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 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18
Then England and France had another petty war, and the pendulum swung the other way. This time Cromwell had sent out a fleet to take New York, (then New Amsterdam) from the Dutch, only to have peace come before the attack could be made. For want of better to do, the fleet then took over Acadia, Major Robert Sedgwick capturing the three key fur-trading posts of Pentagoet, St. John (Jemsec) , and Port Royal, and stationing Englishmen there to take the revenues of the fur monopoly. Once England had taken Acadia, Lord Protector Cromwell found a use for it. He had on his hands, now that the Civil War had ended and Charles I had been executed, plenty of veterans' claims, with the problem of getting pensions for the colonels whose regiments he was disbanding. Here was a chance to help Colonel Sir William Temple, the Puritan son of the loyal
39
Explorers and Claimants
Cavalier, Thomas Temple. To him Cromwell handed over the Acadia monopoly which had been taken from De la Tour, and Temple, the gay ex-officer, now found himself liv- ing across the sea in Boston, guessing how much his agents in Acadia were robbing him, making a real place for himself in Boston society, and getting hold of some good land specu- lations, such as the site of the present East Boston, while Captain Robert Walker kept a garrison at Pentagoet.
Even after Cromwell died, and his son had passed on the reins of power to Charles II, Sir William Temple stayed in possession. Why should the restoration bother him? Could he not write to the new king that one of the old king's last messages before going to the scaffold had been, "Forget not honest Tom Temple?" Honest Tom's son hung on tight to the Acadian fur trade and kept his grant.
Now the Cross of St. George floated over the two posts nearest Bar Harbor, Pentagoet and St. John (Jemsec). It might seem, at last, as if the process of settlement that was then going on through all New England, from Pelham, New York, to Pemaquid, Maine, would reach across the Penobscot and bring settlers to Bar Harbor. But again a quirk of fate prevented settlement, and left, in its stead, romance.
2 Feudal Acadia
I N THE YEAR 1667, just as Sir William Temple was becoming comfortably settled in possession of eastern Maine, the pendulum swung again to the French side, and a chain of events starting in Whitehall Palace came close to making Bar Harbor a part of a French feudal manor. King Charles II of England, who was engaged in liquidating the British empire for what he could personally get out of it, handed over Acadia, and with it Bar Harbor, to his first cousin, Louis XIV of France, as part of a com- plicated deal. Louis, in order to build up his empire in Canada, sent out a great administrator, Jean Talon, the "Colbert of New France," to take over from the Company of One Hundred Associates and advise and control its suc- cessor, the Company of the West Indies. Jean Talon, in order to persuade the French in Canada to stop ranging the woods and to settle down, successfully revived feudalism, both in Canada proper and in Acadia. Then the accident of a raid by the Dutch West India Company transformed this new-born feudalism, as far as the coast of Maine went, from an agricultural to what might be called a forest econ- omy, by driving the French seigneurs into the woods. As part of this later, or forest, feudalism, in 1688 Mount Desert Island, and thus Bar Harbor, was granted to Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac, as part of his manor or seigneurie of Douaquet. But just as Cadillac was about to make a settle- ment, the outbreak of a series of wars carried him off to
40
41
Feudal Acadia
France and ended feudal Acadia. Then it was that the bay to the east of Bar Harbor stopped being Douaquet Bay on the maps and became Frenchman's Bay, so often did it form a staging area for French expeditions. Finally, at the end of the wars, all that was left of this attempt at feudalism was a claim to Mount Desert Island by Cadillac's heirs.
Charles II of England sold Acadia, and with it Mount Desert Island and Bar Harbor, because he was always short of funds. In 1660 he had been allowed to return to the throne on condition that parliament should hold the purse strings. Soon he found that parliament never saw eye to eye with him as to what were or were not legitimate expendi- tures. As he looked around for ways in which to supplement his income, he realized that since diplomacy remained in the king's hands and at times involved sales and subsidies, he could pick up money outside of parliament's control by selling off England's possessions. In 1667, when negotiating the treaty of Breda with Louis XIV, he exchanged for half of the island of St. Christopher such rights as Cromwell had secured to Acadia. Then he showed his true colors by telling the New England authorities not to honor his in- structions. Acting on these orders, Sir William Temple, the owner of Acadia under the English grant, stood pat and refused to deliver his trading posts, Pentagoet, Jemsec, and Port Royal, to the French. Thus the year 1668 passed with the profits of the fur trade still in Sir William's hands. Thereupon the French ambassador in London had a show- down with the English, and got an ironclad order for the transference of Acadia. It was sent out from La Rochelle, but the ship carrying it was driven into Lisbon by stress of weather, and the year 1669 went by with Acadia and its profits still in the possession of Sir William. Finally, in 1670, the frigate San Sebastien, carrying the company of Grand-
42
The Story of Bar Harbor
fontaine of the regiment of Carignan-Salières, reached Quebec with a copy of the order among the papers of the one-armed veteran, Captain Hubert d'Andigny de Grand- fontaine, who then began the slow work of showing King Charles's instructions to those who did not want to see them. A first try at Pentagoet received the answer that Sir William Temple in Boston was in charge, and it was only after Sir William had been faced by the direct command of his king that he laboriously and sadly penned instructions to Captain Richard Walker at Pentagoet to transfer the fort to Captain de Grandfontaine.
