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Historic Sites of Ancient Pemaquid (Volume 3)

Table of Contents

Introduction
Proto-historic Pemaquid
The Building of the First Ship Virginia: Edge Tools and Contact Period Ferrous Metallurgy in 1607
Elizabethan England and the Merchant Adventurers
History of Monhegan Island
The Geography of Ancient Pemaquid
The Voyages of Humphrey Gilbert, 1583, Bartholomew Gosnold, 1602, and George Waymouth, 1605
The Popham Colony
Conundrums of Ancient Pemaquid
The Tale of Sylvanus Davis
Interregnum
Information Files

Tales of Early Visitors to Monhegan Island
Zeno Explorations
16th Century Fishing
David Ingram's Trek
Pemaquid and Monhegan
The First Colonial Dominion of Maine
Wreck of the Grand Design on Long Ledge, Mount Desert Island

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Introduction

Any conventional history of the Davistown Plantation would begin with the first recorded observations of the area and certainly with its first settlers.  Cyrus Eaton in his Annals of the Town of Warren (1851) comments on a hermit named Davis a the first known European settler in the Davistown area.  Though probably using a multiple number of hunting and trapping camps, he appears to have lived in the Davistown area for several decades.  He left no written diary of his life in Davistown, his presence here nearly the boundary line between the written history of Davistown and prehistory of unrecorded visitors and events.

The very first observations recorded (here) of the hills of Davistown appear to have been made by survivors of Peleg Wadsworth's ill-fated expedition to oust the British at Castine in 1779.  Forced to abandon their fleet on the shores of upper Penobscot Bay, probably near Belfast or Ducktrap, hundreds of colonists fled westward on the Cushnoc Trail.  It was these colonists who made the first recorded observations of the hills of what was later to be called Montville as they fled west towards the safety of the trading post at Cushnoc (Augusta.)

But the history of Davistown does not begin with the colonists who lost the battle at Castine with the British.  As part of the Norumbega bioregion - that part of the Maine coast between the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers, including its tidewaters and upstream backcountry - Davistown is part of a palimpsest.  Peel back the layers of history (as in layers of archaeological artifacts and/or tool types, or in this case, as written and oral history) and we find an interregnum in the history of coastal Maine - that long period of time beginning in 1676 when all of the Norumbega tidewater was abandoned for four decades or more.  Hiding beneath that blank page in our regional history is one of the the most interesting and intriguing chapters in American history, the conundrum of ancient Pemaquid.

Extensive written records exist that help document the history of settlements such as those at Arrowsic (e.g. The Clarke and Lake Company) Cape Newagen, Monhegan and Pemaquid during that period after 1620.  Archaeological excavations have taken place or are underway at Pemaquid and other locations searching for further evidence of European and Native American settlement patterns and activities.  But the history of Pemaquid and the central Maine coast poses a problem: we know much more about its endings than its beginnings.  There is no starting date for settlement of ancient Pemaquid as there is for Jamestown, St. Augustine, Plymouth or Boston.

The palimpsest that constitutes the history of the Pemaquid region from 1621 to 1676 can be peeled off to reveal another prior era.  This most ancient dominion of pre-colonial European exploration and trade is not entirely without written records but remains as a most elusive and mysterious chapter in American history.  It also must be a most fascinating subject to traditional historians whose credibility rests on facts and documents that are simply not available for documenting what transpired in ancient Pemaquid before 1621.

Proto-historic Pemaquid

The year 1625 is an appropriate date for dividing the history of the Pemaquid region -- that coastal and tidewater lying between the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers and synonymous in our interpretation of our regional history with Norumbega -- into a historic and proto-historic period.  In the spring of 1625, Edward Winslow sailed to Monhegan Island and then to Boothbay Harbor and probably up the Sheepscot River in his shallop to secure supplies and food from English traders and fishermen that saved the Plymouth colonists from starvation after their first winter.  His journey and the traders who supplied the Plymouth colonists provide inexorable evidence of a thriving European presence in ancient Pemaquid prior to colonial settlement of southern New England.  It is the puzzle of the florescence of fishing, trading and timber harvesting prior to recorded permanent settlement of the Maine coast that attracts the attention of so many of the writers cited and quoted in the following excerpts.

The proto-historic period is the era of the exploration of the Maine coast, of Rosier's account of George Waymouth's voyage, and the ill-fated Popham settlement (1607.)  It is with the attempted settlement at the mouth of the Kennebec River that elements of historical narrative begin mingling with the protohistoric observations of writers who were not in Maine at that time.  Along with Rosier, Davies (1880) in Relation of a voyage to Sagadahoc, 1607 - 1608 provides one of the first historical narrations pertaining to the European exploration and settlement of Maine.  It was in 1607 that construction began on the first ship built in America, the pinnace Virginia.  Davies relations is the only surviving historical document that describes the voyage and attempted settlement at Fort Popham.  The construction of the pinnace Virginia provides, however, a tantalizing opportunity to explore a much more well documented history, the millieu of Tudor England, Elizabethan England, and the merchant adventurers who sponsored both the Waymouth voyage and the Popham settlement.  There are many things we cannot know about this settlement of ancient Pemaquid, but certain key events occurred only decades or less before Rosier's 1605 voyage and the 1607 attempt to establishe a colony on the Kennebec River at Fort Popham.  The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588; the reign of Queen Elizabeth ended in 1603.  The following chapters of Ancient Pemaquid revisit the social and industrial environment, which is the context of the settlement of ancient Pemaquid.  

In seeking to unravel the mysteries of protohistoric ancient Pemaquid, history as a palimpsest again emerges.  European visitors to ancient Pemaquid before 1625 were here for a reason.  There was another flourishing society on the central Maine coast prior to European settlement that, along with fish and timber, attracted traders from England, France and other countries.  This was the Abenaki confederacy of Mawooshen, described in detail by Samuel Purchas from Rosier's account of George Waymouth's 1604 voyage to the Maine coast.  That even more mysterious and uncertain ancient dominion of Maine is discussed and documented in Norumbega Reconsidered: Mawooshen and the Wawenoc Diaspora.

