USA > Maine > Hancock County > Bar Harbor > The story of Bar Harbor, an informal history recording one hundred and fifty years in the life of a community > Part 2
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really affecting the history of the town. Though men were now realizing the real riches of Maine as well as dreaming of the imaginary ones; though Mount Desert Island was probably beginning its career as a landfall that identifies the eastern approach to Penobscot Bay; though legalistic claims were being set on paper, no sound identifications had yet been made that would cause a claim to a piece of land to mean the same spot to the whole world. Until something like that happened, Bar Harbor would have no true history, just material for romanticizing conjectures. Someone had to put Bar Harbor, literally, on the map. That happened when Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, sent out the map- maker Samuel de Champlain to explore the Maine coast.
Du Guast de Monts was a Frenchman, a Huguenot, a loyal follower of Henry of Navarre, who had remained a Protestant when his master had changed his religion to make sure of staying on the throne as Henry IV of France, saying Paris was worth a mass. Henry owed De Monts much, and paid him for his services, cheaply enough, with a grant of trans-Atlantic lands. Du Guast took this grant seriously. He, first of all, had it registered at the French supreme court, the Parlement of Paris, not once but twice. Then he had both registrations printed, in handy form, to show to any who might challenge the authority given to one of his ships, just as the Spaniards carried pocket editions of the papal bull of demarcation. Having thus carefully protected his monopoly, he organized an expedition, and set forth to the New World, in order to drive interlopers off his prop- erty and to make a settlement. With him the Huguenot veteran of Ivry took another veteran, the Catholic pilot Samuel de Champlain. In due course the expedition arrived at the Bay of Fundy, rejected Port Royal and selected Dochet Island, in Quoddy Bay, as the site for a settlement.
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The Story of Bar Harbor
There Du Guast de Monts put up buildings, vestiges of which, discovered in 1799, were used in deciding the exact boundary of the United States with Canada, and sent Champlain out to do some exploring and mapping, in a small pinnace.8
Late in August, 1604, Samuel de Champlain set off, tak- ing advantage of the clear, usually fogless weather of that season to examine closely the likely spots on the coast to the westward. On September 5, 1605, his boat rounded Petit Manan, so called by him in contrast to the Grand Manan he had left behind him at the mouth of Quoddy Bay, passed Schoodic Point and entered the future Frenchman's Bay. It had been a long passage, twenty French leagues or, roughly, sixty sea miles or sixty-five land miles, from his last landing, and he must have wanted to get his crew ashore, write up his log properly, and take aboard fresh water. So he pushed briskly inshore, looking sharply at the high moun- tains to the westward. He seems to have done a good job of observing, for he realized from the start that Mount Desert was not one hill but many, thus avoiding a mistake that bedeviled later mapmakers. He also stood inshore far enough to make sure Mount Desert Island was an island and not a peninsula, though separated from the mainland by a passage he correctly estimated as being only one hundred paces in width. However, in his impetuosity he cracked the bottom of his tiny vessel against a rock-one would guess it to have been Googin's Ledge, between Hadley's Point and Racoon Point, though from the description given of a rock bare at low water it could have been any rock from Otter Creek Ledge to Folly Island Ledge. That forced him to run to the shore to effect repairs. They took some time, for the next day he sailed only two leagues, and then found savages in a cove under the mountains. He could not converse with
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them, as they ran away. Here he again spent the night. The next morning the savages showed more confidence, made friends, and told him that they were hunting beaver.
It has been generally assumed from Champlain's de- scription, that he went back on his tracks, since no course through the Narrows would bring him close enough to be "under the mountains." If one assumes that he measured his distances with the accuracy of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and made his turn at or beyond Goo- gin's Ledge, where he could see through the Narrows to Blue Hill Bay, that would put him at either Hull's Cove, Bar Harbor, or Cromwell's Harbor. Then, after he had made friends with the Indians, he could have rounded Bass Har- bor Head, and gone up through Merchant's Row past Deer Island to Penobscot Bay, which caught his fancy far more, and which he explored up to what he called Kendusquit, the Kenduskeag stream at Bangor. On the other hand, the Reverend Edmund Slafter, the editor of the Prince Society edition of Champlain's works, was sure, from having found in 1880 a ninety-year-old fisherman at Otter Creek who remembered a beaver dam there, that Otter Creek was the site of Champlain's landing. That, however, does not seem conclusive, for beavers were plentiful, and might have been trapped at any cove. However, since Otter Creek's eastern side is within the town limits of Bar Harbor, it is possible to feel confident that when Champlain landed on Mount Desert Island he set foot within the present town limits.
