Radio Script #729

Little Talks on Common Things

May 7, 1967

As spring prepares us for summer, attention of Maine people and thousands of tourists will again be directed at the archeological work still progressing at Pemaquid. Those of my listeners who have visited the site know that, near Pemaquid Beach, between the Fort and Gilbert’s Lobster Pound, the Maine Archeological Society has unearthed the ruins of ancient Pemaquid. There have been revealed the walls of the old trading post of the 17th century, the old shipyard of the 18th, and hundreds of artifacts, not only of colonial times, but of even earlier Indian manufacture. Among the discoveries were two skeletons believed to have been both Indians.

Today I want to tell you something about ancient Pemaquid. Geographically the Pemaquid peninsula juts into the sea from Damariscotta to Pemaquid Point. Most of the area is in the present town of Bristol, and its settlements include Bristol, New Harbor, Pemaquid Harbor, Pemaquid Beach and Pemaquid Point. The whole area comprises a collection of Maine summer resorts. It has many links with Waterville. The leading real estate promoter of the Point was Waterville’s former mayor, Herbert C. Libby, and his son Carlyle Libby of Damariscotta still heads the company.

When a white man first Sighted the rocky promontory of Pemaquid Point no one knows. We do know that Basque fishermen were coming to Monhegan Island on regular voyages at least a hundred years before Columbus planted the cross on San Salvador. Vatican maps, once used by the fishing fleets, are dated as early as 1350, and expert cartologists have identified their island nation across the Atlantic as Monhegan. Monhegan is so near Pemaquid that certainly some of those fishermen must have sighted the Point, but we have no recorded evidence that they ever set foot on its shore. As one historian says: “No story has been preserved of those who came to Pemaquid for fish and furs before 1600. Yet Pemaquid could hardly have been unfamiliar to those who came and went for gain, who sheltered their vessels in the protection of New Harbor, and dried their fish on its shores. All we are sure of is that they made no settlement.”

The first recorded visit to Pemaquid by white men was on June 3, 1605, when George Weymouth, on his exploratory voyage for the Plymouth Company in England, sailed into New Harbor. A month later the French explorer, Champlain, rounded Pemaquid Point and sailed up the Sheepscot River as far as the modern Wiscasset.

The best known early settlement in Maine, although it was not permanent, did last for nearly a year. It was originally called the Sagadahoc settlement, but we know it by its more popular name, the Popham Colony. Its historical site is now well marked near Popham Beach, not far from the City of Bath. That settlement was the work of a British nobleman, Sir Raleigh Gilbert, and his friend, Captain George Popham. At the mouth of the Kennebec River they built a log fort and a cluster of buildings. The colonists were all men and they intended to get well established before bringing over women from England. The Maine winter was too much for them and in the summer of 1608 they departed for home.

In the previous summer, however, on August 8, 1607 Gilbert and Popham visited Pemaquid, made contact with the Indians, and bought furs. There is also an unconfirmed report that some 50 men of the Popham colony did not return to England, but started a new settlement at Pemaquid. If such a settlement was made, it did not last. When Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame stopped at New Harbor in 1614, he found no trace of white men. Smith spent some time at Monhegan, and in his account of the voyage he did say: “The first locality in New England (it was Smith who first used that name) well known to Englishmen was the region of Pemaquid.”

Well known also is the debt of the Pilgrims of 1620 to the Pemaquid region of Maine. It will be recalled that after that first terrible, starving winter, when the snows had melted, the Pilgrims were visited by an Indian who addressed them in English. Where did that Indian learn English speech? Had he learned it at Pemaquid, where he had known English traders for many years? It is even possible that he was one of several Indians taken to England when the Popham colonists returned in 1608. We know that at least three of those transported Red Men returned to their native land. If, as reported, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims to plant corn was indeed named Squanto, and he was introduced to the Pilgrims by Samoset, Squanto certainly came from Pemaquid.

