Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

Newport's southern peak was just overhead, its sharp protuberances made smooth by knobs of ice that resembled the bosses of a target. There reached me occasional rapid glimpses of the sea in ascending, but I walked chiefly in a dense growth that excluded all light, except when the glint of the sun through the tree-tops fell in golden bars across my way. Prostrate and uselessly rotting was wood enough to have kept a good-sized village through the winter. The air was light and elastic. I do not think a pleasanter ramble is to be had on the island than this forest-walk.

"O'er windy hill, through clogged ravine,
And woodland paths that wound between
Low drooping pine-boughs winter-weighed."

At Otter Creek is a scattered settlement and an inlet of the sea, into which the creek empties. The island traditions say the place was once the favorite retreat of the otter. There are cliffs to admire or study on the sea-shore, and Thunder Cave is there to explore.

In this pocket-edition of Somes's Sound we find ourselves once more under the shadow of Green Mountain, and upon looking back up the valley a pass opens between it and Newport, through which the road finds its way to Bar Harbor.

The dwellings here, as elsewhere on the island, are humble, and bespeak, in many instances, a near approach to poverty. In the larger villages there are comfortable and even substantial residences, but the impression of unthrift is associated with the proper population. The reasons are obvious. The first inhabitants got their livelihood by fishing, and formerly many vessels were fitted out from the Sound. Perhaps not a few went for the Government bounty. With the failure of this industry little was left on which to depend. A scanty subsistence at most could be wrung from the soil, though Williamson, the historian of Maine, avers this was once strong and fertile in the valleys. The land, by the removal of crops without restoring the elements essential to it, has been growing poorer year by year. A little hay is cut on the uplands, and at Pretty Marsh are some hundreds of acres of salt meadow. The mountains have been stripped of their wood to the last merchantable tree. At this unpromising juncture the island became suddenly famous, and is now among the most frequented of American summer resorts. None could be more astonished at their own prosperity than these islanders, who, being, as a whole and in a marked degree, incapable of appreciating the grandeur of the scenes with which they have from infancy been familiar, look with scarce concealed disdain upon the admiration they inspire in others.

Some handsome cottages have already sprung out of the prevailing ugliness at Bar Harbor. At Great Head a tract of considerable extent has been inclosed. The star of Mount Desert is clearly in the ascendant, as, however prudent the city man may be at home, all purse-strings are loosened at the sea-side. The French proverb, "Il faut faire ou se taire" is usually construed into the modern barbaric "play or pay" at the shore. Not one of these worthy landlords was ever known to fall, like Vatel, on his own sword because there was not enough roast meat. Nevertheless, at the risk of forfeiting the reader's good opinion, I will say that there are landlords with consciences, and I have both seen and spoken with such on Mount Desert.

Another of my excursions, which afforded new entertainment with new scenes, was a pedestrian jaunt from Otter Creek to North-east Harbor. This route commands fine ocean views in the direction of the entrance to the Sound and of the outlying islands. You first open Seal Cove, and, crossing the shingle road at its head, in two miles and a half of farther progress skirting the eastern shore of the Sound, arrive at the head of North-east Harbor, an inconsiderable village, in which Williamson conjectures La Saussaye finally landed.

Seven miles more along the eastern base of Brown's Mountain, in the sombre shadows of which the road nestles, brings us back to the tavern door at Somesville. This road crosses a limb of Hadlock's Pond, and is skirted for some distance by a fine grove of beeches. In summer-time this part of the route is traversed under a canopy of overarching branches, whose dense foliage excludes all but a few straggling rays that let fall a shimmer of delicious sunlight, for the moment glorifying all that pass beneath.

It may chance that the visitor will first pass over the section already traversed in these pages; or it may so fall out that he will decide to undertake a run by the shore north of Bar Harbor in advance of other excursions. In this case Salisbury's Cove and the "Ovens" become his objective.

I have already fore-warned the reader that it is six or seven miles from any initial point to any other given point on Mount Desert Island. This equality of distance sometimes makes a choice embarrassing, since in selecting from two routes the preference is usually given to the shorter. But it will sometimes happen that he will find these longer than statute miles, or that when pursuing his way with all imaginable confidence, it is suddenly blocked by a mountain or a precipice. These contingencies make walking preferable. A horse is no doubt a very useful animal where there are roads.