When the first European traders and explorers came to ancient Pemaquid, Pemaquid was a Native American, not an European community.  That it endured for decades as a meeting and trading place for these two cultures is among the most intriguing chapters of American and Maine history.  The European presence in ancient Pemaquid cannot be understood without documenting that most ancient dominion of Maine, the Abenaki communities of coastal Maine and their confederacy of Mawooshen.  The history of ancient Pemaquid can also not be understood without seeking its roots in Elizabethan England and the merchant adventurers who were among the first European visitors to ancient Pemaquid.

The Building of the First Ship Virginia: Edge Tools and Contact Period Ferrous Metallurgy in 1607
draft -- work in progress

In view of the upcoming 400th anniversary of the construction of the first ship the pinnace Virginia, a brief exploration of the unexplored subject of the metallurgy of the edge tools that made settlement of the New World and the American colonies possible is appropriate and, in fact, sheds new light on the exploration of North America.

Elizabethan England and the Merchant Adventurers

In Portsmouth Harbor, England, on July 19, 1545, Henry VIII was watching from a nearby castle as Mary Rose sailed out of Portsmouth Harbor.  In attempting to fend off French invaders on the nearby Isle of Wright, Henry's flagship was overloaded with both too many cannons and soldiers, and, turning in a gust of wind, it suddenly capsized and sank with a loss of 700 or more sailors and soldiers.  The sinking of the Mary Rose is a landmark event in the archaeology of tools; the ship's carpenters' tool chests that were recovered from this wreck during salvage operations in the 1970s and 80s provide us with important information about the designs and forms of tools in late medieval and early Renaissance England.  Though the Mary Rose met an ignominious end, this event marked the beginning of a period of the construction of a vigorous and powerful British Navy as well as of an extensive fleet of privately owned merchant vessels, which reached its zenith in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558 - 1603).  The sinking of the Mary Rose also has relevance for students of the history of the ancient dominions of Maine.

Prior to the sinking of the Mary Rose, France, Portugal and Spain were the predominant maritime powers of the early 16th century.  While Henry VII sponsored John Cabot's 1497 voyage, which resulted in the discovery of North America, and his son, Sebastian Cabot discovered the Hudson Bay in 1509, while in search of the Northwest Passage, the preponderance of exploratory activities in the North Atlantic and St. Lawrence River were Spanish and French.  David Quinn, in the second chapter of American Beginnings, summarizes the significance, as well as the cartography, of the early visits of both Verrazano (1524) and Gomez (1525) to the coast of Maine.  These early explorations were quickly followed by Jacques Cartier's discovery of the entrance to the St. Lawrence River in 1534.  The expedition to settle the St. Lawrence River area in 1540 was followed by an intensive period of French exploration of the North American coast between 1540 and 1566.  These visits established, for the first time, the basic outlines of the Maine coast and helped bring the attention of the English to the vast potential of the natural resources of the Norumbega region.  The maps that resulted from these early voyages hung in Whitehall as early as 1525, drawing the attention of the English court, court sponsored explorers and private merchant adventurers to the possibility of a northwest passage to China and to the North American coast west of Nova Scotia, including Maine, as a source of fish, masts, and later, furs.  The actual documentation of trading activities during this period is limited to numerous commentaries on the vast fishery northeast of Nova Scotia in the St. Lawrence River region and along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador.  Some of these early Breton and Basque fishing and trading expeditions inevitably must have explored the Maine coast and the Bay of Fundy.  The secrecy of their voyages is the fundamental reason for the lack of documentation of their activities.  Between the Mary Rose debacle in 1545, and the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, English maritime activity greatly increased, in part, in response to the challenge posed by French settlement in many areas of North America first claimed by England as a result of John Cabot's voyage of 1497.

The rapid increase in shipbuilding activity after the sinking of the Mary Rose was followed by a significant expansion of English mercantile activities.  Formerly almost entirely dependent on exporting cloth through Antwerp to European markets, the traditional market for European exports was seriously disrupted in 1551.  The need for additional export markets, as well as the urgent need for naval supplies such as timber, pitch, iron and other commodities, gave rise to the formation of the merchant adventurers.  Initially, foremost of importance among the merchant adventurers were those chartered out of London who were granted the right to continue the ancient monopoly of shipping wool.

After 1550, a whole new series of merchant adventurers were chartered, trading not only with the Netherlands but also with the Holy Roman Empire (Germany and Poland), Denmark, Baltic seaports in Finland, Sweden and Russia as well as ports in the Mediterranean and on the coast of Africa. Wood and other commodities had previously been shipped through Calais prior to the heyday of the Antwerp market.  Warfare and other controversies sometimes closed the northern European ports; increasing knowledge of the New World and jealousy of the Spanish monopoly on imports from south and central America combined to direct increasing attention to the possibility of discovering a northwest passage to India and the riches of the Far East.  In The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, Samuel Eliot Morison states "In the meantime, about two hundred English merchant-adventurers had started a more elaborate project, with a capital of £25,000.  Styled ambitiously 'The Merchants Adventurers of England for the Discovery of Lands, Territories, Isles, Dominions and Seignories Unknown,' they received a royal charter from two successive sovereigns in 1553  and 1555, and elected Sebastian Cabot their governor.  For a time the directors debated whether to take another crack at the Northwest Passage or to try a Northeast Passage to Asia." (pg. 483.)   Morison continues with a description of how John Dee recommended the eastern course of exploration and follows with a description of the three ill-fated expeditions to the northeast of Britain that failed to find a passage around Siberia.

The customs records of these merchant adventurers' exports and imports through London are much more complete than for any other port in Britain for trading activities in the Elizabethan era.  The officially sanctioned and chartered merchant companies registered their activities with the custom district.  There was also a vast seafaring community especially in ports in the west and south of England, which did not participate in the officially sanctioned and chartered explorations described below. These traders were called the interlopers; they did not clear customs with their incoming cargo and left few if any customs records or any other documentation. Their presence on the coast of North America was noted and recorded due to the obviousness of their sailing ships even if the nature of their trading and fishing activities were not.  The Elizabethan era was also a period in which smuggling and privateering were rampant.  To what extent these privateers constituted a portion of the many sailing ships noted along the coast of the new found lands is unknown.  One more example of our ignorance of trading and mercantile activities in this era is our lack of knowledge of the difference between unregistered merchant adventurers not clearing customs and privateers harassing and seizing the shipping of other nations.

