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 4
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This habit of self-promotion should not be judged too harshly. If a man of ability needed a title of nobility to secure a post he was eminently fitted to fill, how wrong was it to take a short-cut to get it? Cadillac certainly had ability; he proved this in later times as governor of Michilimacki- nac, as governor and founder of Detroit, and as governor of Louisiana. Which is the more praiseworthy, the genuine nobleman, Baron de Lahontan, who lay down on the job and deserted his post at Detroit, or the imitation nobleman, Cadillac, who two decades later made a success where La-
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hontan had failed? If blame is to be bandied about, should not some of it go, not to the man who made a successful bluff, but to the institutions which forced him to lie before he could accomplish his life's work?
It was long thought that Cadillac first appeared in defini- tive history as a Sieur de la Mothe who engaged in a notor- ious tavern brawl, in May, 1687. The surrounding circum- stances made the identification plausible. Cadillac all his life was a brawler; it has been suggested that he was the original of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, and Father Jean Delan- glez, Jesuit historian, has taken up that suggestion as at least throwing light on Cadillac's character. The loser in the brawl in question was a Sieur de Sabrevois, who in later years seems to have carried a grudge against Cadillac to the point of getting him kicked upstairs out of his post at Detroit into the governorship of Louisiana, in order to secure the post at Detroit for himself. The occasion of the brawl was a slur upon a widow, the cousin of the lady whom Cadillac was to marry two months later. However, recent careful research into the La Mothes of Canadian history has shown that this brawler was a Louis de la Rue de La Mothe, whom the Iroquois killed two years later, and that at the time of the brawl Cadillac was probably in Acadia.11
It is at his marriage that Cadillac finally appears in trust- worthy records under the name he made famous. On June 21, 1687, he married Marie Thérèse de Guyon, daughter of the royal engineer at Quebec, and niece of that François de Guyon from whom he allegedly gained his knowledge of the New England coast. In the marriage record his signa- ture reads as "Antoine Launay de la Mothe, Sieur or Lord of the Place Called Cadillac, and son of Jean de la Mothe, Sieur or Lord of Cadillac, Launay, and Lemontel, a Judge of the Parlement or Supreme Court of Toulouse." Note
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how clever this claim is. Cadillac, being the son of a police- court judge, who was also a lawyer in practice at the bar of the parlement, would not find it hard to pass himself off as the son of a judge. He knew the answers to all the questions anyone in Canada might ask him; and by that deft self-promotion he entered the "nobility of the robe," and as such a noble he was eligible for a militia, army, or navy commission. By signing himself "Launay" instead of "Cadillac," he admitted having an elder brother-as was then true-and also by that admission explained why he was in Canada seeking his fortune, in the manner of second sons.
Having thus stepped on the stage of recorded history, Cadillac took his Quebec bride to Acadia. Here he appears in his first and surest connection with Bar Harbor, accord- ing to English records. For the English were now chal- lenging French control of eastern Maine. All New England, under orders of James II, had been joined into one domin- ion, under Governor Sir Edmund Andros, and Sir Edmund, in the spring of 1688, came "down East," to enforce his authority. He traveled to the St. Croix. For his own pur- poses, Sir Edmund made a census of the population between the St. Croix and the Penobscot. On his list," dated May II, are not only the Baron de St. Castin at Pentagoet, St. Aubin at Quoddy, and Martel and Du Breuil at Machias, all with "pretended grants from Quebec," but "Cadolick and wife," "at Winskeag Bay on the Eastern side of Mount Desert."
There has been much argument, and consequently much
* The actual paper, reprinted from the Hutchinson papers by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1827, has since then disappeared, being at neither the Massachusetts Historical Society nor in the State Archives. It has been therefore impossible to check with the original as to spelling and correctness of transcription.