It is practicable at low tide to reach the Ovens by the beach, but as this involves many difficulties, it is better to take the road beyond Hull's Cove, two miles from Bar Harbor. The cove is said to have been named for a brother of General William Hull. It was resorted to quite early in the settlement of the island. Here was the dwelling-place of the Gregoires, to whom Massachusetts ceded the whole island upon proof, exhibited in 1787, that Madame Gregoire was the lineal descendant of Cadillac, who claimed under his grant from Louis XIV. in 1688.[18 - See Williamson, vol. i., p. 79; "Resolves of Massachusetts," July and November, 1787; "New York Colonial Documents," vol. ix., p. 594. Mr. De Costa has given a summary of these in his pleasant little book.] The meditative reader may ponder upon this resumption under a French title as an evidence that time at last makes all things even. It would not seem inappropriate, inasmuch as two women have had so prominent a share in the history of Mount Desert, to perpetuate the names of Guercheville and Gregoire. The graves of the Gregoires may be seen near the north-east corner of the burial-ground. Monsieur is asserted to have been a bon-vivant.

The Ovens are caverns hollowed out by the waves in the softer masses of the cliffs. When the tide is completely down a pebbly beach shelves away to low-water mark. The feldspar and porphyry of which the rocks are composed impart a cheerfulness to the walls of these grottoes more pleasing after descending into the gloomy recesses of the south shore. Near the Ovens is a passage driven through a projecting cliff, known as Via Mala.

In passing, the reader will give me leave to mention another woman whose influence was felt in the affairs of Acadia. It was Henrietta, Duchesse d'Orleans, and aunt of Louis XIV., who obtained the relinquishment of Acadia by her husband, Charles I. of unfortunate memory, under the peace of 1632. The fate of the widowed queen is involved in one of the most repulsive chapters of history. According to contemporary accounts, she fell a victim to the reign of the poisoners in the time of Louis. By the testimony of the Marquis Dangeau and other annalists of the times, the poison had been sent by the Chevalier De Lorraine, her lover, then in England.

The reader may now complete the circuit of the island at leisure. In taking leave of these hills, I would observe that although not every one is possessed of a knowledge of woodcraft, or of the muscles of a mountaineer, it is far better to depart the beaten paths and to seek out new conquests. For my own part, I may safely guarantee that in finding himself for the first time on Mount Desert, the visitor will be as thoroughly surprised as impressed in the presence of natural scenes so pronounced in character, and so unique in their relation to and environment by the sea.

In my way to and from this remote corner of New England, it was my fortune to encounter a single instance of that inquisitorial propensity known the world over as Yankee curiosity. On arriving at a late hour at Ellsworth, the landlord, a great burly fellow, drew a chair close to mine, pushed his hat back from his brows – every body here wears his hat in the house – spat in the grate, smote his knees with his big palms, and said,

"Look a here, mister! I know 'tan't none o' my business; but what might you be agoin' to Mount Desart arter?" And in the same breath, "I'm from Mount Desart."

"Certes," thought I, "if it's none of your business, why do you ask?"

The same publican afterward let a fellow-wayfarer and myself a sick horse that proved unfit to travel when we were well upon our journey. I forgave him all but the making me the unwilling instrument of his cruelty to a dumb beast.

CHAPTER IV.

CASTINE

"A wind came up out of the sea,
And said, 'O mists, make room for me.'"

    Longfellow.
Whoever has turned over the pages of early New England history can not fail to have had his curiosity piqued by the relations of old French writers respecting this extreme outpost of French empire in America. The traditions of the existence of an ancient and populous city, going far beyond any English attempt in this corner of the continent, are of themselves sufficient to excite the ardent pursuit of an antiquary, and to set all the busy hives of historical searchers in a buzz of excitement.

