by Porter Fox
Milton was seventeen when he dropped out of high school to work on a seiner. He hadn’t stopped fishing since. His grandfather taught him the trade. The old man rowed a wooden dory along the border six days a week for sixty years to set his nets—the same way Chute men had since the 1800s. At sunset he hauled his catch and the eight-hundred-pound boat a hundred yards up the beach. “He was a hard man,” Milton said.
Milton drove the skiff at full throttle against a ten-mile-an-hour ebbing tide. A few feet from the Captain’s Lady, Roger grabbed the gunwale and held up a hand to help Milton off. Milton swatted it away and hoisted his giant haunches onto the rail. He had owned too many boats to count and spent too much money on them to tally. He didn’t know why he’d named his last two Captain’s Lady, he said. He just liked the sound of the words together.
Roger tossed the mooring line into the sea, and Milton steered us out of the harbor. One of Milton’s kids had rigged up a coffee-stained IBM laptop to his GPS so that Milton could see his track on a bigger screen. A greenish blip moved across the chart as we steamed north along the border. The boundary was a green line. On the water, it was nothing. There were no flashing lights or border patrol. No sign that two nations converged there.
I asked Milton if he had any contact with Canadian fishermen. “None,” he said. “They’re allowed to do whatever they want.” The spirit of sharing along the world’s friendliest border had not been going well recently. The sovereignty of nearby Machias Seal Island had been disputed for more than two hundred years. The island is set in one of a half-dozen “gray zones” along the northern border that are claimed by both the US and Canada. Conflicting language in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War and drew the first miles of the northern boundary from Maine to Minnesota, created the confusion. Bad maps and bad information produced a line that ran along imaginary rivers and mountain features. It took more than a dozen treaties and agreements over the next two centuries to iron it out.
Machias Seal Island wasn’t a problem until the price of lobster spiked in 2015 and Nova Scotia fishermen started setting traps there. Death threats, cut lines, and close calls between American and Canadian fishermen followed. An American lobsterman lost his thumb while jostling with a Canadian boat. An American captain threatened to ram and sink a Canadian government ship after the ship hauled away his traps. (The Canadians returned them.) The dispute was never resolved, nor were several others in gray zones along the line.
Fishermen at Dixon Entrance, between Alaska and British Columbia, have been battling for fishing rights for years. US and Canadian companies began vying for oil-drilling rights in the Beaufort Sea, near the Arctic Ocean, in 2016. In 2012, a border conflict erupted over albacore fishing grounds off Vancouver, and a thirty-year battle to regulate the salmon fishery in shared waters off the Pacific Northwest was finally settled in 2016. One of the most public feuds along the northern border is playing out in the Northwest Passage—the fabled water route to China that only recently thawed enough to allow boats through—where American ships are claiming navigational rights on water that Canadians say is theirs.
THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE WAS crisscrossed with overlapping borders when Samuel de Champlain sailed into Passamaquoddy Bay on June 26, 1604. Pope Alexander VI had issued a papal bull two months to the day after Christopher Columbus returned from his 1492 voyage, creating a north–south “line of demarcation” one hundred leagues west of the Azores. Everything east and south was the domain of Portugal; territory to the west answered to Spain. The Portuguese moved the line twelve hundred miles toward South America to protect their claim to Brazil. Marie de Médicis, queen regent of France, drew an east–west boundary years later along the Tropic of Cancer to preserve North America for French exploration. As for undiscovered lands on America’s Eastern Seaboard, she said, “The strongest in those quarters are masters there.”
France was far from a master in North America when the father of the northland arrived on what is now the US-Canada border. Forty years of religious wars—some of the most brutal fighting in human history—followed by two international wars, had emptied royal coffers. A quarter of the population was dead. King Henri IV was humbled and broke. The French navy possessed only a handful of ships, and the people’s spirit was broken. Westward from the flattened villages of Brittany at the turn of the seventeenth century, North America was France’s best chance for a new start, and the window to get a foothold there was closing.
France wasn’t the only nation looking for a clean slate. Kings, noblemen, and businessmen across Europe had already claimed massive—and conflicting—swaths of America. Within fifty years of Columbus’s discovery, the Spanish conquered Mexico, crossed the Mississippi, settled Florida, discovered the Grand Canyon, and claimed California. Basque ships had been fishing the waters off of Newfoundland for years before Columbus arrived, and Norse ships had landed in Nova Scotia long before them. The English also explored Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, claimed California, and attempted a settlement in North Carolina.
Competition between kings, treaties signed in Europe, accidents, misinformation, and luck divided up most of America’s northland. No one knew what was at stake. Most early explorers thought North America was about three hundred miles wide, and few had any idea what natural resources the northern tier held. Gold, silver, pearls, slaves, molasses, and rum were available in the south. In the north, there looked to be only trees, fish, a few copper veins, and rocky soil that was difficult to farm.
Champlain and the 1604 expedition’s financier, Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, had explored the Saint Lawrence River the previous spring and found the climate and landscape promising for a settlement. They assumed, incorrectly, that since the Bay of Fundy was at a lower latitude than France, it would enjoy milder winters. The Don de Dieu and La Bonne-Renommée headed for the bay from Le Havre, France, on April 7. They got lucky with the wind and made the crossing to Nova Scotia in four weeks.
