The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  The family bands came together in joy and relief at the spring fishing camps, as a silvery tide of millions of shiny, footlong alewives choked even the smallest streams flowing into the sea. Crowding their way up from the ocean to their breeding ponds and lakes, the oily alewives were easy to dip up with woven nets from pools where they gathered to leap small waterfalls. Battling the rocks and water dislodged so many of their sparkling scales that the stream bottoms shimmered like the iridescent linings of mussel shells. The people also gathered oysters at mardarmeskunteag, the young shad pool, and added their shells to the mounds that rose like hills where generations long past had also feasted.

  The paddlers moved in an easy, long-practiced rhythm, as the islands and hours passed. Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions snacked on smoked meat and last summer’s dried berries as the falling tide carried them easily down the bay. Now that they were among the outer islands, the air was alive with birds—gulls and white terns screeching discordantly, the little puffins with their bumblebee wings burring through the air. The water heaved with movement as well. There were askigw and small, dark porpoises, and once, off toward the open sea, a great, slow-moving potepe that rose like an island itself, as black as the rocks and marbled on its head with barnacles. It was shadowed by an immense calf, both slowly cruising north toward mikmurkeag, the land of the mi’k’makik.

  The Moon of the Smelts had passed, and with it the last of the snow, even the dirty, half-rotten drifts hidden in the shade of the deepest spruce forests. The bands had gathered again at their summer villages, patching the wigwam frames with fresh sheets of bark, putting the seeds of squash and beans into the ground as the Sowing Moon grew and waned, ushering in a summer that already seemed more fertile and gentle than those of recent years.

  And then came the electrifying news, carried up and down the coast by canoes and runners. Several days earlier, six men gathering birds’ eggs had encountered a huge wigwaol, bigger than the biggest dugout—an immense canoe with bare trees growing from it, hung with the skins of animals as big as a potepe and flapping in the wind, so that from a distance it looked like a k’chi-wump-toqueh, a white swan.

  Such a wigwaol had been seen the autumn before at pαnáwαhpskek, and the strange men in it had paid respect to Ktə̀hαnəto’s brother, the great sὰkəmα Bashabes, to whom dozens of villages looked for guidance. Although the wenooch, the strangers, were accompanied by mi’k’makik, with whom Ktə̀hαnəto’s people sometimes fought, it had been a hospitable meeting, and the first time anyone at pαnáwαhpskek had encountered such wenooch.

  This time, some men from the village at Segoukeag had slept aboard the newest giant wigwaol, eating the odd meat and other food they were given. They found some of it very good, especially the ushcomono, the round green berries that the wenooch ate hot. But the yellow water that the strange men gave them, and that the wenooch themselves seemed to enjoy, tasted like piss, the Wapánahki said. One of the visitors came to Segoukeag and was given a dance, but the rest seemed suspicious and stayed aboard the wigwaol, gesturing for furs and tobacco to trade. Go to see the Bashabes, the people from Segoukeag told them, but the wenooch did not listen.

  The sun was climbing high in the morning sky when the canoes carrying Ktə̀hαnəto and his companions rounded the last of the small islands, facing the swells again. The strange vessel was clearly visible, sitting quietly in a natural harbor among several islands, its trees bare of skins, the figures of men silhouetted against the sky. There was a sharp sound like thunder, and some of the men, who had been fishing, scrambled to pull up their lines. As the canoes drifted closer, one of the strangers on the big wigwaol shouted in a harsh language that sounded like screeching gulls, making signs that those in the canoes should come aboard.

  ***

  Wôbanakik The “Maineland” Coast, ca. 1605

  By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European explorers such as Samuel de Champlain and George Waymouth were just beginning to map the crenellated shoreline of what is now Maine. Yet Norse vessels had reached the region roughly six hundred years earlier, and Native inhabitants of the Northeast had been in contact with Old World fishermen and whalers for hundreds of years.

