USA > Maine > Hancock County > Mount Desert > Mount Desert : a history > Part 4
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2 Biard's narrative of his adventures can be found in The Jesuit Relations. The story of the voyage home is told in his letter written from Amiens on May 26, 1614, to P. Acquaviva, Général de la Compagnie de Jesus, and printed in P. Auguste Caryon's Première Mission des Jesuites au Canada, Paris, 1864. Biard died at Avignon, November 17, 1622.
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Captain Flory and the rest of the prisoners. Flory was just in time to resume command of his re- stored vessel.
With the dispersion of the Mount Desert col- ony the dream of Jesuit dominion on our coasts vanished forever ! But still to-day, when the mists envelop the crags and hills of the en- chanted island, the departed shades flit by. In the chambers of imagery we see the unbroken wastes that greeted the bold explorers, the moun- tains silent in primeval sleep, and the untracked ocean mingling with the sky ; and when the surf rolls on the rocky beach the rhythm sings of the poetry of those forgotten times ; we hear the boom of the little cannon that the stout-hearted Jesuit fired at the advancing foe, and then the rattle of the volley that answered it; we hear the shouts of the warriors or the pattered Latin prayers of the learned professor of theology who left the cloisters to plant the cross under the shadow of desert mountains and gather the savage hordes around it. And when the breakers dash them- selves against the crags and fall back in defeat they repeat the story of baffled human endeavor.
Slow winging as the raven flies, the age-long Past hath sped; Still forests guard, the eagles wheel, the osprey soars o'erhead; A thousand ghostlike snows, dream-white, when winter moons are keen,
A thousand drifts of bloom and song through tender mists of green ;
The salmon's leap, the blue jay's flight, the shadowy canoe,
These are the memories of the years that age and childhood knew;
And loves and hates have flared and died as council fires were blown,
Closed in the circle of the hills, unknowing and unknown !
Like sentinels the moving tides, slow pacing to and fro, Sweep to the ocean and return with strong and searching flow. The olden sleep - the virgin peace - the song of life unsung, All, as of yore, and guarded well as when the world was young ! Before the dawn float fading mists, unveiling, as they die, An empty sea whose blue waves leap beneath an empty sky, An empty sea - save for a fleck of white upon the blue, A lonely wing, of longer flight than ever sea-bird flew !
From the poem read by CHARLES CAMPBELL at the three hundredth anniversary of the landing of De Monts and Champlain at St. John, N. B.
PEMETIC
A CENTURY and a half of silence rolls between the dispersal of the Jesuit colony and the coming of the first English settlers to Mount Desert. French- men and Englishmen, Catholics and Protestants, disputed the sovereignty of what is now Maine. Sometimes the boundary between the jurisdic- tion of the rival nations was at Pemaquid, some- times at Passamaquoddy; but whether Mount Desert was in New England or in New France, its shores were for long periods untrodden by white men save when some fisherman or trader stopped for wood and water or some war-party made the island a rendezvous. The great hills were landmarks that no sailor could miss, and many an unrecorded traveler hailed them from the lonely sea. Captain John Smith, on his voy- age of 1617, though he did not sail to the east- ward of Penobscot Bay, saw the hills from afar and marked them on the edge of his famous map of New England. The Boston colonists made their landfall at Mount Desert, or Mount Man- sell,1 as the English at that time called the island,
1 The name Mount Mansell was given to the island in honor of Sir Robert Mansell, vice-admiral of his Majesty's navy, who was one of the Council of New England and one of the signers
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and John Winthrop wrote in his journal on June 8, 1630, of the joy with which the weary travelers, after two months' battling with the sea in the little Arbella, saw the hills, and of the fragrance that came from the spruce woods, and of the "fair sunshine and so sweet and pleasant an air as did much refresh us." But though almost unvisited by white men, the island
of the great patent in New England, called the Plymouth Char- ter. (Note of James Savage's in Winthrop's History of New England, p. 23.) Mansell's name, together with those of the other members of the New England Council, appears on the map of New England made for Sir William Alexander in 1622. (Figured in Winsor's Nar. and Crit. Hist. of America, iii, 306.) On this map each member of the Council seems to have been assigned special territory. Mansell's name covers the region about the Kennebec. Sir Samuel Argall's name appears on the territory of Plymouth. On the same map it is interesting to note that the Bay of Fundy is called Argall's Bay. The first use of Mansell's name for Mount Desert that I have been able to discover occurs in the well-known book published anonymously in 1622, entitled " A Brief Relation of the Discovery and Planta- tion of New England," commonly called the Council's " Rela- tion." This quaint description contains accounts of the wild ani- mals of New England, and among others of the moose, of which the writer says, "There have been many of them seen in a great island upon the coast called by our people Mount Mansell, whither the savages go at certain seasons to hunt them. The manner whereof is by making up several fires, and setting the country with people to force them into the sea, to which they are naturally addicted, and then there are others that attend them in their boats with bows and weapons of several kinds, wherewith they slay and take at their pleasure." The second use of the name Mount Mansell is in the journal of Winthrop quoted above. It gradually disappeared and by the end of the seventeenth century Mount Desert was the common name with both French and English.