Each boat was about a hundred feet long, and both were outfitted like self-sufficient forts, with provisions, defenses, and building supplies for a year. Holds were packed with dried vegetables, fruit, sheep, pigs, salt pork, wine, hard cider, herring, cod, and grain. Houses for noblemen were prefabricated in France, including roofing, glass windows, and solid oak doors. Shipwrights built complete kits for a fleet of small vessels to be assembled and launched on American shores.
There were about 150 crew, all handpicked by de Mons and Champlain. Officers and noblemen held the top posts. Professional sailors, some with experience in America, captained and operated the ships. Swiss soldiers were hired to man the arquebuses—handheld cannons that preceded the musket. The bulk of the passengers were skilled artisans and laborers, including a shipwright, apothecary, surgeons, blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, armorers, gunners, miners, and locksmiths—the latter with experience repairing firing mechanisms. There were no women on the journey, just men and boys.
Champlain was thirty-seven years old in 1604. His official title was navigator, but his skills on the sea and at war made him the expedition’s default leader. He was not born a nobleman. He was a Breton from a sailing family who had had fourteen years of elite military schooling by the time he was twenty-four. He had gotten along well with Indians around the Saint Lawrence in 1603 and learned about the coast and inland waterways from them.
After making landfall in Nova Scotia in early May 1604, and searching for a settlement site for a few weeks, de Mons and Champlain spotted a “most advantageous” island in a narrow passage, about fifteen miles northwest of present-day Lubec. The island was “eight or nine hundred paces [in circumference], with rocky sides three or four fathoms high all around.” It was a classic Maine island, thick with fir, birch, maple, and oak trees. Two rivers emptied into the passage—one from the west, the other from the east. De Mons saw the cross-like confluence as a sign. He named the island Saint Croix and decided to plant France’s new colony there.
By September, the basic
layout of the colony was complete. Champlain had a battery of cannons installed on the southern shore. The British—who had explored Penobscot Bay 130 miles to the south the year before—would have to pass by their iron barrels to dislodge New France from America. He had most of the trees on the island cut down for firewood and planking, save some that were close to the water and one in the middle of what would be a town square. De Mons’s home was built with casement windows packed in one of the ships and finished with a mansard roof, a brick fireplace, and a large French flag that flew overhead.
Some of the buildings were still unfinished when temperatures plummeted in November, and skim ice crept across the passage. When the ice thickened, the tides turned it into an impassable jumble, cutting the colony off from the mainland. The well the settlers tried to dig turned up dry, and the crops they planted didn’t produce. Champlain had vastly overestimated the amount of firewood the island’s trees could provide, and the group nearly froze as winter winds blew straight through their buildings. De Mons was right that Maine and France sit on a similar latitude, but ocean and atmospheric currents keep Europe far warmer. A global cooling phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age was also pushing Arctic air down on America’s northeastern coast that winter, adding to the deep freeze. By January, three feet of snow covered the ground and the only food left was the salted stores the crew had brought from France.
A mysterious disease spread through the colony in January, and a few weeks later several settlers died. A surgeon cut into the corpses but could not discern the cause. Champlain’s explanation was a lack of fresh food, which we now know was close to the truth. He wrote in his journal about Flemish sailors who brought citrus on voyages to the East Indies to stave off disease. Since he was trapped on the icebound island, there was nothing he could do about it. The few settlers on Saint Croix who were immune to scurvy were hunters who ate fresh meat. Most of the others, who sat by the fire or lay in bed all day, eventually fell ill. By March, thirty-five of the original seventy-nine settlers were dead.
Champlain and de Mons had studied other island settlements, such as the doomed French colony on nearby Sable Island, that had also been cut off. They were stunned that they had walked into a similar trap. There was more than pride and money at stake. In the Frenchmen’s eyes, and those of their king, America’s northland represented the best chance for their motherland to remake itself. New France would be a social experiment in liberty and religious freedom—a chance to correct some mistakes. Saint Croix Island was the first cell of a great body that would grow westward, discovering and occupying a new world. It would save the souls of native Indians; supply France with timber, fish, and minerals; and keep the British Empire to the south in check by drawing a border across the continent. It was worth suffering for. All they needed to do was make it to spring and hold the line.
FOUR HOURS AND THIRTY MINUTES into our journey, Milton asked why I wanted to see the border. I told him I was traversing it from Maine to Washington. He asked why, and I said I wanted to see whether there were more places like this across the country.
“Where you going next?” he asked.
“Saint Croix River,” I said.
“What kind of boat you on?”
“Canoe.”
“You’ll make it.”
Milton drove into Cobscook Bay and let the boat drift as we waited for sunrise. Regulations prohibit fishing before dawn. He had been fined a few months before for lowering his rig too early. “They will know if you drop it five minutes too soon,” he said. “The warden posts up on that point over there with binoculars—or someone else does and tells him.” He could lose his urchin permit if he was caught again, and there was a long line of applicants waiting to take it.