  The wigwaol was, in fact, a squat, square-rigged sailing bark named Archangell, its twenty-nine-man crew under the command of Captain George Waymouth, who did not know it was the Grubbing Hoe Moon. By Waymouth’s reckoning, it was June 4, 1605,1 and his ship was two months out of England on a voyage to look for potential settlements and new fisheries. After several increasingly tense encounters with the local “Salvages,” as his men called the Wapánahki, he was preparing to leave—with just one crucial task left unfinished. The arrival of two canoes full of Natives must have seemed providential.

  It was Waymouth’s second voyage to the New World. In 1602, he’d sailed with two ships, Discovery and Godspeed, so certain of finding the Northwest Passage to Asia that he carried with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth I to the emperor of China. Waymouth was primed for the trip: his father and grandfather were sailors, and his father, William Waymouth the younger, had taken part in the Newfoundland fishery in the late 1500s before turning to shipbuilding.

  Although George Waymouth would have learned much about crossing the treacherous North Atlantic from his father, instead of the hoped-for passage, his ships ran into Resolution Island, at the entrance to Hudson Strait. They turned north along the eastern edge of Baffin Island, following (whether they knew it or not) the route blazed by Martin Frobisher in the 1570s on his own Northwest Passage expeditions. On those rare moments when the fog lifted, the island-strewn coast must have been a daunting sight—flotillas of icebergs, glimpses of foreboding cliffs, thousand-foot hills of bare rock, tundra and snowfields, and higher, glacier-wrapped mountains farther inland.

  After ten freezing days of fitful exploration, creeping their way north almost by feel in constant fog and mist, the sound of ice scraping against the fragile hulls of their small wooden ships, Waymouth’s crews mutinied. The captain backed down and agreed to give up. After poking their noses into Hudson Strait, they limped back across the Atlantic, arriving in England four and a half fruitless months after they’d left, their imperial letter undelivered.

  The trip was a failure, but Waymouth wasn’t discouraged. Although we know little about the man, including his age during this period, he clearly was not a quitter. He immediately began drumming up support for another go at the Northwest Passage, presenting two hand-illustrated copies of his book The Jewell of Artes—about navigation, seamanship, and military tactics—to the newly crowned King James I. A second Northwest expedition wasn’t in the cards, but in March 1605 Waymouth was commanding the Archangell, sailing out of the Thames for “North Virginia”—the poorly known coast between Chesapeake Bay and Cape Cod, also known as Norumbega—with orders from his commercial backers to seek out prospects for fishing and for settlement by English Catholics.

  After ignoring the New World for almost a century—while French, Portuguese, and especially Spanish explorers roamed its coasts—the English were playing catch-up. In the 1580s, several attempts by Sir Walter Raleigh to start a colony on the Outer Banks of North Carolina foundered, and when, after three years of war with Spain, England was finally able to send a rescue party, they found the colony abandoned, with no clue to their fate except for the cryptic word “Croatoan” carved on a post. Whether the members of the “Lost Colony” were killed or assimilated into one of the local Algonquian tribes, history has never determined.

  In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold and about thirty men sailed down the southern New England coast to Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, looking for a place to establish a trading post. Although Gosnold and his co-captain, Bartholomew Gilbert, were supposed to leave twenty of their men behind to man a permanent colony, by the time they built a small fort on what is now Cuttyhunk Island, they realized they had only a six-week supply of food, instead of the six months’ worth they felt they needed, and retreated to E
ngland. They took with them a load of cedar and prized sassafras, the latter thought to be a cure for a variety of maladies, including “the French pox,” or syphilis.

  The next year, Martin Pring led two small ships, Speedwell and Discoverer, back to the New England coast, again coming away with a load of young sassafras trees, roots and all. At the same time, Gilbert was exploring farther south, looking for the Lost Colony around Chesapeake Bay, where an encounter with hostile Algonquians would lead to his death.

  Given the rudimentary maps and primitive navigation of the day, it’s hard to say exactly where Waymouth was planning to make landfall on his 1605 expedition; the Mid-Atlantic coast seems a likely guess. But contrary winds pushed the Archangell well to the north, and the crew narrowly escaped dangerous shoals that prevented them from reaching the only land they’d seen since passing the Azores three weeks earlier—a distant cliff that was probably Nantucket Island or Cape Cod.