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was not without the touch of human life. The earliest voyagers on the American coast were not alone in making discoveries. The discover- ers were themselves discovered. Champlain was conscious of this as he furled the sails of his " patache " in the lee of the desert mountains and saw the Indians peering out at the strange vessel from the headland. Nine years after- wards, when the Jesuit company in the Jonas saw the fog rise and disclose the same hills to view, there again were the Indians looking out at the ship and finally coming alongside in their canoes.
The Indians of eastern Maine were related by tribal connections and by language with the Al- gonquin family of Indians which spread at the time of the white occupation over most of the northern and eastern parts of the continent. Parkman says that the name " Algonquin " was originally applied to a group of tribes north of the St. Lawrence River, and that the difference in language between these original Algonquins and the Abenaki of New England and the Ojib- was of the Great Lakes corresponds roughly to the difference between French and Italian, or Italian and Spanish. Tribes of this Algonquin family met the Jamestown colonists in Virginia and welcomed the Pilgrims at Plymouth. They were found in Pennsylvania and New Jersey by the Quakers. As Pequots and Quinipiacs they
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roamed what is now Connecticut ; as Narragan- setts they were found in Rhode Island ; as Wam- panoag's in Massachusetts; as Pennacooks in New Hampshire. East of the Saco River these tribes were generally known as Abenaki,1 though the English colonists often spoke of them as Tarratines. According to Ventromile, the Jesuit missionary, the proper form of Abenaki is Waba- naki, designating " the people of the place where the sky begins to look white in the morning," or " the people of the east." A number of tribal names are given to the different villages or com-
1 See The Abenakis and their History, by Eugene Vetromile (1866) ; Histoire des Abenakis, par L'Abbé J. A. Maurault (1886); art. on "The Abenakis" in New England Magazine, N. S. iii, 42 (1890). See also articles by Lorenzo Sabine in Christian Examiner for 1851 and 1857; a sketch of the Abenaki in Hanson's History of Norridgewock (1849), and papers in the Collections of the Maine Historical Society, vi, 203 (1859), vii, 337 (1876) ; and second series, i, 309 (1890); Mass. Hist. Coll. Soc. ix, 207; New York Col. Doc. ix, 879.
The spelling of the name Abenaki differs with the various authorities. Father Rasles, who was killed by the English at Norridgewock, called his Indians the Abnakis, and Father Ve- tromile says that in the older French manuscripts the name is written Abenaquis or Abenaquois. Sullivan (History of Maine, p. 88, 1795) calls the Indians Abenaquis. Williamson (History of Maine, vol. i) follows Charlevoix in naming the Indians Abe- naques. Mr. C. E. Potter (Maine Historical Soc. iv, 190) writes the name Abenaquies. Father O'Brien is probably right in say- ing that Abenaqui is the French and Abenaki the English of the name. The weight of English authority is certainly in favor of Abenaki, the spelling used by Governor Thomas Hutchinson (1760), by J. H. Trumbull, the chief American scholar in Al- gonquin, by Hon. J. P. Baxter, president of the Maine Historical. Society, by Frederic Kidder, and by Francis Parkman.