At this time, large numbers of Bristol fishermen joined the already numerous Basque, French and Spanish fishing fleets off the coast of Newfoundland.  None of these fishing fleets left records of their voyages behind. Morison is again the most reliable source of information about how and why the British fishing fleet suddenly participated in an industry previously dominated by the countries to the south.  In "An act of Parliament... Henry VIII (1542) indicated that too many English fishermen were buying codfish from 'Pycardes, Flemynghes, Norman and Frenchmen,' sometimes 'half the sea over' and even in foreign ports, instead of catching fish themselves.  Parliament forbade this practice with severe penalties, since the 'craft and feate of fishing' gave 'great strenthe to this Realm by bringing up and encreasing of Maryners . . . but also a great welthe to the Realme.'  But the situation changed in the next thirty-five years, for in 1578 Anthony Parkhurst wrote to Hakluyt that the English fishermen were lording it over all others in Newfoundland harbors.  Edward Hayes, in his narrative of Sir Humfry Gilbert's voyage of 1583, found that to be the situation in St. John's Harbor." (pg. 471).  Morison continues "English or not, hundreds of fishermen, whose names we do not even know, by mid-sixteenth century were exploiting the Banks and the shore fisheries of Newfoundland.  Not only the Grand Bank, which lies like a big buffer to the southeastward, but little banks south of Newfoundland such as Burgoo, St. Pierre, and Banquereau.  The waters off southern Labrador and around the Magdalen Islands were almost equally fecund." (pg. 473).  It is difficult to believe that these activities did not extend into the Gulf of Maine until after 1602.  Morison has a particularly interesting description of the differences between the wet cod fishing techniques of the Bretons and Basque and the dry fishing  techniques of the English.  The necessity of building land-based fishing stations for British fishermen to dry codfish encouraged over-wintering, contact and trading with natives resulting in an intimate knowledge of the Maine and Bay of Fundy coast, activities already underway before the more well documented English voyages of the early 17th century.

Morison continues with a further description of the huge number of European ships visiting the north America fishery by 1560.  "When we consider that as early as 1560 more than thirty fishermen sailed from Saint-Malo and Cancale for Newfoundland and that the same number sailed next year from three minor ports of Normandy; that Parkhurst in 1578 reported 50 English, 150 French and Breton, and 100 Spanish in Newfoundland ports, exclusive of the whalers; and that Thevet puts the total number (including the Dutch, who had just got onto it) at 300 in 1586; one can appreciate that European sailing craft had become common every summer in Newfoundland and Gulf waters.  A brave sight they must have been, as if a yachting regatta were on.  We have no details whatsoever of these many hundreds of northern voyages, since fishermen kept no journals and published no narratives.  For the most part they had no aid to navigation more modern than the compass, and performed latitude sailing by eye altitudes of sun and North Star." (pg. 479).

The large number of sail engaged in the Newfoundland fishery in the late 16th century raises one of the more contentious issues for Maine historians.  To what extent did English and other fishing fleets visit the Maine coast to fish as well as to participate in the lucrative fur trade?  No records exist documenting any specific English trading voyages to the Pemaquid region prior to 1602.  Every chartered and official English and French explorer, including and following Gosnold's 1602 voyage encountered Native Abenaki in Maine who spoke broken English, sailed Basque shallops and often wore English britches and waistcloths.  The merchant adventurers of Elizabethan England had been to Maine well before Gosnold's visit seeking timber, fish and furs, but they did not  leave any written account of their visits.  If trading had been limited to Micmac Indians as intermediaries (see Bourque and Whitehead), the natives on the Maine coast would have had no reason to be familiar with the English tongue.  As a result of the lack of documentation of these early voyages, the history of the early years of ancient Pemaquid, Monhegan, Damariscove Islands and other Maine coastal localities as ports of call for European traders remains unrecorded.

It is this period of time, from the early decades of the 16th century to the beginning of the historic period of Maine's first colonial dominion, that constitutes a mysterious period of French, Dutch and British exploration of the newly found lands of North America.  Who came to North America, when they came and why they came here are the still partially unanswered questions that are inevitably encountered in attempts to understand the beginnings of the first colonial dominion of Maine.

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The History of Monhegan Island

In Monhegan, the Cradle of New England, Ida Proper provides one of the most interesting and comprehensive reviews of known and rumored visitors to the coast of Maine during the period from the early explorations of Verrazano (1524) and Gomez (1525) to the more well documented florescence of the Monhegan Island fishing community in the 1620s.  Antiquarian and contemporary historians have assembled a broad record of the many individuals and families who settled in the coastal regions of central Maine after Miles Standish made his 1621 journey to get supplies for the starving Plymouth colonists.  Ida Proper, an amateur historian, provides an extensive catalog of the many known and rumored visitors to the ancient Pemaquid region in the period of time before the establishment of the Plymouth Colony.  Her historical research and resulting history of Monhegan Island, as well as the writings of older historians like Rufus King Sewall and Benjamin DeCosta complement work of contemporary historians such as Quinn, Morison, Baker and Churchill.  Together these sources allow at least a tentative sketch of visitors to the Maine coast during the 100 years prior to the landing of the Pilgrims; of these both Quinn and Proper help us realize that many of the visits to Norumbega occurred during the 16th century, not only during the two decades that proceeded the settlement of the Plymouth Colony in the early 17th century.

Ida Proper begins her history: "Monhegan is the most famous deep sea island on the Atlantic seaboard. Her place in the recorded history of the discovery of the American continent is still shrouded in fogs, just as her rocky heads are so often obscured by the wisps and wreaths of the circling fogs that haunt her shores. This obscurity is due to the secrecy imperative during that momentous period. But as the new records are dug up in old-world musty libraries, we glimpse her unmistakable outline, here and there, and the glorious place she held in the colonization of America." (pg. 3).