The identification of Champlain's landing place is doubly significant, since a few years later other savages, at a cove- perhaps the same one-made friends with French explorers. As their vessel, the Jonas, did not pass the Porcupines, Crom- well's Harbor seems the most probable place to have had both the Jonas and Champlain landings, since it is "under
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the mountains" as well as a safe harbor. However, what is chiefly important in this welter of guesswork is that Cham- plain named Mount Desert Island and identified it so clearly in his writings that future voyagers recognized it from his description if not from his maps. The founder of Quebec was Bar Harbor's first surveyor, there before Jamestown was settled.
This visit was the first and probably the last time Bar Harbor saw Champlain. The next year he and De Monts did sight the island, but seem to have slipped past it without landing, as they did again in 1606, in two trips as far as Cape Cod, which Champlain called "Cape Mallebar." To him, for the work done on these trips, New England owes more than it may be ready to admit. He seems to have been its first mapmaker, in the sense of drawing a map that would let you find a place a second time and would let you decide for yourself how good a harbor there was. He could locate places accurately, both by celestial observation and in terms of local landmarks. It seems indeed possible that the Pil- grims chose Plymouth and the Puritans selected Boston as their places of settlement, on the basis of copies of charts made originally by him. Certainly, Bar Harbor owes him a debt, for though it saw him but once, it got from him the French-sounding name for the whole island, "Mount Desert," that has had such useful connotation ever since.9
Champlain and Du Guast de Monts do not again come into the history of Bar Harbor. The unusually bitter winter of 1604 drove them out of Dochet Island, across the Bay of Fundy to what the French called "Port Royal," the beautiful, broad Annapolis basin. There Du Guast de Monts set up a colony that has with intermissions lasted to this day. More than that, he brought to effective use in Acadia -that is, the present State of Maine and the Provinces of
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New Brunswick and Nova Scotia-a method of granting land that to this day affects Bar Harbor land deeds. Strange as it may seem, this method was based on feudalism. To De Monts, the natural way to reward the Sieur de Poutrincourt was to give him a feudal grant of Port Royal. Poutrincourt, his son Biencourt, and their successor in title, Charles de la Tour, made an apparent success of the feudal method of settlement. Naturally enough, since the system worked, the French authorities went on with it. One such feudal grant, that of Douaquet, included Bar Harbor, and, by a quirk of fate, became the legal basis of land titles in existence to this day. So a reward to a supporter turned into an experiment in colonization.
More than that, this same introduction of feudalism brought, far more directly, an attempted settlement to Bar Harbor. When De Monts lost control of Acadia, as he did after the assassination of his protector and friend Henry IV, Poutrincourt retained control of Port Royal, and could not be ousted. Had not De Monts secured supreme court regis- tration of the title he had passed on to Poutrincourt? How- ever much De Monts' eventual successor, Madame de Guercheville, wanted to oust Poutrincourt-for she wanted to make a religious settlement and Poutrincourt had come to Acadia to get furs, not save souls-she could not. There- fore, Madame de Guercheville's colonists had to go else- where, and thus it was that Bar Harbor saw them.
Madame de Guercheville makes a colorful figure in Bar Harbor's history. She was an unusual person; once she had, in earlier days, resisted Henry IV's advances in so diplomatic a way as to earn his respect. When His Majesty had quartered himself upon the widow with obvious intentions, she had given him a royal welcome, in the true sense of the world, and had then driven away, saying that she was too unenter-
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taining a person to spend the night under the same roof as the king of France. Now, at the end of her life, she had been enthralled by the aims of the Jesuit Fathers. In 1605, the very year in which De Monts had founded Port Royal, the Jesuits had reopened their missions in Paraguay, and had begun the work that was to make that South American province an international byword for idealistic govern- ment for the benefit of the governed-so much so as to earn the praise of Voltaire, that hater of Jesuits. The Society of Jesus, however, was not contented with one region in South America. They wanted a "Northern Paraguay" in North America, and Madame de Guercheville meant to make it possible for them to have one. She acted, through the channels of court influence she well understood how to use, and the holder of De Monts' title to Acadia, the Prince de Condé, found it politic to transfer his claims to her. She then sent out Father Biard to see what he could do, and to find, through his squabbles with Poutrincourt, that Port Royal was no place for her cherished mission settle- ment.