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touching to the quick of local pride, over the question where "Winskeag Bay" was. The late William Otis Saw- telle, who lived on Cranberry Island opposite Otter Creek, was sure that it was Otter Creek. Since Cadillac's grand- daughter later lived at Hull's Cove, many have been sure Cadillac lived there. The comparison between Winskeag and Wonsqueak have led others to think Cadillac lived to the east of Schoodic Point. But the logical answer seems to be that Cadillac lived at Douaquet, the Indian Adowakeag. If English transcribers could call Cadillac "Cadolick," and Chartier "Sharkey," surely it is not too much to expect of their penchant for inaccuracy to transform Waukeag into Winskeag. And the Indian settlement at Waukeag would be the natural place for Cadillac to settle. Certainly, whether or not Cadillac and Marie Thérèse his wife lived there or only near the Indians there, it was the Indian camp that attracted them.12
How long the bridal pair stayed there must remain a guess. Compilers of Cadillac's genealogy have suggested that his eldest daughter, Marguerite, was born at Douaquet. When that suggestion is pushed as far as it will go, it makes Bar Harbor's first white child end her life with the Ursuline nuns in Quebec, after quite a struggle to conquer her fa- ther's reluctance to have her do so. But whether Cadillac stayed long enough to have his wife bear a child, he cer- tainly stayed long enough to gain the information needed for an accurate description of the channels through the Porcupine Islands which he later put into the hands of the French ministry of marine, with a boost for Douaquet as a trading station. This report was considered so important as to have been frequently transcribed, as a guide for a "Manhattan Project" of attack on New York. Since copies numbered 76 and 78 survive, it might be guessed that nearly
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eighty were made. But though Cadillac stayed long enough at Frenchman's Bay to know it well, his visit was cut short abruptly by a trip to Canada.
For shortly after Andros's visit, Cadillac took action to secure a "pretended grant from Quebec." Andros had left behind him the frigate Rose, with instructions to enforce England's authority. The crew of the Rose enforced it so well that they robbed the Baron de St. Castin of his best wine, and then, drunk, they burnt his house, after driving him to the woods, where his trunk and other belongings were lost for a century and a half. Just what effect this had on "Cadolick and wife," the records do not tell-or, rather, two records, both provided by Cadillac, contradict each other. In 1690 Cadillac told the French government he had defended his property so well he should be made Baron de la Mothe in recognition of his deeds. In 1719 he told the French government he deserved repayment of his losses, of an unspecified amount.13 One thing seems certain-in a very short time Cadillac was far away from Bar Harbor. In either May or July, 1688-depending on whether the Quebec or the Versailles clerk got the date wrong-he was in Montreal, procuring a grant of Douaquet and the Island of Mount Desert from Governor de Denonville. If the Versailles date is correct, then, by aligning the dates of Andros's census, May 11, old style and the grant, May 23, new style, it becomes clear that Cadillac traveled at high speed away from his home.
Whatever the cause of Cadillac's exit, it had an important result in Bar Harbor's history. For on that day, in May or July, Jacques de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville and gover- nor of Canada, and Jean Bouchart de Champigny, intend- ant of Canada, granted to the Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac, "then living in La Cadie," "the place called Douaquet near
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Magesse" with two leagues in each direction, one on each side of the Douaquet River, and two leagues in depth." Inserted in the margin of this grant in the Quebec register, but not in the confirmation in France, is this addition: "With the island of Mount Desert, and the other islands and islets that are in the foreground of those two leagues."
This, misinterpreted, twisted, revalidated by a sentimental Massachusetts legislature, and altered by court order, is the basis of all land titles in Bar Harbor.14
Because this document is so important in the history of the town, it will do no harm to clarify certain statements about it. First of all, there is no reason to worry because the Versailles copy does not mention Mount Desert Island. The Versailles copy was only a confirmation of the Quebec grant, and omitted some details. Perhaps, however, this discrepancy tells why Cadillac's grand-daughter sent Philip Langlois to Quebec to obtain a copy of the original, when she was asking the Massachusetts legislature to confirm the grant. Clearly, Cadillac both received at Montreal and had confirmed to him at Versailles a French title to Mount Desert Island, the islands in Frenchman's Bay, and "Doua- quet."
As to the Douaquet River, that was clearly, according to frequently repeated French sailing instructions, the Sullivan River. A century later a surveyor moved the river one step to the west, so that the actual regrant made by the Massa- chusetts legislature centers on the Skillings and not on the Taunton River. But had the original grant been made from the Skillings River, there would have been no need to mention Mount Desert Island by name apart from the islands in front of the grant, for it was then proved by that very survey to be exactly in front of the land one French league each way from the Skillings. Regardless of what
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happened to the grant later, when lawyers and land specu- lators whittled away at it, originally it ran from Schoodic Point-Little Douaquet on French maps-to Bartlett Island Narrows, and included the Porcupines, Ironbound, Jordan's and all other Frenchman's Bay Islands.