Proper begins her history of Monhegan with an interesting survey of prehistoric voyages to North America that may have visited Monhegan Island itself.  Extended excerpts from her commentary on these early voyages are in the information files on Tales of Early Visitors to Monhegan Island and the Italian Zeno's explorations.  Ida Proper also speculates on Norse visitors to Monhegan and Norumbega; this section of her history is only briefly quoted in the Pre-Columbian bibliography.  Proper then continues with what is one of the most comprehensive overviews of 16th century explorations of the New England region, called Norumbega until John Smith renamed it New England in 1614.  Only Samuel Eliot Morison and David Beers Quinn come to mind as professional historians who devote as much attention to this period of New England history.  Unfortunately, Morison arbitrarily terminates his narrative at the year 1600, leaving those interested in the following critical years of Maine history in limbo.  Proper is more willing to speculate about the wide range of visitors to the New England coastline during this period.  She particularly notes the clandestine nature of exploration to the new found lands of North America by not only the Basque, French, Portuguese and English fishermen, who had excellent reason to keep their fishing stations secret, but by the merchant adventurers from Elizabethan England who began trading on the Maine coast long before George Waymouth kidnapped five Wawenoc Indians and brought them back to England in 1605.  On Sir Humphrey Gilbert's ill-fated 1583 voyage to the new found land:

"So secretive were the English explorers of this time that Sir Humphrey Gilbert took unusual precaution in regard to concealing the sailing directions of his voyage.  In the winter before the voyage, Gilbert had carefully selected watchwords to be used, upon the voyage, and had sealed them up in two bullets or scowles. The bullet sealed with the yellow wax was to be opened immediately and contained the sailing directions for the English and Irish coasts. The one sealed with red wax was only to be opened after these coasts were left behind. He also arranged a code of signals by means of flags in the daytime and of lights by night." (pg. 67).

While Sir Humphrey never completed his voyage to Maine and died at sea, the shroud of secrecy surrounding European voyages to New England in the 16th century continued well into the 17th century.  Humphrey undertook his voyage of 1583 with the intention of settling an English colony in Norumbega.  His attempt at establishing a colony on the Maine coast and the vast numbers of English fishermen then in North America illustrate the widespread awareness of Norumbega and its rich natural resources in Elizabethan England well before the voyages of Gosnold, Waymouth, Pring and Smith.

For more from Ida Proper's text on Monhegan Island, see the annotations in the Maine History: Antiquarian sources and Ancient Pemaquid bibliographies.

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The Geography of Ancient Pemaquid

The domain of ancient Pemaquid is the region between the Penobscot River and the Kennebec River.  Rockland Harbor and Owl's Head on Penobscot Bay mark its northeastern corner; the ancient port of Monhegan Island marks its most southeasterly boundary.  The Kennebec River and Fort Popham mark its southwestern extremity; the domain of ancient Pemaquid ranges north along the Kennebec to the Sasanoa River and includes Arrowsic and Georgetown Islands.  Within this trapezoid lies the tidewater regions of the Sheepscot, Damariscotta, Medomak and St. Georges rivers.

An enlargement of a section of Plate 6, Morris, Gerald E., Ed. (1976). Maine bicentennial atlas: An historical survey. The Maine Historical Society, Portland, ME.  For more maps showing this area go to our maps section.

The 1607 construction of Fort Popham at the mouth of the Kennebec River began an English immigration into Mavooshen that became a flood after 1620.  The Plymouth colonists established a trading post at the abandoned site of Fort Popham in 1626.  North of Fort Popham a flourishing farming community was established in the upper regions of the Sheepscot River between Wiscasset and Alna by the mid-1620s.  East of Pemaquid's breadbasket at ancient Sheepscot and Alna lies Damariscotta and the huge oyster middens at Salt Bay and Damariscotta Mills.  Further east lies the Medomak River and the St. Georges River.  The ancient settlement of Pemaquid itself had two harbors, one on the west side of Pemaquid Neck, Pemaquid Harbor, and the other, New Harbor, on the east side of the neck.  North of New Harbor lies Muscongus Island (now Louds Island) fabled home of Samoset, the Wawenoc Indian who greeted the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1621.  During the English heyday of ancient Pemaquid, other trading posts were established at Monhegan Island, ancient Pemaquid's chief port, as well as at Arrowsic, Woolwich and at Cushnoc, north of the Pemaquid region at Augusta.  Just northeast of the Pemaquid region other trading posts had been established at Penobscot and Pentagoet.  The portage from Rockland Harbor west to the St. Georges River provided easy access for Native American traders traveling across Penobscot Bay from Pentagoet and the eastern Sagadahoc down the St. Georges River to New Harbor with beaver pelts and other furs.  During the English years of ancient Pemaquid (1607 - 1676) the florescence of fishing communities included Newagen, Boothbay, Damariscotta, New Harbor, Bristol,  Friendship and most importantly, Damariscove and the Monhegan Islands.  The most intense concentration of farmers were north of Wiscasset on the Sheepscot River at Sheepscot and further north to the head of the tide at Alna.  Extensive farming is also reported at Pemaquid and New Harbor, north of New Harbor on both sides of Muscongus Bay and the Damariscotta region.  Ancient Pemaquid represents the easternmost boundary of English settlement in the early colonial era.  East of Penobscot Bay lie territory controlled primarily by the French (with the exception of Castine) until the fall of Quebec in 1759.

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The Voyages of Humphrey Gilbert, 1583, Bartholomew Gosnold, 1602, and George Waymouth, 1605
This section under construction -- a link to Rosier's narrative of the Waymouth voyage will be posted shortly.

Humphrey Gilbert sailed to North America in 1583 intending to establish a naval station and colony at or near Pemaquid in the heart of Norumbega.  Reaching Newfoundland instead, his enterprise failed, and Gilbert was lost at sea.  But ancient Pemaquid and nearby Monhegan Island were already a port of call in for French, Portuguese, Spanish and English fishermen and occasional coastal traders.  When Gosnold (1602) and George Waymouth (1605) visited Pemaquid and nearby coastal Maine locations, Native Abenakis including both Cannabis and Wawenoc Indians spoke broken English and utilized Basque shallops (small coastal sailing craft, +/- 30 feet), some possibly left by Spanish traders at Pemaquid.  Among the first of a series of officially chartered voyages accompanied by authorized recorders and their written documents, the explorers of the historic period followed decades of Native American contact with roving merchant adventurers.  These traders, who had no royal charters or official designation, left no records in the custom books of the periods.  Coming first from southern Europe, and later from England, for fish, timber and furs, they had no reason to leave detailed records of their trading activities, partners or the locations of the resources they sought.