So finally, on August 5, 1670, His Most Christian Maj- esty's frigate San Sebastien came to anchor in Penobscot Bay. Someday a historical novelist should paint a picture of this event, using the license permitted in such fiction of adding the probable to the provable. He will be able to describe the red Cross of St. George flying over the square blockhouse on shore, the fleur de lys of France hanging from the mizzen peak of the frigate in the bay. He will contrast the redcoated English sentry walking his beat for the last time on shore, with the eager band of professional soldiers waiting for the long boats to take them to the land. He will put thoughts into the minds of the soldiers on each side- into the minds of the redcoated former "Ironsides" on shore perhaps memories of Marston Moor and charges be- hind "Brave Oliver," or of striding into the House of Com- mons when Colonel Pride made his "purge"; into the minds of the whitecoated men of Carignan-Salières on shipboard perhaps memories of stern fights in Austria against the Turks, or of long marches against the Iroquois through the Mohawk valley. Certainly, as an added touch, somewhere in the same picture he will place, peering out through the trees on the shore, the wise Indian chief Mockawando and
43
Feudal Acadia
his daughter, the latter little knowing she would be baptized Marie Marguerite Pidianske and end her days among the Pyrenees as the Baronne d'Abbadie de St. Castin.1
If such a book is ever written, the novelist should paint the contrast between the French aristocrats who were land- ing-D'Andigny de Grandfontaine, Joybert de Marson de Soulanges, D'Abbadie de St. Castin-and the Puritan middle-class veterans who were leaving. For therein lies the explanation of what was happening. Jean Talon, intendant of New France, had sent those noblemen to Pentagoet of set purpose. He hoped that they would provide the leadership whereby Canada, with one-fifteenth the population of the British colonies, might hold her borders against English and Iroquois. As he wrote back to France, he was intentionally copying methods of the middle ages and the Roman empire. Just as Charlemagne had defended France by feudal set- tlements on the Pyrenees, and as the Normans had set up Marcher Lordships on the Welsh borders, and as the Romans had settled veterans in Dacia to make it Roumania and a barrier against barbarian invasion, so Talon intended to disband Carignan-Salières where the disbanding would do the most good.
This was a perfectly practical idea. Essentially, feudalism is an exchange of protection from those who grant land for services from those who take over the land and live on it. Consequently, throughout history it has formed a frequent means of encouraging settlement in dangerous country. Under proper conditions it has worked well, and in Canada, in the 1670's, conditions were proper. Talon discovered that for himself, from the benefits he drew from the three villages he founded on the St. Charles River, opposite Quebec, which grew first into the barony of Des Islets and later into the county of Orsainville, thus giving him both profit and a
44
The Story of Bar Harbor
title of nobility to take back to France. So successful was feudalism in Canada that it lasted in full legal strength until 1854, and in an attenuated form until 1940. In the middle of the nineteenth century seigneurs would not have trav- eled to the "Castle of St. Lewis in Quebec," there to swear fealty to Queen Victoria and present her representative with an enumeration of the resources of their fiefs, had there not been solid advantages in the system. French- Canadian habitants would not have brought their grain and their logs to the seigneur's mills had not they found it worth their while. Nor would they have rallied to fight not only under French seigneurs against invading Iroquois but also under English seigneurs against Montgomery and Arnold's invading Americans, had there not been a solid bond between seigneur and habitant. In Canada proper, feudalism did just what it was intended to do, and brought the French settlers out of the woods and on to the farms.2
In Acadia, too, feudalism had proved itself by the time Talon came. In 1685 Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac found peasants there who proudly exhibited the grants that Pou- trincourt had made to them or their sires sixty or more years before.3 It was very much part of Talon's plan to establish feudalism in the St. John valley and eastern Maine as well as in the Richelieu valley; in fact, his grants of seign- euries in Acadia antedate by a few days those he made in Canada proper.4 Talon also saw to it that something was done to link Acadia with Canada. Canoe routes were surveyed and opened. Seigneuries and forts and mission stations on the Chaudière, the St. Charles, the Rivière du Sud and the Temiscouta provided bases at the St. Lawrence end of the cross-country journey to match seigneuries and forts and mission stations on the St. John, the Penobscot, and the Kennebec at the Gulf of Maine end. In between these bases,
45
Feudal Acadia
the rivers that connected Canada and Acadia, and the net- work of portages that connected the rivers, were well ex- plored. When a later intendant, Duchesneau, wanted to show Colbert what Canada was like, by means of an orna- mental map, Maine was filled up with pictures of Indians carrying canoes. As late as 1759, the year in which Quebec fell to the English, Montcalm was writing back to France that if something had to be given up to get peace, the com- munications by way of the Maine portages were more im- portant than those by way of Cape Breton Island.5 Such was the store the French set on the eastern coast of Maine, such were the reasons for their establishment of feudalism there.