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munities of these people by Marault in his " His- toire des Abenaki " (1866). The Sokoki lived about the Saco River and Casco Bay, the Nor- ridgewocks on the upper Kennebec, the Penob- scots on the river of that name, and two tribes known to the French as the Etchemins and the Malecites farther to the east. Most of these people had their more permanent villages on the upper waters of the rivers, and were in the habit of making semiannual journeys to the islands of the seacoast to hunt in winter and to fish in summer. They also tilled the soil with intermit- tent industry and raised corn and beans.1
1 In Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, Pro- fessor N. S. Shaler describes the Indians' cultivation of maize: " The aborigines, with no other implements than stone axes and a sort of spade armed also with stone, would kill the forest trees by girdling, or cutting away a strip around the bark. This admitted light to the soil. Then breaking up patches of earth they planted the grains of maize, among the standing trees : its strong roots readily penetrated deep into the soil, and the tops fought their way to the light with a vigor which few plants pos- sess. The grain was ready for use within three months from the time of planting and in four months it was ready for the harvest.
" The beginning of civilization which the aborigines had made rested on this crop and on the pumpkin, which seems to have been cultivated with it by the savages, as it still is by those who inherited their lands and methods of tillage.
"The European colonists everywhere and at once adopted this crop and the method of tillage which the Indians used. Maize- fields with pumpkin vines in the interspaces of the plants be- came for many years the prevailing, indeed, almost the only crop throughout the northern part of America. It is hardly too much to say that, but for these American plants, and the American method of tilling them, it would have been decidedly more dif- ficult to have fixed the early colonies on this shore."
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It was these Abenaki that Champlain met in 1604, calling them " Etchemins," which seems to mean " people who live in canoes." It was these Abenaki of the Norridgewock family with whom Biencourt and Biard parleyed on their cruise of 1611. It was among the Abenaki of the Penob- scot tribe that Biard determined to plant his mission. It was these Penobscots that he met at Mount Desert, whither they had come on one of their summer fishing journeys, and among whom the Jesuits settled. These Indians were regular visitors at Mount Desert, coming down each spring in their canoes, occupying their former wigwams of poles and bark, digging clams, catch- ing fish, trapping beavers, and then returning to their palisaded village at Kadesquit on the Pe- nobscot for the winter.1 Had the colony of Saint
1 Parkman's description of the life of these tribes is as follows: " In habits they were all much alike. Their villages were on the waters of the Androscoggin, the Saco, the Kennebec, the Penob- scot, the St. Croix, and the St. John; here in spring they planted their corn, beans, and pumpkins, and then, leaving them to grow, went down to the sea in their birch canoes. They returned to- wards the end of summer, gathered their harvest, and went again to the sea, where they lived in abundance on ducks, geese, and other water-fowl. During winter, most of the women, children, and old men remained in the villages, while the hunters ranged the forest in chase of moose, deer, caribou, beavers, and bears.
" Their summer stay at the seashore was perhaps the most pleasant, and certainly the most picturesque, part of their lives. Bivouacked by some of the innumerable coves and inlets that indent these coasts, they passed their days in that alternation of indolence and action which is a second nature to the Indian. Here in wet weather, while the torpid water was dimpled with
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Sauveur continued, we should doubtless have been able to record the history of these Indians from the time when they were first discovered, for the Jesuits were observant and painstaking his- torians. Their carefully compiled letters, for- warded to the general of the society and stored in the archives at home, form to-day the best store- house of our knowledge of the aboriginal tribes.
The Indian name for the island they thus early in history made a summer resort was "Peme- tic," which the Abbé Marault translates "That which is at the head." Dr. Ballard of Bruns- wick, a better authority in Algonquin nomencla- ture, derives Pemetic from two words meaning the " sloping land," and adds that the name proba- bly denoted a single locality on the island rather than the whole island. The great hill which stands fourth in the range counting from the east preserves the Indian name. The chief place of Indian resort was undoubtedly Manchester's Point at the entrance of Somes Sound. There the extent of the shell-heaps indicates long occu-
rain-drops, and the upturned canoes lay idle on the pebbles, the listless warrior smoked his pipe under his roof of bark, or launched his slender craft at the dawn of the July day, when shores and islands were painted in shadow against the rosy east, and forests, dusky and cool, lay waiting for the sunrise. The women gathered raspberries or whortleberries in the open places of the woods, or clams and oysters in the sands and shallows, adding their shells as a contribution to the shell-heaps that have accumulated for ages along these shores. The men fished, speared porpoises, or shot seals."