Humphrey Gilbert journeyed as far as St. Johns, Newfoundland, before his expedition floundered in bickering and logistical problems.  Bourque and Whitehead in Tarrentines and the Introduction of European Trade Goods in the Gulf of Maine, 1985, outline what is now the dominant view of historians pertaining to early European voyages to Maine:

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The Popham Colony
(draft)

When George Popham sailed to Norumbega in 1607 to settle the Sagadahoc colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River, he first landed at Monhegan Island to hold the thanksgiving services described below in detail by Rufus King Sewall.  Leaving Monhegan, he then sailed directly to Pemaquid, rather than to the mouth of the Kennebec, first landing at New Harbor, its eastern port on Muscongus Bay.  Popham had on board his ship Skidwarres, one of the five Wawenoc Indians captured by George Waymouth in 1605.  Resentful of his years of captivity with the English, Skidwarres quickly disappeared into the large community of Native Americans still living at Pemaquid prior to the great pandemic of 1617.  Nahanda, the Pemaquid sagamore, another Waymouth captive, had been returned to Pemaquid by Martin Pring in 1606.  The disaffection of Skidwarres and his return to his native community was an omen of events to come for the short-lived Popham Colony.  Building a fort, houses, stockade and a store house, which soon burned with all its supplies, what began as a relatively friendly alliance with local Wawenoc, Canibas and Arosaguntacooks soon deteriorated and eventually resulted in an attack on the Popham colonists resulting in 13 deaths.  The combination of a particularly severe winter, the death of Sir John Popham (the colony sponsor in England,) the death of Sir John Gilbert (father of Captain Raleigh Gilbert) and a poor choice of a colony location at the windblown mouth of the Kennebec resulted in the demise of the colony.

Some early writers, including both Sewall and Proper, question whether all Popham colonists returned to England or whether some went to Monhegan Island or upriver locations at Sheepscot or elsewhere.  While this issue may never be completely resolved (contemporary historians believe all Popham colonists returned to England) by 1608 the demise not only of the Popham Colony, but of Native American communities in the Norumbega tidewater was well underway.  In 1607, Micmac Indians from Nova Scotia armed with French guns attacked and destroyed the Archimoquois at Saco.  The question of what transpired at Pemaquid as a trading center before the era of documented English settlement beginning in the 1620s remains one of the most intriguing unanswered puzzles of Maine's early history. 

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Conundrums of Ancient Pemaquid

When Raleigh Gilbert piloted one of the two ships (Mary and John) in Sir John Popham's expedition to settle a colony in the new found land in 1607, he first landed, not at the mouth of the Kennebec River where the colony was later established, but at Monhegan Island.  At this point in time, Monhegan was so well known as a haven from the winds of the Gulf of Maine and as a source of fresh water that it appears to have been a landing place for mariners coming to the new world for centuries, if not for millennia.  (See Ida Proper's Tales of Early Visitors to Monhegan Island; also see Samuel Eliot Morison's dissenting discussion of this topic in the first few chapters of The European Discovery of North America: The Northern Voyages.)  While anchored at Monhegan, the second of the two ships in the Popham expedition (Gift of God piloted by George Popham, a relative of Sir John Popham) also arrived at Monhegan to the exultation of the colonists on the Mary and John, who thought it may have been lost at sea.  Having visited Monhegan and celebrated what was probably the first thanksgiving service by Europeans in North America, the two ships headed for the mainland.  John Davis, the master of one of the ships, wrote a journal for Fernando Gorges that was later found by Benjamin DaCosta in his papers in England in 1875.  His journal recounts their first landing on the mainland via shallop:

Moving back in time from 1607, Proper also notes voyages by others either certain or probable: Richard Strong 1593, Sir Francis Drake 1586, Sir Bernard Drake 1586, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles 1582, Steven Bellinger 1580 (who allegedly reported seeing 80 houses in the Pemaquid area), Simon Fernando 1579, M. Anthonie Parkhurst 1578, Richard Whithorne 1575, Champagne on the ship Gargarine from Le Harve 1569, Andre Thevet 1556, Diego Maldonado 1540, Verrazano 1524, Gomez 1525, Joao Alvarez Fagundes 1520, not to mention the voyage of Cabot in 1498, who may or may not have stopped in Monhegan.

As early as 1517, 150 French fishing vessels were noted as visiting "newfoundland."  While it's a long way from the Maine coast to Newfoundland, this name was a generic name for the entire region between Maine and Labrador in the 16th century, i.e. new found land or terra nova.  Proper mentions the recurring oral tradition, which other historians have noted, that the French Bretons had settled on the Labrador coast as early as 1465.  Early visitors to Maine could also include Thomas Aubert 1508, Gene Denys 1510?, Sebastian Cabot and Casper Corte-Relas 1501.  Proper also notes the possibility of other Portuguese visitors in the period of 1464 - 1474.  Rufus King Sewall makes note in one of his obscure publications of the oral tradition of Portuguese shallops having been left at the Pemaquid trading station during the 16th century.

One of the more intriguing and one of the more well documented puzzles of the dominion of ancient Pemaquid is the case of David Ingram.  Captain John Walker, either due to a lack of provisions ships or due to mutiny, was forced to abandon 100 seamen on the coast of Mexico in 1568.  Most headed south along the Mexican coast and were picked up by Spanish and Portuguese ships.  Ingram, along with one or two others, allegedly followed the Mexican coast north, picking up and following Native American trails which led into Maine.  Ingram then hailed a French trading ship 60 leagues west of Cape Breton, which would put him somewhere in the Bay of Fundy or the Gulf of Maine, either at the St. Johns River in New Brunswick, St. Croix or Penobscot Rivers.  It is certainly indisputable that the French were actively trading for furs in North America at this early date.  What is unlikely is their avoidance or ignorance of the region south and west of Sable Island and the rich fur resources of that area, i.e. the coast of Maine, eastern New Brunswick and western Nova Scotia on the Bay of Fundy.  In fact, the first visits to Port Royal by Europeans can be dated at least as early as the expedition of Estevan Gomez in 1524.  Samuel Eliot Morison, in fact, notes that when Gomez made his trip to North American seeking a passage to China, he picked up where Verrazano left off; "No sense hitting America further north as the Portuguese knew all about that region already." (pg. 328).  So David Ingram, in 1568, was well aware that he could easily meet European traders on the coast of New England or New Brunswick and thereby return to his homeland in England.  This contradicts the Bourque and Whitehead thesis as noted above.  It was during this return that he allegedly visited the Bangor area and concocted the famous tale of the riches of the city of Norumbega, a myth so obviously an imaginative invention that historians continue to discount the very existence of Norumbega in any context (see Norumbega Reconsidered.)