That scoffer, Lescarbot, would dispose of the ancient city of Norumbega as Voltaire would have disposed of the Christian religion – with a sarcasm; but, if there be truth in the apothegm that "seeing is believing," the forerunners of Champlain came, saw, and made a note of it. "Now," says the advocate, "if that beautiful city was ever in nature, I should like to know who demolished it; for there are only a few cabins here and there, made of poles and covered with the bark of trees or skins; and both habitation and river are called Pemptegoet, and not Agguncia."[19 - Lescarbot, vol. ii., p. 471.]

I approached the famed river in a dense fog, in which the steamer cautiously threaded her way. Earth, sky, and water were equally indistinguishable. A volume of pent steam gushing from the pipes hoarsely trumpeted our approach, and then streamed in a snow-white plume over the taffrail, and was lost in the surrounding obscurity. The decks were wet with the damps of the morning; the few passengers stirring seemed lifeless and unsocial. Here and there, as we floated in the midst of this cloud, the paddles impatiently beating the water, were visible the topmasts of vessels at anchor, though in the dimness they seemed wonderfully like the protruding spars of so many sunken craft. Hails or voices from them sounded preternaturally loud and distinct, as also did the noise of oars in fog-bewildered boats. The blast of a fog-horn near or far occasionally sounded a hoarse refrain to the warning that issued from the brazen throat of the Titan chained in our galley.

At this instant the sun emerging from his dip into the sea, glowing with power, put the mists to flight. First they parted on each side of a broad pathway in which sky and water re-appeared. Then, before brighter gleams, they overthrew and trampled upon each other in disorderly rout. A few scattered remnants drifted into upper air and vanished; other masses clung to the shores as if inclined still to dispute the field. Owl's Head light-house came out at the call of the enchanter, blinking its drowsy eyes; then sunlit steeples and lofty spars glanced up and out of the fog-cloud that enveloped the city of Rockland.

The vicinity of a town had been announced by cock-crowing, the rattling of wheels, or occasional sound of a bell from some church-tower; but all these sounds seemed to heighten the illusions produced by the fog, and to endow its impalpable mass with ghostly life. Vessels under sail appeared weird and spectral – phantom ships, that came into view for a moment and dissolved an instant after – masts, shrouds, and canvas melting away —

    "As clouds with clouds embrace."

Rockland is a busy and enterprising place in the inchoate condition of comparative newness, and of the hurry that postpones all improvements not of immediate utility. Until 1848 it had no place on the map. Back of the settled portion of Rockland is a range of dark green hills, with the easy slopes and smooth contours of a limestone region. I know not if Rockland will ever be finished, for it is continually disemboweling itself, coining its rock foundations, until perchance it may some day be left without a leg to stand on.

Penobscot Bay is magnificent in a clear day. The fastidious De Monts surveyed and passed it by. Singularly enough, the French, who searched the New England coast from time to time in quest of a milder climate and more fertile soil than that of Canada, were at last compelled to abide by their first discoveries, and inhabit a region sterile and inhospitable by comparison. Had it fallen out otherwise, Quebecs and Louisburgs might have bristled along her sea-coast, if not have changed her political destiny.

Maine has her forests, her townships of lime, her granite islands, her seas of ice – all, beyond dispute, raw products. Fleets detach themselves from the banks of the Penobscot and float every year away.

"One goes abroad for merchandise and trading,
Another stays to keep his country from invading,
A third is coming home with rich and wealthy lading.
Halloo! my fancie, whither wilt thou go?"

The sumptuous structures we erect of her granite are only so many monuments to Maine. I have seen, on the other side of the continent, a town wholly built of Maine lumber. While Boston was yet smoking, her neighbor was getting ready the lumber and granite to rebuild her better than ever. So these great rivers become as mere mill-streams in the broader sense, and, at need, a telegraphic order for a town or a fleet would be promptly filled.

There is no corner, however remote, into which Maine enterprise does not penetrate. The spirit of adventure and speculation has pushed its commerce everywhere. With a deck-load of lumber, some shingles, or barrels of lime, schooners of a few tons burden, and manned with three or four hands, may be met with hundreds of miles at sea, steering boldly on in search of a buyer. An English writer narrates his surprise at seeing in the latitude of Hatteras, at the very height of a terrific storm, when the sea, wreathed with foam, was rolling before the gale, one of these buoyant little vessels scudding like a spirit through the mingling tempest, with steady sail and dry decks, toward the distant Bahamas.