Therefore it was that in 1612-13 preparations were made for an independent mission settlement. Court ladies them- selves embroidered the altar cloths that were to be used in the wilderness. The ship Jonas, a veteran of Acadian voyages, was chartered, under the command of Captain Flory. The Sieur de la Saussaye was appointed to govern the new colony. To Father Biard and Father Masse was added the enthusias- tic young lay brother, Gilbert du Thet, who boarded the Jonas with the prayer that he might die in America, in serv- ice there. And so, from the Norman port of Honfleur, the Jonas sailed to Port Royal and thence, it was hoped, to that Kenduskit of which Champlain had spoken so highly.
Port Royal was reached, with no improvement in the
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relations between Poutrincourt and Biard. Then the Jonas set sail, behind her a gentle northeast wind that carried her gaily across the Bay of Fundy. The wind increased, and, following the laws of circular storms, veered into the south- east, and then the southwest, rising steadily in intensity. The happiness of the crew and passengers was not increased by knowing that they were near Petit Manan, whose dangers Champlain had vividly described. The passengers prayed, the captain tacked the Jonas "as God willed" against the veering wind, which as night drew on swung into the north- west, and as dawn broke those on the Jonas saw that their prayers had been answered. Somehow, they had slipped up Frenchman's Bay, avoiding Schoodic Point, Baker's Island, Egg Rock, and all the other dangers of the shores, and were either just above or just below the Porcupine Islands. Captain Flory steered towards a harbor on the eastern shore, perhaps either Cromwell's Harbor or Compass Harbor, which he and his passengers promptly and devoutly named Saint Sauveur, a name perpetuated to this day similar to the original by the Episcopal church in Bar Harbor, and in the English translation as the Holy Redeemer by the Catholic church. Here smoke signals attracted them to the shore. A party embarked in boats and met Indians who announced that their chief, Asticou, at his shell-heap village at Man- chester Point, was dying, and hoped to be baptized in time to save his soul. Promptly the Jonas weighed anchor and sailed around the corner, after the hurrying Father Biard, to reach Somes Sound in time.
There, as might have been expected, Asticou was found well and hearty, but anxious to be baptized, and hopeful that the Jesuits would make their colony near his village. Events forced them to do so. With a view to economy, the Jonas had been hired only to take the Jesuits to their landing
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The Story of Bar Harbor
place after they should leave Port Royal, and for three months of coast duty thereafter. Naturally, the captain wanted all the time he could get for fur-trading, and claimed that the casting of anchor at St. Sauveur meant the end of the sea voyage and the beginning of his final months of service. As under those conditions it would be hopeless to go to Kenduskit and lose the Jonas, Biard consented, and landed across the sound from Manchester Point. Here, at what is now called Jesuit Point, work was begun on a fort and winter quarters, while Biard, Masse, and Du Thet began their work of conversion. (Thus, in 1613, Bar Harbor was as close to an area of potentially important settlement as any other spot in America. Apart from Port Royal and Quebec, each with but a handful of fur traders, the starv- ing plantation at Jamestown, and the neglected Spanish fort at St. Augustine, there was no white settlement north of Mexico. With all the resources of the Society of Jesus behind it, the Biard settlement might well have become for a time the most important in America.)
But fate was against the Frenchmen. Suddenly a sail ap- peared in Western Way, and a ship raced into the quiet waters near Greening's Island, before a strong southwest wind. With red flags flying, and obviously bent upon war, the stranger flew up to the Jonas. Brave Frenchmen, in boats, returned to the Jonas, prudent Frenchmen stayed in them, and slipped behind Greening's Island. Those on shore gaped, while those in the Jonas ran hither and thither, not knowing what to do. The stranger rounded up past the Jonas, and poured a broadside into her, then swung around again, for another attack. With that, one man, lay brother Du Thet, was stirred to action, and, with a hot coal in his hand, set off one cannon, unfortunately not having aimed it first. The assailant replied to this with musketry fire,
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which dropped Du Thet. That ended all resistance. Then a boarding party swarmed unopposed over the sides of the Jonas and burst into the captain's cabin. There a chest was broken open, and from it, without knowledge of the Frenchmen, their official commission was taken. Only then, after all this had been done, did the stranger reveal herself as the ship Treasurer, of Virginia, under the command of Captain Samuel Argall.