Another interesting puzzle of ancient Pemaquid is the alleged ignorance of both European fishermen and merchant adventurers of the existence of the New England coastline and its rich resources until after the voyages of Gosnold in 1602, Champlain in 1604 and 1605 and George Waymouth in 1605.  Many other planned expeditions and oral tales other than that spun by David Ingram contradict this contemporary model of Maine history (see Bourque and Whitehead.)   Sir Humphrey Gilbert's ill-fated expedition of 1683 was intended as a colonizing expedition in New England; it apparently terminated in St. Johns, Newfoundland, due to logistical problems; Sir Humphrey was then lost at sea on a return voyage to Europe.  The coast of Maine and the Bay of Fundy must have been well known to all of the fishermen coming from Europe to the new found lands since one of the two principal sailing routes passed Sable Island, both an obstacle and a landmark off the south east coast of Nova Scotia.  Morison notes the frequency of shipwrecks on this island; there are indications that the fast more northerly route to the fisheries was relatively underutilized until 1600, after which it was used by many of the ships in the great migration to New England in the third decade of the 17th century.  Since fishermen as well as the merchant adventurers were coming to areas nearby and east of the maritime peninsula to trade for furs with the Indians in the 16th century, it is highly unlikely that they would not have ventured into the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy in their search for additional sources.  Ingram's hitching a ride to Europe from a Maine or New Brunswick river is testimony both to the secrecy of the fur trading enterprise and the proliferation of traders west of Sable Island in the 16th century.

Another component of the conundrums of ancient Pemaquid is the issue of the salting and storage of fish after the catch by European fishermen.  As Morison so eloquently describes, while the French and Basque fishermen salted their fish and went directly to market without long periods on land, by the middle of the 16th century, English fishermen were establishing fishing stations and their flakes (drying racks) on the shores of Newfoundland and the maritime provinces.  Since they kept no records, its not know when they began frequenting the Gulf of Maine, but John Smith is certainly eloquent in his description of the larger cod and longer fishing season of the area around Monhegan, Pemaquid and the Kennebec River.  The English made frequent use of whatever manpower they could locate, whether other Europeans or Native Americans in their construction of coastal fishing stations.  Monhegan Island appears to be one such station, dating at least to the third quarter of the 16th century and probably earlier.  Ida Proper, based on Fernando Gorges comments, believes the Monhegan station became permanently inhabited on a year round basis as early as 1608 or 1609, as does David Beers Quinn.  The many rumors of Europeans living at or near Pemaquid in the years before 1620 may also be part of this same pattern whereby seasonal fishing stations became the location of over wintering as well as unrecorded isolated family settlements.

Another aspect of this undocumented pattern of possible settlements on the Maine coast pertains to the issue of corn, wild wheat and rice and water mills.  The oral tradition persists that Maine's Native Americans grew corn not only west of the Kennebec River but throughout the inland river valleys above the tidewater as far north as Medutic on the St. Johns River in New Brunswick.  There's no reason why the early traders would seek not only fresh water and furs, but also trade their highly sought after steel and iron tools for corn, which could easily be ground by the Native Americans and made into bread in simple ovens.  And, in fact, once fishing stations were established on the coast of Maine in areas near rivers that drained the sheltered valleys above the tidewater, there were no significant logistical obstacles to prevent visiting Europeans from bringing grindstones to use for milling the corn and other grains that grew in the warm river valleys.  John Davis notes in his journal about the Popham colonists at Pemaquid that upon landing on the mainland they passed by "three mills" in the vicinity of Pemaquid.  This was 1607.  Is there any chance that earlier European visitors had brought their readily available mill stones from Europe for the use of Native Americans, who would be more than willing to trade not only their furs, but their ground corn, for the European trade goods.  This issue lingers as one of the mysteries of ancient Pemaquid and the early history of Maine; Sewell as well as others note the oral tradition of "ancient mills" on the Sheepscot River, especially at the head of the tide in Alna, far distant from the cold winds that blow at Pemaquid.  It is possible that the fragments of corn recently discovered in Native American hearths, circa 1420 - 1500, at Pemaquid are an isolated example of agricultural activities on the immediate coast; it's much more likely that corn being ground for consumption was grown in the warmer inland valleys and then transported to the coastal villages of Mawooshen.  (See Arthur E. Spiess, Fall 2001, Native American occupations at Pemaquid: Review and results, Maine Archaeological Society Bulletin.)  Europeans visiting the area for trading at a later date could with their steel axes and adzes easily construct a water mill at a location such as the falls at Alna as long as they brought with them two grindstones and an iron shaft.  For merchant adventurers plying the coast of Maine on a regular basis such as Sir. Francis Popham's crews, the construction of small water mills would have been no more of a challenge than that of building flakes, shacks and piers.