Rockland was formerly a part of Thomaston,[20 - Named for General John Thomas, of the Revolution.] and is upon ground anciently covered by the Muscongus, or Waldo patent, which passed through the ownership of some personages celebrated in their day. A very brief résumé of this truly seignorial possession will assist the reader in forming some idea of the state of the old colonial magnates. It will also account to him for the names of the counties of Knox and Lincoln.

Prior to the French Revolution there were distinctions in society afterward unknown, the vestiges of colonial relations. Men in office, the wealthy, and above all, those who laid claim to good descent, were the gentry in the country. Habits of life and personal adornment were outward indications of superiority. The Revolution drove the larger number of this class into exile, but there still continued to be, on the patriots' side, well-defined ranks of society. There was also a class who held large landed estates, in imitation of the great proprietors of England. These persons formed a country gentry, and were the great men of their respective counties. They held civil and military offices, and were members of the Great and General Court.

The Muscongus patent was granted by the Council of Plymouth, in 1630, to John Beauchamp of London, and John Leverett of Boston, England. It embraced a tract thirty miles square, extending between the Muscongus and Penobscot, being limited on the west and north by the Kennebec patent, mentioned hereafter as granted to our colony of Plymouth. Besides Rockland and Thomaston, the towns of Belfast, Camden, Warren, and Waldoboro are within its former bounds. In 1719 the Muscongus grant was divided for the purpose of settlement into ten shares, the ten proprietors assigning two-thirds of it to twenty associates. I have examined the stiff black-letter parchment of 1719, and glanced at its pompous formalities. At this time there was not a house between Georgetown and Annapolis, except on Damariscove Island.[21 - Williamson's "History of Maine."]

The Waldo family became in time the largest owners of the patent. Samuel Waldo, the brigadier, was the intimate friend of Sir William Pepperell, with whom he had served at Louisburg. They were born in the same year, and died at nearly the same time. Their friendship was to have perpetuated itself by a match between Hannah, the brigadier's daughter, and Andrew, the son of Sir William. After a deal of courtly correspondence that plainly enough foreshadows the bitter disappointment of the old friends, Hannah refused to marry Andrew, the scape-grace. In six weeks she gave her hand, a pretty one, 'tis said, to Thomas Flucker, and with it went a nice large slice of the patent. Flucker became the last secretary, under crown rule, of Massachusetts. He decamped with his friends the royalists, in 1776, but his daughter, Lucy, remained behind, for she had given her heart to Henry Knox, the handsome young book-seller of colonial Boston, the trusted friend whom Washington caressed with tears when parting from his comrades of the deathless little army of '76.

The old brigadier fell dead of apoplexy at the feet of Governor Pownall, while in the act of pointing out to him the boundary of his lands. Mrs. Knox, the artillerist's wife, inherited a portion of the Waldo patent, and her husband, after the Revolution, acquired the residue by purchase. Here his troubles began; but I can not enter upon them. He built an elegant mansion at Thomaston, which he called Montpelier.[22 - Jefferson had his Monticello, Washington his Mount Vernon.] The house has been demolished by the demands of the railway, for which one of its outbuildings now serves as a station.

General Knox involved in his personal difficulties his old comrade, General Lincoln, though not quite so badly as Mr. Jefferson would make it appear in his letter to Mr. Madison, in which he says, "He took in General Lincoln for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which breaks him." The same writer has also recorded his opinion that Knox was a fool; but the resentments of Mr. Jefferson are known to have outrun his understanding. Through the embarrassments incurred by his friendship, General Lincoln became interested in the Waldo patent.

Lincoln was about five feet nine, so extremely corpulent as to seem much shorter than he really was. He wore his hair unpowdered, combed back from his forehead, and gathered in a long cue. He had a full, round face, light complexion, and blue eyes. His dress was usually a blue coat, and buff small-clothes. An enormous cocked hat, as indispensable to an old officer of the Revolution as to the Little Corporal, or as the capital to the Corinthian column, completed his attire. He had been wounded in the leg in the battles with Burgoyne, and always wore boots to conceal the deformity, as Knox concealed his mutilated hand in a handkerchief.