Fifteen minutes later, sunlight touched the tip of the dredging tower, and a great whine erupted from the cable spool as Milton dropped the rig. The water was thirty feet deep. He let the net out five hundred feet behind the boat, and the Captain’s Lady shuddered as it got purchase. Milton throttled up for the first run, then he and Roger commenced a routine they had performed a few thousand times: drive straight for half a mile, haul in the gear, dump the net, pick out the urchins, pack the crate, sweep the deck, turn the boat around, drop the gear, and do it again.
The first two drags were nearly empty. Milton repositioned a few hundred yards south, and Roger started pulling urchins from the net and packing them in crates. He sat on the rail and shucked scallops between runs. He ate them quickly—it wasn’t scallop season—then handed me one on the tip of his knife. The meat was sweet and salty, but it didn’t sit well at six in the morning, rolling in the waves. I spat it overboard when Roger wasn’t looking, just in time for him to sneak me another. “This business is a screw on both sides of the deal,” he said. “It’s the biggest screw in any business I know. No one is getting away with anything.”
Light spooled across the water from Canada and turned the underside of the clouds yellow and pink. We were about fifteen miles south of Saint Croix Island, a dot in the tideland that surrounds Lubec. The matrix of bays, basins, inlets, coves, and straits extends more than a hundred square miles. Milton spent the next hour chatting about prices on the VHF. The first boat to market the day before had sold seven crates at $2.80 a pound. An hour later, the last fisherman in had gotten $3.50.
When the crates were full, we headed home. A nearly full moon was setting behind Dennys Bay. Milton had seen a blood moon a few days before. “It was like an eclipse,” he said. “The shadow blacked it out just like that, left that little ring.” He said it was dark red, that it was just something that happened. Like a lot of magical things that happen on the water most people never see.
We rounded Moose Island, and Milton watched a small plastic clock on his console. He ranked other fishermen’s pedigrees as we passed them. He knew most of their fathers and some of their grandfathers. A mile from the pier, he noticed a red trawler angling in front of him. He nudged the throttle, and the Captain’s Lady hit nine knots. The red boat accelerated, and Milton dipped into an eddy behind Treat Island and slingshotted into the lead.
Milton got to the dock first, but his truck wouldn’t start. He cursed as Roger tried to turn it over. With no other way to get his urchins to the landing, he ended up pushing the truck downhill to jumpstart it. It didn’t work, and he and Roger tinkered under the hood while I watched the captain of the red boat sell his catch. The arrangement was surprisingly informal. A middle-aged Japanese man wearing a windbreaker wandered over and looked at the crates. The fisherman muttered something about how good the roe was. The buyer cracked a few urchins open and made an offer. The fisherman shook his head. The buyer made another offer. The fisherman nodded. The buyer handed him a wad of cash and carried the crates to his truck. That night they would be flown to Japan, and the following day the roe would appear on kaiten-zushi conveyor belts at restaurants throughout the country.
It was past noon, and I planned to start paddling the Saint Croix River early the next morning. I said goodbye to Roger and Milton, who were still fussing with the truck, and drove three miles to West Quoddy Head. The battered volcanic cliffs of America’s easternmost point rise a hundred feet off the ocean, lean back, and push the forest inland. The water is green blue, and the confluence of wind and current knocks waves in every direction. The silhouetted walls of Grand Manan Island stand to the east and the rocky outline of the Wolves archipelago rises up to the north.
Even on a calm day, three-foot swells smashed into Sail Rock and the ebbing tide left a V of whitewater around lobster buoys. A hundred yards from the cliffs, a candy-striped lighthouse flashed a white beam out to sea. Hopley Yeaton helped establish the original light there, financed by Congress in 1806.
It felt odd that the entirety of America was at my back. And even stranger that an international border passed by here. There was no sign of it on the water or land, no way to tell what was Canada and what was the US. The air smelled like algae and clam flats. The sound of waves
crashing drowned out a dozen shrieking gulls. The sun dropped and the temperature fell. Two lobster boats motored out of Quoddy Narrows, both abiding the invisible line.
2
IT WAS TWENTY-EIGHT DEGREES THE MORNING I STRAPPED A CANOE to the roof of my car and followed route 1 north to the saint croix river. The Saint Croix has marked the boundary between New England and Canada since the day Samuel de Champlain landed there. The official line was drawn along the river at the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Both parties agreed that the border should follow the Saint Croix, but US emissaries Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay tried to move the line northeast by claiming that a different river, the Magaguadavic, was, in fact, the Saint Croix—adding about eight thousand square miles to the US.
Such haggling over the border was common in America’s early years. Several land grabs by the US and British Canada came close to war. The Saint Croix dispute continued for more than a decade, until the 1794 Jay Treaty, written by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and negotiated by John Jay, assigned a commission to locate the real Saint Croix.
British and American agents sailed and walked the area, interviewing families and local Passamaquoddy tribal members about who lived where, when. Conflicting reports poured in until commission member and British Loyalist judge Robert Pagan sourced copies of Champlain’s drawings and writings from 1604. He then took the papers to Saint Croix Island and found the ruins of Champlain’s buildings there—plus stoneware, a spoon, and a musket ball—settling the matter.