Another conundrum of ancient Pemaquid pertains to the lack of European exploration of the tidewater estuaries east of Sheepscot and west of the Georges River.  This problem is made particularly clear by the Maine historical atlas and its maps of the explorations of Europeans during the 16th and early 17th centuries.  There is no record of any documented visits in the Damariscotta region or in the Muscongus Bay and Medomak River areas prior to English settlement after 1620.  In fact, the estuaries and bays of this region were confusing enough to the early explorers that they often conflated geographical locations, as typified by the following quote from Lescarbot as reprinted in Ida Proper's Monhegan, the Cradle of New England, page 88: "Moreover that River (Penobscot) receives many Rivers falling from those parts which are toward Norombega: At the entrie whereof, it is so farre from having but one Iland, that rather the number thereof is almost infinite for as much as the River enlarging its selfe like the Greek Lamba A, the mouth of it ia all full of Iles, whereof there is one of them lying very farre off (and the fore most) in the Sea, which is high and markable above the others. (Undoubtedly Monhegan.)"  This quotation, from one of the more reliable of the French observers, helps emphasize the fact that a description of "the Penobscot" pertains to an entire coastal region east of the Kennebec, including the numerous estuaries and river tidewaters, which were too complicated to navigate by ship and too dangerous to explore by small pinnaces.  Decades of raids by predominantly English traders and fishermen had alienated most Native Americans on the coast of Maine by the time Gosnold encountered angry Indians, allegedly at Cape Neddick.  In fact, the Indians that Gosnold encountered in 1602 were more likely to have been the coasting Micmac traders (Tarrentines) described by Bourque and Whitehead rather than local Presumpscots or Pigwackets.  The complex pattern of river drainages and the archipelago of islands, including Monhegan, noted by Lescarbot as a component of the Penobscot remind us that the early explorers often called the entire region of the maritime provinces and Newfoundland as the "new found lands."  At this time, Norumbega was a regional designation for coastal lands stretching from Massachusetts Bay east to Frenchman's Bay.  John Smith renamed Norumbega, New England in 1614.  When the early narratives note the Bashabas as inhabiting a village at or near the Penobscot, its highly unlikely this location was Indian Island at Orono on the Penobscot.  We may never be able to decipher exactly what either Native Americans or early European explorers meant when they used terms such as Penobscot River or Norumbega.  There remains the uncanny coincidence that Norumbega is contiguous with the confederacy of Mawooshen and that its heartland was the ancient dominion of Pemaquid.

By the time Miles Standish sailed his shallop from Plymouth to Monhegan Island in 1621 to obtain bread for the starving Plymouth colonists, dozens of English and French sailing ships were processing and loading their cargos in the Pemaquid region for return trips to Europe.  Standish was visiting the vicinity of an already ancient Pemaquid that had a prehistory as a Native American trading center stretching centuries if not millennia into the past and which was now alive with European sailing vessels.  Standish was successful in obtaining bread for the Plymouth colonies; was this bread baked in England and brought to America by English supply ships for the coastal traders, or was it baked fresh in North America from Indian corn grown and harvested at some unknown location up the Sheepscot River?

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The Tale of Sylvanus Davis

Sylvanus Davis is one of the early settlers of ancient Pemaquid; he was later one of the first settlers in Falmouth, now Portland.  Sylvanus was born in 1635 and is first reported as buying land from the Indians in ancient Pemaquid up the Damariscotta River in June of 1659; he is also reported as buying land from the Indians in 1665 and later in 1694.  Davis also purchased large tracts of land from other settlers and received grants of land from the colonial government.  Davis established himself as a coastal trader, harvested timber from the Norumbega tidewater and brought this timber to Portland, Boston and other coastal communities until the beginning of the Indian Wars in 1676.

Sylvanus Davis was, in fact, the prototypical English merchant adventurer, several generations from that milieu that then recapitulated itself in the 17th century in the swarms of traders, fishermen and settlers on the Maine and New England coast.  After 1673, Davis was an agent for the Clark and Lake Company on Arrowsic Island.  The entry in Noyes' Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire reports Davis organized the town of Harwich on the east side of the Kennebec in what was then called the Province of Maine, the Province of Sagadahoc lying on the west side of the Kennebec River.  William Williamson in his The History of the State of Maine makes no mention of the town of Harwich, which may have been a part of Pownalboro, later Dresden and New Millford (Wiscasset). Davis soon was granted land on the Presumpscot River in Falmouth (Portland) where he established a sawmill.  Davis already had a warehouse at Arrowsic as well as livestock at his various holdings in ancient Pemaquid.

Sylvanus Davis was at Arrowsic Island in 1676 as an agent for the Clark and Lake Company when after the attack that destroyed Woolwich on August 13th, the Indians attacked the Clark and Lake settlement and fort at the southeasterly point of the island.  Williamson in the The History of the State of Maine notes what happened after the Indians were able to get past the sentinel on duty and gain entrance to the fort.  "Aroused from sleep, Capt. Lake, Davis, and others, soon finding resistance vain, fled through a back-door, and jumping into a canoe, strove to reach another Island.  Overtaken, however, by their pursuers, just as they were stepping on shore, Lake was killed by a musket-shot, and Davis so wounded that he could neither fight nor flee.  Able now only to creep, he hid himself in a cleft of the rocks; and the beams of the rising sun, in the eyes of the assailants, prevented a discovery.  Nevertheless, two days elapsed before he could, even in a light canoe, paddle himself away to the shores of the main." (pg. 536).  Davis recovered sufficiently from his wounds to return to Arrowsic Island in March 1677 to refortify the former settlement there with a garrison of 40 men.  This garrison, which according to Williamson had not yet had time to bury the bodies of the victims from the attack in late August, 1676, was again attacked by Indians with the loss of nine lives.  Davis was one of the survivors who fled to the fort at Casco Bay; he eventually commanded the fort at Falmouth (Portland) under Bradstreet.  Falmouth, along with all the other communities in Maine east of Wells were now abandoned except for garrisons of colonial soldiers.  Ida Proper as well as contemporary writers note on and off activity at Monhegan Island and possibly other isolated locations on the Maine coast in the 1680s.  The coastal activities of Davis as well as his gradual migration from central Maine to Portland and to Boston are representative of many a coastal trader. Davis removed to Boston where he became active in the government under Andros.  Later on the fall of Fort Loyal Davis spent four months as a prisoner in Canada.  Both Falmouth and Arrowsic remained uninhabited until 1714 and 1716 respectively.

Of particular interest is the information provided by Sylvanus Davis reprinted at the end of Rufus King Sewall's Ancient Voyages.  King provides neither footnotes nor sources for the following information, but it is reprinted below as an illustration of the florescence of early colonial life in the Pemaquid region.  Sylvanus Davis is one of the few sources of information abut the extent of communal and agriclutural activities in the Pemaquid region during the first colonial dominion of Maine.  As sketchy as it is, Sewall's extraction of information from the journals of Davis provides a tantalizing clue to the extent of the florescence of European settlement in the ancient dominions of Pemaquid in the years before the onset of the Indian wars swept the coast of Maine of its English population east of Wells.