  Five days later, they made a brief landfall on Monhegan Island, “the most fortunate ever discovered,” in the words of James Rosier, a thirty-two-year-old who served as expedition chronicler as well as “cape merchant,” charged with overseeing its commercial operations and profitability. On Monhegan, they took on desperately needed firewood, while the crew caught “above thirty great Cods and Hadocks, which gave us a taste of the great plenty of fish which we found afterward wheresoever we went upon the coast.”

  Standing in for the mountainous land they could see far to the west, they found themselves two days later in the natural anchorage formed by several islands, which Waymouth dubbed Pentecost-harbour—for, said Rosier, “we [arrived] there that day out of our last Harbor in England, from whence we set saile upon Easterday.” Rosier was the son of an Anglican clergyman, a recent Catholic convert who would, in later years, become an ordained Jesuit, but anyone who risked his life crossing the Atlantic in the frail sailing ships of the day was likely to be devout.

  They had come to rest in what today are known as the Georges Islands, which cluster at the mouth of Muscongus Bay along the mid-coast of Maine. With the Archangell protected in its harbor, Waymouth’s crew worked hard for a week and a half, digging wells for fresh water, cutting new yards for the ship, laying in firewood, and discovering fine clay for bricks. They assembled a long, narrow sailing boat known as a pinnace or shallop, which they’d carried across the Atlantic in pieces down in the ship’s hold, and which would allow them to more easily explore the surrounding coast.

  When not working, the men gathered blue mussels, prizing the small, misshapen pearls they found inside. Fishing near the shore with a net of twenty fathoms (about 120 feet long), they caught in a single pull “thirty very good and great Lobsters,” more cod and haddock, rockfish and flounder. On the shore, they planted a small garden patch with peas and barley and marveled that despite birds that got most of the seed and soil that was “but the crust of the ground,” within sixteen days the seedlings had grown eight inches or more. Once the pinnace was finished, they erected a cross on high ground, where it was visible from the sea.

  With watering and woodcutting completed, they set out to explore the larger island, which they judged to be four or five miles long and a mile wide. The exploration party was well armed with “fourteen shot and pikes.”  The “shot” were matchlock muskets, unwieldy firearms that required the soldier to guard a smoldering fuse that set off the shot, and which were so heavy that those shooting them sometimes rested the gun on a wooden stand. The pikes were strong, slender shafts of ash wood ten or more feet long, tipped with razor-sharp spearheads. A pike was a handy weapon against mounted opponents, and more certain than a matchlock, but Waymouth’s crew were among the first to learn how clumsy and ill suited pikes were to this new land, where dense forests of oak, pine, birch, beech, and spruce, as well as thickets of raspberries and wild roses, covered the island.

  Waymouth was guarding against an ambush, even though they had seen no other people, only the charcoal of old fires on the islands framing Pentecost-harbour. Lying around these remnants of fires were “very great egge shelles bigger than goose egges, fish bones, and, as we judged, the bones of some beast.”

  Finally, on the morning of May 30, Waymouth and thirteen of his men set off in the pinnace to explore the mouth of a river they’d glimpsed from the ship. Despite the absence of people for the past twelve days, the decision to split the crew must have given Waymouth pause, since it left the Archangell significantly undermanned in the event of trouble. Perhaps the weeks of seeing no one along the coast emboldened him.

  Only a few hours after the pinnace departed, however, the crew back on the ship spotted three “canoas” coming toward them from what Rosier called “the maine land,” a name that ultimately stuck to this rocky coast. The “Salvages” seemed suspicious at first; one man pointed a paddle toward the open ocean and spoke loudly, as if to demand that the Englishmen leave. “But when we shewed them knives and their use by cutting of stickes and other trifles, as combs and glasses, they came close aboard our ship, as desirous to entertaine our friendship,” Rosier wrote. The Englishmen gave the visitors tobacco pipes and rings, metal bracelets, and long iridescent peacock feathers, which the Indians stuck in their thick black hair. “We found them then (as after) a people of exceeding good invention, quicke understanding and readie capacitie.”