For a moment some of the French thought they would flee to the woods, to continue the fight. But a night without shelter ended their ardor, and Argall found himself in charge of the whole colony. He at once demanded by what right they had settled. On being told of an official French commission, he demanded to see it-and, not unexpectedly, it could not be found. Therefore, Argall took with him the Jonas and the colonists, back to Virginia; a few were allowed to sail across to Port Royal.
So died Du Thet, in service in America, and that was the end of the Jesuit colony and of the "Northern Paraguay" at Mount Desert. Of this, next year Argall made sure, by returning to the island, destroying what of the fort had not been destroyed previously, and, with Father Biard's assist- ance, attacking Poutrincourt at Port Royal and driving him into the woods, where he stayed.10
A moment's reflection will show what Argall had gained by his theft of the commission. To expel a legal French settlement, no matter what official orders he had to do so, might be considered an act of war and might lead him and his employers, the London Company, into trouble. But to expel an illegal French settlement would be acting in the interests of the legal French owners of the land, if it should turn out that the English government recognized French title there. Argall's quick-witted discovery of the diplo-
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matic way in which to break up the French settlement had enabled him to do his duty in protecting the boundaries of Virginia, without creating an international incident.
At the time, this adventure passed off smoothly enough. Argall went back to England with Biard, who acknowl- edged he had been well treated, and made his official report justifying his actions. The world went on to concern itself with other matters, while Argall became Governor of Virginia, and got into other scrapes out of which he could not so easily escape. But many years later, with Argall peace- ful at last in his grave, the whole story rose up again. Francis Parkman, of Boston, began digging up the history of New France, and the Province of Quebec reprinted the official publications of the Society of Jesus, those Relations which from year to year had been issued to tell the supporters of the mission work what was going on. Here was the Jesuit side of the story, in which Argall was justifiably called a thief and the destroyer of a settlement, without any state- ment that he was acting upon orders or had used sense and tact in carrying out those orders. Here was the raw material for plenty of historical discussion, which, naturally, broke out. By the time all the vagaries of the Relations had been discussed, the question settled of how accurate the Quebec reprint was, and a number of documents defending Argall had been dug up, the Mount Desert raid was a commonplace of knowledge among amateurs of colonial history. Thus it was that, through the interest aroused in his deeds, Samuel Argall, who drove the Jesuit colony away from Bar Harbor, contributed his share towards bringing the summer colony back there.
Clearing the French out of St. Sauveur left a void. All that remained in Acadia was Poutrincourt's son, Biencourt, wandering in the woods of the Nova Scotian peninsula and
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with less than twenty followers keeping up the fur trade by leading the Indian way of life. This void, as far as claims went, the English soon filled, three times over.
First of all, in 1620, as everyone knows, a band of semi- communistic religious fur-traders, the Pilgrims, found themselves stuck north of Cape Cod and forced to settle not as they had planned on the site of present New York but at that of the present Plymouth, and to secure a grant, from the so-called Plymouth Company, of the lands they had settled upon. To pay their debts, in the early 1630's these religious fur-traders established posts west and east of Bar Harbor, one at what the French called Pentagoet (the Pilgrims' Penobscot, called by us today Castine), the other at what the French called Magesse, which the Pilgrims called Machias and we of today know by the same name. From these settlements, perhaps, population might have moved in upon Bar Harbor, as it did in the 1690's and again in the 1760's. Here was a fragmentary English claim to the land, even though the Pilgrims were here as traders and not as settlers.
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The next claim was a fanciful one. The fact of the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth encouraged the Plymouth Company-or, rather, its successor, the Council for New England-to parcel out the New England coast among its various members. Some of this parceling took effect, nota- bly, the Georges claim to western Maine and the Mason claim to New Hampshire, and became the basis of effective land titles. Other grants were nominal and soon forgotten. Such was the sale of Mount Desert Island to Sir Robert Mansell. An important man, with a minor interest in the Council, he secured, for his subscription of £150, title to the island and the right to name it Mount Mansell. The name stuck for a while; some English voyagers landed there
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and found moose, and then the name drifted into oblivion.