It is questionable that Cadillac ever returned to his manor. It is known definitely that he was living in Port Royal in 1689, and made trips to Quebec to get money out of his father-in-law's estate. He was then merely planning to go to Douaquet. All this is known because he got the royal Scrivener of Acadia, one Mathieu des Gouttins, to put in a word for him with the government at home, asking for a subsidy to help him to start his manor and trade with the Indians; this was done by a letter dated September 2, 1689. Perhaps he later spent some time at Mount Desert; a report in 1692 contains the words, "when we were at Mount Desert," in discussing the way the English during that year rebuilt their fort at Pemaquid. On the other hand, Cadillac's enemies, the Marquis de Vaudreuil and Intendant Radot, in opposing his claims for compensation for the destruction of his manor, said in 1719 that he had been at that manor only once, thirty years before.
However, this discussion of doubtful evidence is rather academic, for another of the freaks of fortune that so fill the history of Bar Harbor carried Cadillac away from Acadia to a career in the west. In October, 1689, His Most Christian Majesty's frigate Embuscade, under the command of M. de la Caffinière, entered Port Royal, and there stayed, windbound, while an engineer officer, Vincent de Saccardy, tried to hustle up some kind of fort. M. de la Caffinière was disgusted with the pettiness of the Acadian officials, who spent their time bringing mutual accusations against one another, instead of getting things done. That was a very
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natural attitude for De la Caffinière to take; the corre- spondence of Scrivener des Gouttins and Governor de Menneval, still on file in Paris, shows how quarrelsome both men were, and how Acadia was split into two hostile camps. However, De la Caffinière made one exception; he found that the Sieur de Cadillac, who was pitching in to help Saccardy build the fort, was "the only man in Acadia with the king's interests at heart." Having that opinion of Cadillac, De la Caffinière turned to him in his perplexity.
For De la Caffinière had received an impossible assign- ment. Louis XIV was on the verge of going to war with England, and either he or someone close enough to him to get royal orders written had cooked up a wild scheme of a joint attack on New York by land and sea. Count Louis Buade de Frontenac, the newly reappointed governor of Canada, had come out with De la Caffinière, in the Embuscade, and he passed on to De la Caffinière top-secret orders to be off New York, ready to land De Villebon of the Acadia garrison, De Saccardy, and troops, on November 15. These troops were to fire guns in the air, and shout "Vive Louis!" Thereupon French and Indians would burst from the woods, shouting "Vive Frontenac!," join, and capture New York. These instructions went into full details for launching the pinnace with which the Embuscade was equipped, and they told who was to be governor of New York, and which Protestants were to be allowed to go to Pennsylvania after the capture, but no mention was made of how De la Caffinière was to meet the mysterious band of French and Indians. On that score, all he was told was that he was to find a good pilot in Acadia and get him on board, without revealing to him the plan of the expedi- tion.