This old soldier, Lincoln, who had passed very creditably through the Revolution, was, like the fat boy in "Pickwick," afflicted with somnolency. In the old Hingham church, in conversation at table, and it is affirmed also while driving himself in a chaise, he would fall sound asleep. During his campaign against Shays and the Massachusetts insurgents of 1786, he snored and dictated between sentences. He considered this an infirmity, and his friends never ventured to speak to him of it.

Another charming picture is the approach to the Camden Hills. I saw their summits peering above fog-drifts, flung like scarfs of gossamer across their breasts. Heavier masses sailed along the valleys, presenting a series of ever-shifting, ever-dissolving views, dim and mysterious, with transient glimpses of church-spires and white cottages, or of the tops of trees curiously skirting a fog-bank. Sometimes you caught the warm color of the new-mown hill-sides, or the outlines of nearer and greener swells. These hills are a noted landmark for seamen, and the last object visible at sea in leaving the Penobscot. The highest of the Megunticook peaks rises more than fourteen hundred feet, commanding an unsurpassed view of the bay.

After touching at Camden, the steamer continued her voyage. The menial warmth of the sun, with the beauty of the panorama unrolled before them, had brought the passengers to the deck to gaze and admire. I chanced on one family group making a lunch off a dry-salted fish and crackers, the females eating with good appetites. Near by was a German, breakfasting on a hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of black bread. My own compatriots preferred the most indigestible of pies and tarts, with pea-nuts à discretion. Relics of these repasts were scattered about the decks. The good-humor and jollity that had returned with a few rays of sunshine led me to think on the depression caused by the long nights of an Arctic winter, as related by Franklin, Parry, Kane, and Hayes. A greeting to the sun! May he never cease to shine where I walk or lie!

Driving her sharp prow onward, the boat soon entered Belfast Bay. Many vessels, some of them fully rigged for sea, were on the stocks in the ship-yards of Belfast. The Duke of Rochefoucauld Liancourt, during his visit in 1797, noticed that some houses were painted. The town then contained the only church in the Waldo patent. As might be inferred, the name is from Belfast, Ireland![23 - Its Indian name was Passageewakeag – "the place of sights, or ghosts." It contained originally one thousand acres, which the settlers bought of the heirs of Brigadier Waldo at two shillings the acre. Belfast was the first incorporated town on the Penobscot. It suffered severely in the Revolution from the British garrison of Castine.]

The bay begins to contract above Camden, bringing its shores within the meaning of a noble river. Indeed, as far as I ascended it, the Penobscot will not lose by comparison with the Hudson. The river is considered to begin at Fort Point, the site of Governor Pownall's fort. Above the flow of tidewater its volume decreases, for the Penobscot does not drain an extensive region like the St. Lawrence, nor has it such a reservoir at its source as the Kennebec. At Orphan Island the river divides into two channels, making a narrow pass of extreme beauty and picturesqueness between the island and the western shore. Nowhere else, except in the Vineyard Sound, have I seen such a movement of shipping as here. A fleet of coasters were standing wing and wing through the Narrows. Tow-boats, dragging as many as a dozen heavy-laden lumbermen outward-bound, came puffing down the stream. As they entered the broad reach near Fort Point, one vessel after another hoisted sail and dashed down the bay. The Narrows are commanded by Fort Knox, opposite Bucksport.[24 - In 1797 there were twenty vessels owned in Penobscot River, two of which were in European trade.]

In coming out of Belfast we approached Brigadier's Island, from which the forest had wholly disappeared. General Knox, whose patent covered all islands within three miles of the shore, offered three thousand dollars to the seven farmers who then occupied it, in land and ready money, to relinquish their possession. Vessels were formerly built on the island, and it was famous for its plentiful supplies of salmon. In old times a family usually took from ten to sixty barrels in a season, which brought in market eight dollars the barrel. The fish were speared or taken in nets. Owners of jutting points made great captures.