By 1672, a start had been made. Land had been granted; nobles had actually settled with their families; disbanded veterans of Carignan-Salières had been left to join them. Here, at Pentagoet and at Jemsec, were nuclei out of which might have grown little French villages, just as out of Pou- trincourt's Port Royal was growing the Acadia about which Longfellow wrote his Evangeline. Had the normal trend of settlement continued, the veterans turned peasants would have taken French wives, sent over by the fostering care of the government at home, the seigneurs would have become firmly established in the new world, and new seigneuries would have been granted, next to the old. The settled area would have spread, and in due course a French village would have appeared at Bar Harbor, perhaps headed by a noble, perhaps headed by a rich peasant who wished to turn noble. If this had happened, the fields of Mount Desert Island might have seen castellated manor houses, like that of Le Moyne de Longueuil, which so reminded Fron- tenac of French chateaux, and Bar Harbor's social life might have revolved around the lord of its manor. That
46
The Story of Bar Harbor
was what did happen in the Canadian summer resort of Murray Bay, with its Nairne and Fraser manors.
But all this remains in the realm of might-have-been, because Charles II of England again started a chain reaction, one that reached across the Atlantic Ocean from White- hall, by way of old Amsterdam and New Amsterdam to Pentagoet and to Frenchman's Bay. In 1670, to get money and power, and inspired by debatable motives that do not concern this account, Charles went on from liquidating the British empire to selling out his country's foreign policy, religion, and safety. By the secret treaty of Dover he turned all these over to Louis XIV for £70,000 a year. Louis, who now had the British navy on his side, promptly attacked Holland. The Dutch naturally struck back where they could strike best, and sent the Zeeland and Holland fleets to raid the rich English and French possessions in the West Indies. These fleets, having exhausted the possibilities of the West Indies and finally coming to the point where they nearly fought each other by mistake, then joined, and sailed north to recapture the lost Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Hardly had they done so when the news came that England had switched sides. Parliament, aghast at seeing England's ancient ally, Protestant Holland, about to be overrun by Catholic France, had forced Charles to go back on his bargain. Naturally, as one price of peace, Charles had demanded and secured the return of New Am- sterdam.
With New Amsterdam back in English hands once more, the Dutch sea rovers had to set sail again and look elsewhere for booty. The nearest enemy point was the French settle- ment in Acadia. Captain Julian Aernauts of the frigate Flying Horse picked up in Boston the Yankee pilot John Rhoades, and went "down East" to see what profits he
47
Feudal Acadia
could make. Ever since the Dutch West India Company had declared immense dividends after Maurice of Nassau's conquest of Brazil, the Dutch had had a tendency to go in for a refined form of piracy. The conquest of Acadia was easy. It took but an hour to capture the fort at Pentagoet and the two Carignan officers in it, Captain de Chambly and Ensign d'Abbadie de St. Castin. De Chambly, being valuable property, was sent to Boston for ransom, as was also Pierre Joybert de Marson of Jemsec, the Major of Acadia. As a matter of prestige, Count Frontenac paid what was demanded for these men. Then "persuasion," in the form of a cord knotted around his wrist, was applied to Ensign d'Abbadie de St. Castin, to make him sign up with the shorthanded freebooters. Probably this often worked with adventurous young men who were at first reluctant to switch allegiance, but who were good and even willing recruits once their initial reluctance had been conquered. It did not work with De St. Castin, who broke away from his captors, took to the woods, and by the newly discovered canoe routes carried to Quebec the news of the Dutch in- vasion. Aernauts also captured Port Royal, where he left one Petrus Ricardo. Then, rechristening Acadia "New Hol- land," and leaving behind him a commission that would make Ricardo governor of it and controller of the fur monopoly, Aernauts went back to Holland with his booty.