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pation. There were other more or less temporary Indian villages of the same character at Hull's Cove on the northeastern shore and at Goose Cove on the southwestern side of the island. The name of Asticou, the sachem of these wan- dering tribes at the time of the Jesuit colony, was first used in 1882 for a summer camp of the Champlain Society at Northeast Harbor. Mr. J. H. Curtis adopted it for his estate on the eastern bank of the harbor ; thence it mounted to the hill whose western slope is on this estate, and finally it was adopted for the post-office and group of houses at the head of the harbor.
The squalor of the lives of these Indians, the harshness of the winter climate, the accidents of the chase, the chances of their almost constant petty wars, all combined to keep the numbers of the wandering tribes small. A dozen lodges meant a large village, and these little clusters of wigwams were far apart. Though all of one stock and language, the Abenaki were constantly fighting among themselves. Biard's Indian in- terpreters who accompanied him on the voyage of 1611 and who came from the Penobscot or Pas- samaquoddy tribes, refused to accompany him beyond Monhegan, as their foes dwelt to the westward. The English records of the voyage of Captain George Waymouth (1605) and of the Popham colony on the Kennebec (1607) make it plain that the Indians whose chief seat
MANCHESTER'S POINT
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was at Pemaquid were at war with the Indians living farther east, called by the English Tarra- tines, and still later accounts indicate that these Pemaquid Indians were finally overpowered and probably absorbed by their conquerors. The Jesuits and the English colonists both exag- gerated the population of the wilderness. The nomadic habits of the Indians undoubtedly ac- counted for the inaccuracy in estimating numbers. The Jesuits were not above the desire to show a large number of converts, and the English set- tlers knew the eastern Abenaki only as the savage scourges of the border. The number of these detested foes was not likely to diminish as the hardy borderers told at the fireside their tales of sudden assault and cruel murder and rapine.1
In the eighty-five years between 1675 and 1760 there were thirty-six years of open and bit- ter warfare between the New England settlers on the one hand and the French and Indians on the other. When peace intervened it was hardly more than an armed truce. The conflict in New Eng- land itself was hardly more than a succession of murders and pillages, finding cause, not so much in the European wars that engaged the mother countries, as in the inevitable conditions of local rivalry and hostility. The reasons for the ever-
1 See Parkman's Pioneers, Thwaites' Introduction to the Jesuit Relations, Frederick Kidder's The Abenaki (1859), and Baxter's Sir Ferdinando Gorges, ii, 19.
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increasing bitterness of the Abenaki tribes toward the English were concisely described by one of the chiefs when he said, "Frenchmen do not take our lands. They open our eyes to religion. They give us good weight in trade. Englishmen rob us and kill us. Englishmen shall die."
It is not to be supposed that the Indians un- derstood the issues between France and England that were being fought out both in Europe and America. They became the allies of the French and the implacable foes of the English partly be- cause of the bitter enmities excited by the harsh treatment accorded them by brutal Englishmen, partly because of inherent vindictiveness, partly because of the influence exerted by attractive adventurers like Saint Castin 1 and other French-
1 Jean Vincent de l'Abadie, Baron de Saint Castin, was a native of Oléron in Bearn on the slopes of the Pyrenees. He came to New France in 1665 an ensign in the regiment " Cari- gnan-Sallières." When the regiment was disbanded he " fol- lowed his natural bent and betook himself to the Acadian woods." He established himself in the old fortified house at Pentagoet or Bagaduce, on the peninsula where the town of Castine now stands, and carried on a profitable trade with the Indians. With them he ranged the woods and shores or led them in forays against the English border. He married the daughter of the Penobscot chief Madockawando. He is described as " very daring and enterprising . .. a man of sound understanding, hating the English, who fear him." (Denonville au Ministre, November 10, 1686.) Parkman says : "He was bold, hardy, adroit, tenacious, and, in spite of his erratic habits, had such capacity for business that . .. he made a fortune of three or four hundred thousand crowns." He returned to France in 1701, and his half-breed sons, Anselm and Joseph, succeeded
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men who, in striking contrast to the domineer- ing habits of the English, identified themselves with the tribes, lived in the lodges, formed more or less permanent connections with Indian women, and joined in the hunts and forays. Most of all they were influenced by the urging of the French priests who by their unparalleled devotion early won the allegiance of the Abenaki to the Catho- lic faith, and attached them to it with as strong a bond as the essentially unstable nature of the Indians permitted. Priests like Rasle and Bigot and Thury, acting often under orders from Que- bec, were constantly inciting their Indian fol- lowers to bloody retaliation for injuries received at English hands, and not only counseling war, but accompanying the war-parties against the defenseless villages of the heretics. "How long," cried the assiduous Thury, who was long the priest of the Penobscot mission, "will you suffer your lands to be violated by encroaching here- tics ! By the religion I have taught you, by the freedom you love, I bid you resist. Will you desert the bones of your ancestors and let the cattle of the heretics eat grass on their graves ? God commands you to shake sleep from your eyes, to clean the hatchet of its rust, and to
him at Penobscot. See Parkman, Frontenac, p. 342; Wheeler's History of Castine ; Maine Hist. Coll. vi, 110; Mag. of Am. Hist. May, 1883 (art. by Noah Brooks), and Longfellow's "The Baron of Saint Castine " and Whittier's "Mogg Megone."