  The next day, Waymouth and the pinnace returned, having “in this small time discovered up a great river, trending alongst the maine about forty miles,” and concluding from its size and flow that it must come from far inland. Worrying about attacks from shore, they had returned to the Archangell, planning to arm the smaller ship’s boat, known as a light horseman, against possible dangers on future explorations. Over the next few days, the number of Wapánahkis visiting the Archangell grew. The Indians liked raisins and candy and showed a particular fondness for the boiled dried peas and weevilly ship biscuit that formed a staple of naval cuisine. One can only assume the attraction was sheer novelty rather than the taste, since generations of English sailors cursed “pease” and sea biscuit as nearly inedible. They liked the small beer the crew drank but spat out the grain liquor called aqua vitae. At a demonstration of the Archangell’s guns, they fell flat on the deck in alarm. The ship’s dogs frightened them and were kept tied whenever the Indians were aboard.

  Rosier, in his role as cape merchant, handled the trading. One day he bartered with twenty-eight Indians on the island, swapping “knives, glasses, combes and other trifles” for otter and marten skins and forty beaver pelts. Waymouth indulged in a little grandstanding, using the ship’s lodestone to magnetize his sword, then using the sword to lift a knife, “whereat they much marvelled.” Rosier, meanwhile, was writing down the Algonquian words for various objects, and when the Wapánahkis realized what he was doing, they lined up, holding fish, fruit, and whatever else they could find, patiently pronouncing the name for each thing while he transcribed it. Lobsters, he wrote, were shoggah, mussels shoorocke, and an ax tomaheegon. To the Wapánahkis, Rosier was making a wikhegan, a drawing on birch bark or stone, although to their eyes, these drawings appeared singularly uninformative.

  When Rosier pointed to the distant mainland, they thought he was asking the name of that particular spot, which like most Algonquian names was a simple geographic descriptive: bemoquiducke, “it sticks far out into the water.” Later mariners would call it Pemaquid. When he gestured more widely, signing for the name of the whole land in which they lived, the Indians did not say wôbanakik, but mawooshen, presumably the specific area along the coast whose villages looked to the Bashabes for leadership.

  That evening, Waymouth invited two of the men to dine in his cabin, where they “behaved themselves very civilly, neither laughing nor talking all the time, and at supper fed not like men of rude education.” Waymouth wanted the two to sleep onboard, but the other Wapánahkis were cautious and suggested that they take one of the Englishmen with them as a guarantee of their own. The captain was unwilling to ord
er any of his crew to go with the Indians, but a Welsh seaman named Owen Griffin volunteered, disappearing into the dark. He later described watching a two-hour dance, during which “the men all together . . . fall a stamping round the fire with both feet, as hard as they can making the ground shake, with sundry out-cries, and change of voice and sound.”

  At every opportunity, the Wapánahkis urged the Englishmen to go to “their Bashebas (that is their King),” who lived along the coast to the northeast somewhere and who had an abundance of furs and tobacco. Yet the hairy men, who seemed so anxious to trade here among the islands, making signs for more pelts, more of “their excellent Tabacco,” inexplicably showed no interest in making the journey in their huge canoe.

  At last, the strangers agreed to go ashore not to the Bashabes, but to the point of land a few miles north where the nearest village lay. Waymouth and fifteen armed men crammed into the light horseman, and although they pulled as hard as they could on the eight sets of oars, they couldn’t help but notice that two canoes with just three paddlers each ran circles around them.

  As they approached land, the Englishmen saw smoke rising from the trees, suggesting a large encampment. Before they beached the boat, Waymouth called a halt, the light horseman rolling in the swells; he was uneasy. Rosier would go ashore first, he decided, to reconnoiter—but only if one of the Indians, whom they perceived to be a leader, would stay with the English crew.

  The sagamore “utterly refused,” Rosier wrote, “but would leave a young Salvage.” A youngster was no social match for a gentleman like Rosier, so in exchange Waymouth sent the ever-dispensable Griffin, who scrambled into a canoe and disappeared. The crew rowed the light horseman onto a rocky point half a mile away and waited. Everyone was on edge, but Waymouth’s boatswain, Thomas King, passed the time by chipping his name, the year, and a small cross into the exposed bedrock above the tide line.