As long as Holland remained at war with France, Acadia remained technically "New Holland." * But its Dutch
* In law, at least eight flags have flown over Bar Harbor. These were Cortereal's Portuguese shields and castles, James I's cross of Saint George of England, Sir William Alexander's St. Andrew's cross of Scotland, Louis XIV's fleur de lys of France, the horizontal Dutch tri- color, Queen Anne's union jack of Great Britain, the United Colonies Cambridge flag which they took over from the East India Company, and the stars and stripes of the United States, not to mention the rattle-
48
The Story of Bar Harbor
garrison was well aware that when peace was declared Acadia would go back to France, and that they had better get what pickings they could as quickly as they could. Therefore they abandoned Pentagoet and Machias, and concentrated at St. John and Port Royal. Petrus Ricardo enlisted as many Yankee seamen as he could and tried to make his money by enforcing the Acadia fur monopoly. Naturally, with the departure both of Temple and the French, the Yankees of Boston saw a chance to get the fur trade for themselves and went "down East," ignoring the rights of the Dutch West India Company.
In Ricardo's cruises to enforce his monopoly, Bar Harbor again appears on the stage of history; for on December 4, 1674, one George Manning, in the employ of John Freke of Boston, and commanding the "shallopp" Phillipp was hailed "in Adowake Bay [the present-day Sullivan Harbor, as the context shows] to the Eastward of Mount de Zort by Capt. Petter Rodrigoe & Capt. John Rodes." Just what happened thereafter was a matter of contention in the court of vice-admiralty at Boston, six months later. Man- ning swore that Ricardo and Rhoades came up with Dutch colors flying, tried to force him to sign a statement that the furs they were taking were the produce of Acadia, and threatened to beach and burn his vessel. Furthermore, Man- ning alleged, they showed him a commission from Aernauts, but would not let him read it. The version of the Dutch was that their commission was good, that they had as much right to consider Acadia a monopoly as Temple, and that Manning
snake flag of the Revolution, the Massachusetts pine-tree flag, and the official flag of the State of Maine. Once, too, as a taunt to the British navy, the vierkleur of the Transvaal was raised during the Boer war. Records, however, show only the Dutch flag as above, by implication the fleur de lys in 1692 and 1696 on a warship, the union jack similarly in 178 1, and in the present day the United States and Maine flags.
49
Feudal Acadia
had first surrendered and then tried to murder his captors. The court was in no mind to acknowledge the commission of the Dutch West India Company, and soon adjudged that Ricardo, Rhodes, et al. were pirates, and as such deserved to be hanged.
But just at that moment another outside event, starting this time in Plymouth Colony, both saved the lives of the alleged pirates and changed the history of Bar Harbor. King Philip's War broke out, and Massachusetts Bay found itself in far too much trouble to warrant any experiments in international relations by hanging Dutchmen. The authorities found an excellent way out of their difficulty. They impartially drafted plaintiffs and defendants alike into the army, and sent them all off to the war. The Dutch- men fought bravely, with their freedom as a possible re- ward-witness the feats of one Cornelis, a sailor on Ri- cardo's ship. Manning's attitude was different; in later years he was found trying to escape the draft on the ground that he had served long enough. So it was that Bar Harbor's first and only pirates escaped the gallows.6
Perhaps Manning came back to these waters after the war; in 1677 we find a "Mr. Manning" capturing a French coaster off Douaquet. But before him another white visitor came to the island, and to Bar Harbor. This was the unfor- tunate Thomas Cobbett of Ipswitch, an adventurous youth who had gone "down East" on a voyage of trade and mild freebooting at the start of King Philip's War, only to have the tables turned on him when he was taken prisoner by the Indians. The master to whom he was assigned seems to have roved the woods of Mount Desert, and brought Cobbett to spend an unhappy winter there. From the fragmentary account of all this that the Reverend Mr. Hubbard wrote down, it appears that the winter range was from Asticou
50
The Story of Bar Harbor
to Hull's Cove and across Frenchman's Bay to Waukeag. Finally, in the spring, when he was in need of goods, the master went to Pentagoet to trade with "Monsieur Cas- teen." There the kindly French nobleman procured the sale of the Yankee boy for additional goods, and thus ran- somed him. De St. Castin, until many years later Governor Andros goaded him into war, behaved as an Abenaki chief- tain first, and as an officer of Carignan-Salières second, and kept his Penobscot friends off the war path.7