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avenge Him on His foes." Such urgency, work- ing on the Indian's natural love of bloodshed and pillage, sent the Abenaki on foray after foray against the frontier settlements. The fear of the scalping knife and the midnight attack kept the English at bay for more than a century. Con- stant warfare, however, could not but steadily deplete the originally scanty numbers of the tribes. From the time of King William's War the decline was rapid, and the Indians were more dispirited and dispersed. When the final peace came the Penobscots had dwindled into insig- nificance, and their united bands could muster only seventy-three warriors. The word of the younger St. Castin was fulfilled : "My mother's people will waste away and there is no need of new wars to accelerate their doom." After Wolfe's victory at Quebec and the final with- drawal of the French, some of the remaining Indians followed their religious teachers to Canada, and their descendants can be found at St. Francis in the Province of Quebec. Only a few Penobscots, Micmacs, and Passamaquoddies remained in Maine, living mostly, as they do still, at Oldtown on the Penobscot and at the mouth of the St. Croix. It is significant that the first English settlers at Mount Desert in the year 1762 and later make no mention whatever of Indians in the neighborhood.1
1 The story of the Indian border wars in New England is
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It is impossible in this book to narrate the events of King Philip's War, whose flames con- tinued to burn in Maine and New Hampshire long after they were quenched in the southern colo- nies, or of the barbarities of King William's War, which lasted from 1688 to 1698, and Queen Anne's War in the years from 1702 to 1711. In all this border warfare the eastern Indians were busily engaged, but for the most part the history of these times deals with the regions west of the Penobscot. The most eastern English fort was at Pemaquid, and save for Castin's post at Pen- tagoet, the French seldom came west of the St. John. The territory between was debatable ground, claimed by both parties and occupied by neither.
Occasionally within this century of warfare the fog curtain that hides Mount Desert lifts for a fully told in Parkman's Frontenac and New France and A Half Century of Conflict. The original French sources are found in Charlevoix and in the voluminous reports sent by the Canadian officials to the colonial office in Paris. Many of these are printed in such collections as Margry's Relations et Mémoires Inédits and the New York Colonial Documents, vol. ix. Copious references to these and other original authorities will be found in Parkman. Contemporary English accounts are in books like Hubbard's, Penhallow's, and Church's histories of the Indian wars, Cotton Mather's Magnalia, the Massachusetts archives and the like. Innumerable references can be found in Winsor, Crit. and Nar. Hist. of America. See also such works as Drake's Border Wars of New England and the histories of the towns where fights or massacres took place, such as Wells, York, and Portland, Me .; Durham, Dover, Salmon Falls, N. H .; Deerfield, Groton, and Haverhill, Mass.
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moment. In Hubbard's "History of the Indian Wars in New England " 1 there is record of the compact2 made at Boston on November 6, 1676, between the Governor and the Council of Massa- chusetts and Mugg the Indian, in the name and behalf of Madockawando,3 sachem of Penobscot, in which it was agreed that acts of hostility
1 The History of the Indian Wars in New England, by the Rev. William Hubbard of Ipswich, was first published in Boston in 1677 and in the same year in London. A second edition was pub- lished in Boston in 1775 by Mr. John Boyle, and the work has since gone through the hands of many editors and publishers. The standard edition is that prepared by Mr. Samuel G. Drake, with a historical preface, copious notes, and a life of the author, and issued in 1865.
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