AGRICULTURE AND COMMERCE.¹

Between Boothbay and Pemaquid there were as follows :
 

NAVIGATION.			FARMS.
Fishing Boats at		Men.	Boothbay to Pemaquid, many families	6
Boothbay	15	90	Pemaquid	15
Fisherman's I	2	16	New Harbor	10
Damariscotta	15	90	Between Sheepscott and Pemaquid	10
East Boothbay	2	16	Damariscotta	7
Pemaquid	5	40	Muscongus	12
New Harbor	6	48		__
Monhegan	20	160	Total up to Sheepscott	60
	__	___	At Sheepscott	50
Totals	65	460		__
			Total No. of farms	110

 

TOTAL POPULATION.
Fishermen	460
Agricultural	550
Other occupations	110
Trades people	250
	____
Total	1,370

¹Sylvanus Davis' Statement.
Tables from: Ancient voyages to the western continent: Three phases of history on the coast of Maine by Rufus King Sewall, pg. 79.

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Interregnum

The massacre of southern New England Indians by English colonists on December 18, 1675 at South Kingston, Rhode Island, an event that began King Philip's War, marks a watershed in the history of coastal Maine.  This surprise attack on the Narragansett stronghold in the middle of a great cedar swamp is a landmark act of genocide in American history.  In the middle of a December blizzard, hundreds, possibly in excess of a thousand, Narragansett Indians were trapped in their flammable mat and reed wigwams in their stockade in the middle of the swamp and burned to death.  There may have been no survivors, as there was only one bridge out of the village.  The recent publication of King Philip's War emphasizes how little is known about the exact location or the number of fatalities in this, the most devastating among the many battles fought by the Narragansetts, Wampanogs and other tribes during King Philip's War.  (See pages 244 - 271 for a more detailed description of what is called the great swamp fight.)  The resulting animosity toward English colonists spread warfare to coastal Maine within a year and resulted in that unique interregnum that is the key to understanding Maine's history.

After 1676, the first colonial dominion of Maine was depopulated of English settlers living east of Wells in a series of Indian attacks that continued intermittently until the fall of Quebec in 1759.  After King Philip's War began, vast tracts of Maine wilderness, as well as its ribbon of European coastal settlements, became too dangerous for permanent habitation.  What was once a flourishing series of communities along the Maine coast west of the Penobscot River became the location of a second colonial diaspora (scattering) that recapitulated the earlier Native American diaspora of 1617-1619, though without the accompanying epidemic.
  Plate 6 in the Maine Bicentennial Atlas provides a graphic illustration of the sudden departure of English colonists from Maine in 1676.  The plate provides a list of both Indian tribes and trading posts in Maine in the 17th century.  Some of the trading posts, such as those at Cushnoc (1628 - 1660s), Monhegan Island (1622 - 1625), Penobscot (1630 - 1670) and Machias (1631 - 1635), were discontinued prior to the onset of the Indian Wars.  The remaining trading posts in Plate 6 are all noted as ending suddenly in 1676.  These include Magies (E. Machias?) 1635 - 1676, Pentagoet 1635 -1654, 1670 - 1676, Pemaquid 1628 - 1676, Clark and Lake (Arrowsic) 1654 - 1676, Richard Hammond (Woolwich) 1655 - 1676, Thomas Purchas (Pejepscot) 1630 - 1676, and John Parker (Georgetown Island) 1650 - 1676.  The disruption of the first colonial dominion in Maine and its coastal settlements was swift and affected the entire Maine coast as far west as Wells.  Due to a lack of written records and first hand observer's accounts, the full story of this colonial diaspora may never be known, but Maine town histories are full of stories of attacks and kidnappings during this time.

The history of Maine between 1676 - 1759 is the tale of fearful and tentative attempts to resettle abandoned coastal communities in the face of the continued threat of Indian attack.  Cyrus Eaton in The Annals of Warren provides a graphic account of the struggles of early settlers of Knox county against this threat.  In the recently published (2001) Twelve Thousand Years, Bruce Bourque provides the best contemporary summary of the history and impact of this complicated, sporadic period of warfare.  The inland back country between the Penobscot and Kennebec Rivers, including that area that was later to become the Davistown Plantation, was a haven for the roaming bands of Abenaki raiders who posed a threat to settlers until the mid-18th century.  Prior to 1676, this back country had been a shared hunting ground utilized by Native Americans who had survived the great epidemic as well as English colonists and European fur trappers.  The Europeans played a major role in depleting the beaver populations, a natural resource that had been so avidly sought by European traders for a century or more.

Little information is available about the relationship between the settlers along the coast and the surviving bands of Cannabis and Wawenoc Indians prior to 1676, but there is also no record of any major Indian attacks or harassment prior to 1676 in the central coast region of Maine.  It was during this period that significant numbers of Passamaquoddy and Maliseet Indians began filtering into the central coastal region to fill the void left by the great pandemic.  After 1676, these new arrivals from eastern Maine joined with survivors from western and southern New England (Penacooks, etc.) and remaining Cannabis and Wawenocs to form the roving bands of Abenaki who harassed and dispersed English settlers.  What was once a temporarily, if reluctantly, shared hunting territory -- the back country from which flowed the Sheepscot, Damariscotta, Medomak and St. Georges rivers -- later the Davistown Plantation and now the towns of Liberty and Montville (and vicinity) -- became a no-man's land for almost a century.  As many narrators of the time wrote, few were the colonists in the trickle of resettlement who dared venture above the tidewater to hunt or fish in the backcountry.

No written or oral histories exist to tell us what happened in the Norumbega backcountry between the end of the first colonial dominion in 1676 and the first visits of a hermit named Davis in the 1770s.  The continued use of backcountry trails by Abenaki survivors, occasional trappers and colonial militia patrols sufficed to maintain the viability of native trails that had been traveled for centuries.  Straggling survivors from the ill-fated Penobscot expedition used one branch or another of the Cushnoc Trail to pass from Belfast and Duck Trap on the Penobscot across Montville to the safety of Cushnoc (Augusta) after their defeat at Castine in 1779.  Before that debacle, no written record survives to tell us of any European visitors returning to the Davistown area of the Norumbega backcountry.

Tracing the history of Davistown back in time thus brings us first to this blank page of local history, next to the saga of ancient Pemaquid and the first colonial dominion, and then, lastly and inexorably, to the late pre-historic confederacy of Mawooshen and the Wawenoc diaspora, that most fascinating of all prologues to the history of the Davistown Plantation.

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