But before it faded away and died it began a little piece of Mount Desert Island history. In 1630, the ship Arbella, that carried to Massachusetts the Puritan high command and the precious charter of the Massachusetts Bay Com- pany, became separated from her consorts somewhere near the Georges Shoals, off Nantucket. One passenger, John Winthrop, the governor of the colony, for his interest, noted down the course of navigation of the ship, which shows where she went and why. He records the observed latitude and estimated longitude, the soundings that showed the ship was crossing the Grand Banks, the observation of Cape Sable, and, finally, the definitive landfall at Mount Desert, or Mount Mansell, this being complicated by mistaking the Camden Hills in Penobscot Bay for Mount Desert, and Mount Desert for the Gouldsboro Hills, on the second time of sighting. So it was that Mount Cadillac, whose summit is within the limits of the Town of Bar Harbor, welcomed to New England the charter of its freedoms. Which, again, is another example of the antiquarian interest that lies over the island, and will serve to explain why a postoffice opposite South West Harbor is named Mansett. Antiquarian pres- sure persuaded the postoffice authorities to name it "Man- sell," a clerk crossed the "l's" into "t's," and there is the name, as Indian-sounding as one would wish. It took the Department of the Interior to put Mansell's name on the eastern peak of Western Mountain, in 1919.
In chronological sequence, the third claim of the English to Acadia was that of Sir William Alexander, to whom Charles I gave Nova Scotia, with nice, broad boundaries, adding to it, by a second grant-lest Sir William have too little-"the River and Gulf of Canada." All Sir William had to do was to take over, at his own expense, what Charles
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had given him. That he did, by sending out Scotch colonists to live at Port Royal. He also started his own brand of feudalism, by creating "baronets of Nova Scotia," hered- itary titles which still run in certain Scottish families such as those of the Earl of Gosford and the Duke of Roxburghe. When his colonists landed they found on shore not Biencourt, Poutrincourt's son and successor, but one Charles Estienne de la Tour, to whom the De Monts grant had been passed on. De la Tour was interested in land, not patriotism, and promptly took service under Sir William, receiving from him a baronetcy of Novia Scotia, to seal the bargain. For good measure, Sir William gave another to Charles de la Tour's father Claude, whereby hangs a dime-novel story of the father's having been sent over to persuade the son to give up his French allegiance. This story, told by the none too reliable Nicholas Denys, later Lord of Fronsec, contains one point of value-the fact that Claude de la Tour gave his son an example of how to marry a Protestant and switch allegiance. Soon after the arrival of the Scots, the French seemed driven out of Canada, for in 1628, during the short squabble over La Rochelle which is now known not so much as a battleground as the background for Dumas' Three Musketeers, an English expedition under the three Kirke brothers captured Quebec.
But then the pendulum swung back. Just as the English seemed about to get all of North America, Charles I dis- covered that the French were delaying the payment of the dowry of his wife, Henrietta Maria. To speed up an install- ment of $240,000, he offered to give Quebec back. The offer was accepted, and Claude de Razilly was sent to Canada, to be governor general and feudal lord of Acadia -the French government having forgotten the previous grant to Poutrincourt, now held by De la Tour. Promptly,
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De Razilly took over so thoroughly that the few Scottish settlers were merged in the flood of French, and Port Royal became a true French town. Razilly then died, and his suc- cessor, Charles de Menou d'Aunay-Charisny, then com- peted with De la Tour for the control of Acadia, in the process clearing out all the English. De la Tour took Machias from the Plymouth settlers, D'Aunay took Pentagoet from them. Then the two fought each other. The story of how De la Tour married a Protestant, got aid from Boston, and besieged D'Aunay in the St. John River, capturing Fort St. Jean; of how D'Aunay recaptured the fort; of how Madame De la Tour died of rage a month later; of how D'Aunay was drowned and De la Tour married his widow -all form a vivid page of Acadian history. As far as Bar Harbor goes, they add up to one thing-during the two decades from 1634 to 1654 the French wasted in feudal quarrels the energy and force needed to make good their settlements.
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