This policy of De St. Castin (whose return to Pentagoet is dated by Cobbett's ransoming) secured a chance for a new feudalism to grow up in Maine, that started to close the gap between Pentagoet and Jemsec. Censuses of Acadia show settled population at Quoddy and Machias, with a slight cultivation of the soil, and regular armories of weap- ons. Wealth was piled up. When Benjamin Church raided in those parts in the 1700's, he found Madame Chartier at Descoudet, in Quoddy Bay, had silk stockings worth taking as booty. When Yankees finally settled the coast, and dug up farms and railroad roadbeds, they uncovered several hoards of gold and silver coins of Louis XIV, as well as what seems to have been De St. Castin's trunk. In all, on this coast, from first to last, there were granted seven seigneuries, two paper, and four or five real, according to Quebec and Versailles records. These were, from west to east, Grandchamp, Villeclaire, Douaquet, Magesse, Thi- beaudeau, St. Aubin, and Descoudet.8
But none of these was an agricultural settlement such as Talon had wished to see. Thomas Lefebvre at Grand- champ, Jean Martel at Magesse, René St. Aubin at Pas- samoquoddy, Michel Chartier at Descoudet, all were deep in the fur trade. So deep were St. Aubin and Martel that they used to fight over the rookeries at Machias Seal Island.
5 1
Feudal Acadia
Whatever promises these men made at Quebec, of bringing in settlers, or of setting up mills, on the spot they traded in furs. They were evolving a sort of forest feudalism where Indians, not Frenchmen were the tenants on the manors, paying in goods, not foodstuffs.
The basis of this feudalism being trade, the manors were stationed at points where Indians must foregather. Lefebvre was at Thomaston, at the mouth of the St. Georges. Shrewd old Pierre Thibeadeau, who wisely did not settle at his manor of Thibeadeau, picked on the mouth of the Narraguagus for its trade, before he packed up and went to better himself by farming at Minas Basin. Jean Martel, and his co-seigneur Pierre du Brieul, chose Machias not only for its seal island but also for the network of canoe routes that joined there, from the St. Croix and Penobscot valleys. Both St. Aubin and Chartier chose focal points at Quoddy Bay, where traveling Indians were sure to pass. All watched the migra- tions of the Abenaki, and settled where Indians chose to go.9
With these sites filled, it was natural that Douaquet, Ado- oket, Adowake, the Adowakeag of the Indians, the Wau- keag or Sorrento of the present day, should attract the eye of a would-be lord of a manor. For there, at the Taft Point shell heaps, Indians had summered since time immemorial, as one can see from the collections of the Abbe Museum at Bar Harbor. Not only could Abenaki and Canibas come down the Sullivan or Taunton River, they could reach the Union River through the safe waters of Mount Desert Narrows. Up the Union River it was possible to reach the Penobscot by the Otter Pond Carry, and Lake Nicatous, the Machias headwaters, and thence even the St. Croix through Gassabias Lake. Douaquet-(that, for reasons which will appear, is the best name to choose for this variously named spot) was almost asking for a French lord of the manor in
52
The Story of Bar Harbor
these days of the forest feudalism of the 1680's and 1690's.10
The opportunity brought the man. At this point there appears on the stage of Bar Harbor's history a remarkable adventurer, who for reasons of his own invented a pedigree and noble title for himself, and then bluffed so successfully that he did honor to his assumed name. This was the self- styled Antoine de Lamothe Cadillac, later the founder of Detroit and Governor of Louisiana. Information about Cad- illac's early life is scanty; except for the records of his birth, not one statement has come down to us, until that relating to time of his marriage, that was not made by himself and is not consequently highly suspect. He certainly was the son of a lawyer, Jean Laumet of St. Nicholas de Gave in Gas- cony, and not of an imaginary Jean de la Mothe. He may have been a cadet in the regiment of Dampierre, he almost certainly was not a lieutenant in the regiment of Clairam- bault, though he asserted that he was, when such an asser- tion seemed likely to do him good. He is said to have sailed the New England coast as a privateer under François de Guyon, though no direct authority for that statement seems to exist. In short, he was a self-promoting adventurer, of a type not uncommon in both old France and New France in those days.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.