, jagged, forbidding sea-board; beheld with the eye in a kindly season, its tawny headlands, green archipelagos, and inviting harbors, infolding sites recalling the earlier efforts at European colonization, combine in a wondrous degree to win the admiration of the man of science, of letters, or of leisure.
Maine embraces within her limits the semi-fabulous Norumbega and Mavoshen of ancient writers. Some portion of her territory has been known at various times by the names of Acadia, New France, and New England. The arms of France and of England have alternately been erected on her soil, and the flags of at least four powerful states have claimed her subjection. The most numerous and warlike of the primitive New England nations were seated here. Traces of French occupation are remaining in the names of St. Croix, Mount Desert, Isle au Haut, and Castine, names which neither treaties nor national prejudice have been quite able to eradicate.
The name of Norumbega, or Norembegue, the earliest applied to New England, is attributed to the Portuguese and Spaniards. Jean Alfonse, the pilot of Roberval, the same person who is accredited with having been first to navigate the waters of Massachusetts Bay, gives them the credit of its discovery. It is true that Marc Lescarbot, the Parisian advocate whose relations are the foundations of so many others, was at the colony of Port Royal in the year 1606, with Pontgravé Champlain, and De Poutrincourt. This writer discredits all of Alfonse's statement in relation to the great river and coast of Norumbega, except that part of it in which he says the river had at its entrance many islands, banks, and rocks. In this fragment from the "Voyages Aventureux" of Alfonse, the embouchure of the river of Norumbega is placed in thirty degrees ("trente degrez") and the pilot states that from thence the coast turns to the west and west-north-west for more than two hundred and fifty leagues.[1] The most casual reader will know how to value such a relation without reference to the sarcasm of Lescarbot, when he says, "And well may he call his voyages adventurous, not for himself, who was never in the hundredth part of the places which he describes (at least it is easy to conjecture so), but for those who might wish to follow the routes which he directs the mariner to follow." After this, his claim to be considered the first European navigator in Massachusetts Bay must be received with many grains of allowance.
Champlain, who remained in the country through the winter of 1605, on purpose to complete his map, has this to say of the river and city of Norumbega; he is writing of the Penobscot:
"I believe this river is that which several historians call Norumbegue, and which the greater part have written, is large and spacious, with many islands; and its entrance in forty-three and forty-three and a half; and others in forty-four, more or less, of latitude. As for the declination,