A short look around Port Royal seems to have convinced
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poor De la Caffinière that the local pilots were untrust- worthy. He therefore invited Cadillac to go off on a month's cruise. Cadillac accepted-probably the top-secret plan was by that time no secret, since it got into the ship's log before the Embuscade sailed from Port Royal. De la Caf- finière got no further than Nantucket Shoals. There he ran into a storm. From the excited account he gave, we learn that apparently every time he hove the Embuscade to, she forereached so much he was afraid of running ashore, and every time he scudded before the wind he got many miles out of station. Finally, he gave up hope of even approxi- mating his rendezvous, and went back to France. In so doing he was lucky, for the expedition from Canada never got started until February, and then got no farther than Schenectady, New York, which Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville and his brothers burnt to the ground.15
For Cadillac the result was that his month's cruise ended at La Rochelle and not at Port Royal, and he was forced to borrow from the impoverished De la Caffinière in order to keep alive. Here it was that Cadillac saw a great chance, and he took it. In an absolute monarchy, such as was the France of Louis XIV, the road to success lay through the right to correspond directly with the king's council, and Cadillac had a valid reason for writing to the Marquis de Seignelay, who, as minister of marine, reported directly to the king, in an endeavor to get his Canadian pay in France, since he was too far from Quebec to get it through normal channels. That afforded him an excuse for delivering a sales talk on his high qualifications. The letter, which Father Delanglez considers Cadillac's first direct communication with his home government, laid the foundation of the Cadillac legend, that set of agile improvements on the truth that got him the jobs he handled so well. The veracity of
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this letter is slight. Though D'Abbadie de St. Castin was, at the very time of the writing, leading a successful attack on Pemaquid, Cadillac blandly stated that he was the only nobleman in Acadia and had been chosen by Frontenac to lead an attack on New England. Though to the end of his life Cadillac needed interpreters to speak to the Indians, he asserted he could talk "savage," besides French, English, Dutch, and Spanish. He had also, he claimed, been as far south as the Carolinas, and seven hundred and fifty leagues inland, which last statements cannot be disproved, and may even, by chance, be true. (A few years later Michel Chartier of Descoudet was taken prisoner in what is now Maryland, reaching the scene of his arrest from across the Alleghanies -which shows how far a roving Frenchman could go.) 16
True or not, Cadillac's letter was successful. He was called on for the job of replanning the attack on New York, and then shipped back to Canada. There he moved to Quebec and busied himself with aiding Frontenac and getting in the latter's good graces, where he stayed per- manently. His reputation in France remained so great that he was recalled for more planning, in 1692, and then was sent out again, to build a fleet of whaleboats on the St. Lawrence. Frontenac squelched this waste of energy, and gave him, instead, the command at Michilimackinac. After a stormy career there, during which time he lined his pockets effectively, he got permission to make Detroit a trading post, where he would support a garrison at his own expense, out of his profits. Here he tried to set up just the sort of feudal establishment he had planned for Douaquet and Bar Harbor. The title of marquis, for which he blandly asked, was denied to him, and he was forced to reissue land grants as from the king instead of from himself, but he made, just the same, a fortune, as is shown by the in-
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ventory of the property he left behind. Later steps on the ladder of fame were a governorship of Louisiana, a sojourn in the Bastille and, finally, the governorship of Castel- Sazzarin in France, for which he paid such a sum, just before the office was abolished, as to raise the suspicion that what he paid for it was really the sum needed to get himself out of the Bastille. He died rich, as his estate inventory shows, and a Chevalier of St. Louis. During these years he did not forget Mount Desert. Not only did he make his claim for damages, but at least once, when at Detroit, styled himself "Lord of Douaquet and Mount Desert" in an of- ficial document.
So he passed out of the history of Bar Harbor, having perhaps learned, in planning his manor there, the means of getting his wealth through what is here called "forest feudalism" for want of any other name given to it. With his departure, French settlement, or plans for settlement, at Bar Harbor came to an end.
However, French connections with Bar Harbor con- tinued for a decade more. Two great Canadian sailors so used the waters off its shore as a staging area as to give to the bay the name "Frenchman's Bay," in place of the earlier name of Douaquet Bay. These two men were Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville and Simon Pierre Denys de Bonaventure. Le Moyne d'Iberville was as dramatic a figure as Cadillac, or more so. He was what would today be called a commando officer. It was he and his brothers who in 1690, in the dead of winter, surprised and burned Schenectady, New York. It was he and one brother who in 1685 and again in 1697 entered Hudson Bay by canoe and by frigate and captured three English ships and two English forts. It was he who discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River and so made possible the foundation of Louisiana. Close behind him in
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ability, though not in opportunity, came De Bonaventure.17
As far as can be told, it was these men, and not English adventurers, who actually came to Bar Harbor. For to the English and to the French, Mount Desert harbor seems to have been two different places. English maps and reports indicate that the Englishmen went to the area surrounded by the present towns of Southwest Harbor, Mount Desert, and Cranberry Islands. That would be logical enough. The English expeditions of Captain Benjamin Church, of 1690 and 1704, traveled by whaleboat and schooner, and had as their purpose reaching Port Royal as quickly as possible. To them there would be no point in entering Frenchman's Bay and going along the shores of Bar Harbor. But the French had different vessels and different purposes. They sometimes traveled in frigates, and slipped into Penobscot Bay, to join forces with the Baron de St. Castin and his Abenakis. When they did that, they usually raised what is now Cadillac Mountain as a landfall, sailed to Mount Desert Rock, sixteen miles south of Mount Desert Island, and then bore northwest, through Merchant's Row and Deer Island Thoroughfare, to Pentagoet, the present-day Castine. Or, if they did not do that, they followed sailing directions Cadillac had given, and slipped past the Porcupines to anchor to the north of them. When they did this, if they followed Cadillac's advice they went between Bald Porcu- pine and the Bar Harbor shore, keeping a sharp eye out for the rock that now forms the end of the Bald Porcupine breakwater. Once behind the Porcupines, they could lie "as in a box." More than that, they could rendezvous with Indians in canoes who could come from Penobscot Bay, or down the Union River in calm water. Furthermore, the French frigates could, while waiting, lie concealed behind the Porcupines, safe from English scouting vessels. Natu-
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rally, to the French the "Mount Desert Harbor" or "Mount Desert Roadstead" was the "four leagues in compass" of upper Frenchman's Bay.
The first visit of D'Iberville and De Bonaventure was in 1692-perhaps with advice from Cadillac who had boarded De Bonaventure's Envieux that August-when they slipped into Frenchman's Bay late in October to join forces with D'Abbadie de St. Castin to recapture Pemaquid, which the English had rebuilt. To make this junction, an officer of the Acadia garrison, Captain Jacques Testard de Montigny, was sent with three men in a birch-bark canoe, to secure the aid of "M. le Baron de St. Castin and his savages."
What happened to De Montigny was the sort of coinci- dence that a historian can solemnly record as being true but a novelist has trouble getting his readers to believe. There were two men who knew that D'Iberville's plan to attack Pemaquid had been betrayed, because they them- selves had betrayed it. It was these two men whom De Montigny captured by accident just as they were about to climax their treason by kidnaping the Baron de St. Castin and carrying him off to Boston. By a freak of timing, the two deserters whom John Nelson, the English claimant to Pentagoet, had bribed in Quebec to carry the news of D'Iberville's plan went to Boston with his message, received an assignment to go to Pentagoet, and brought their fishing sloop there to arrive almost at the same hour and minute as did D'Iberville's messenger De Montigny. What finer justification could be found for Louis XIV's prescient warn- ing to Count Frontenac of the danger to security of letting Nelson roam the streets of Quebec, without guard! Quebec and Ottawa archives contain proof that either Louis XIV or a secretary writing in his name foresaw this series of
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events, and the traitors were captured by this narrow margin.
When De Montigny returned to Bar Harbor with the Baron de St. Castin and the two prisoners, D'Iberville came rapidly and correctly to the conclusion that the advantage of surprise had been lost. One thing was left for D'Iberville to do. He had a reputation for toughness which had already stood him in good stead and which he purposefully kept up. He went through the empty formula of suggesting to Gov- ernor de Villebon of Acadia that the two traitors be taken to Quebec for trial. On receiving the answer he had ex- pected, Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville sent the Reverend M. Thury, a local missionary and French agent, to summon the Indians of the region, just about to move inland to their winter hunting grounds from their summer shell-heap camps, to see a formal execution. Trial was held one day, the sentence carried out the next. There and then, "at the Desert Mountains," "the heads of the traitors were broken open." So runs D'Iberville's report, probably meaning that the two men, Armand de Vignon and François Albert, were toma- hawked in front of one hundred and twenty Indian men, women, and children, at either Bar Harbor proper or Hull's Cove. Two days later, with a fair wind from the north- west, the Poli and the Envieux slid out of Frenchman's Bay past Ironbound Island, leaving De St. Castin with the task of making a diversion along the coast that would keep the English men-of-war glued to their posts, waiting for D'Iberville and De Bonaventure. How these two great Canadian sailors hoped to slip into Boston harbor while this was being done, how the Poli was sighted off Cape Cod and a warning fire lit that put Boston on its guard when D'Iber- ville came in sight, is not a part of Bar Harbor's story except as it helps to explain how Frenchman's Bay got its name.18
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