How do we know that? Near the fish wharf and the lobster pound at New Harbor the traveler can now see a monument erected to memorialize the first deed of land executed in the New World. The inscription on the monument refers to the following deed: “I, Samoset, have sold to John Brown of New Harbor a tract of land beginning at Pemaquid Falls and running a direct course to the head of New Harbor, from thence to the south end of Muscongus island, taking in the island, and so running five and twenty miles into the country north and by east, and thence eight miles northwest and by west. and then turning and running south and by west to Pemaquid where first begun. July 15, 1625.” The payment for that big acreage was 50 skins.

There is no record to tell us exactly when John Brown came to Pemaquid, but we do know that he came from Bristol, England, and was the reason why, when the town was incorporated many years later, it was called Bristol. We do know that in 1625 Brown had been on the peninsula long enough to have the deed designate him as “John Brown of New Harbor”.

Very early the Pemaquid area became associated with Bristol, England. The year after Samoset deeded the land to John Brown, two merchants of the British Bristol, Robert Aldsworth and Gyles Elbridge purchased Monhegan Island and in 1631 they procured a royal patent to 12,000 acres at Pemaquid.

Contact between Plymouth and Pemaquid was early and persistent. The Indians Samoset and Squanto persuaded Bradford to send the Pilgrim shallop to Pemaquid for food supplies to be obtained from the fishing fleet in the spring of 1621. That there were several ships in that annual fleet is shown by the record of Christopher Levett, one of Ferdinando . Gorges’ explorers, who wrote in 1623: “I came to Cape Newaggen, where nine ships fished this year.” Newaggen, of course, was in the Boothbay-Southport region, but it was only a few miles from Pemaquid. Levett said that he met Indians who were on their way to Pemaquid to trade with “Mr. Witheridge, a master of a ship out of Barnstable”. When Levett wrote to Gorges in England that Pemaquid and Cape Newaggen had been granted to others, he probably referred to the settlement already made by John Brown at New Harbor.

Religious persecution in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had some influence on the settlements in Maine. One historian tells us: “In the 1640’s Maine furnished asylum for many religious exiles from Massachusetts Bay, while persecution for religious reasons was unknown in Maine.”

At least three of the exiled families settled near John Brown at Pemaquid. Maine’s first historian, Sullivan, whose book was published in 1795, a quarter of a century before Maine became a separate state, tells us: “The plantation of Pemaquid was settled from Boston. We do not know in what years or by what persons habitations at Pemaquid were first formed. Yet it must have been as early as 1623. ”

Sullivan was surely wrong. There is no evidence that John Brown was ever at Plymouth, and of course there was no settlement at Boston until 1630. The little evidence we have implies that John Brown came to Pemaquid directly from Bristol, England.

By 1640 a permanent settlement of several families was under way. In 1639 Gyles Elbridge had obtained a license to export 80 persons with provisions overseas for the support of his fishing plantation in New England. We know that Elbridge’s so-called fishing plantation was at Pemaquid. By 1650 Gyles’ son Thomas Elbridge was the sole proprietor of the Ellsworth-Elb~~~ge. pate~tand cal;Led himse If “merchant of Pemaqu d”. The patent passed through severa 1 hands until it became the property of Nicholas Davidson in 1657.

The first fort at Pemaquid was built as early as 1630, the very year that the Bay Colony started at Boston. It was a crude, wooden building surrounded by a stockade, with at least two blockhouses at corners. Its exact site is not definitely known, but there is evidence that it stood somewhere in the Pemaquid Beach area, not far from the site of the present stone fort. That crude fort was attacked and looted by the pirate Dixie Bull in 1632.

A larger and more substantial fortification was erected by the Massachusetts Governor, Sir Edmund Andros, in 1677. It was a wooden redoubt built on earthworks and had two guns. There was an outwork of two bastions, in each of which were two large guns, with another at the gate. The fort was garrisoned by 50 soldiers, had arms and supplies sufficient for eight months, and sent out a sloop with four guns to guard the coast and the fisheries. The fort was named Fort Charles.

The Maine historian Henry S. Burrage makes it plain why Gov. Andros should decide to fortify Pemaquid: “It was the most populous and most important of the eastern posts and one of the most accessible, and it had a sheltered harbor. A fort built there would obstruct the progress of savages over their ancestral trail between the Penobscot and the Kennebec. When the Penobscot Indians went to join the Canibas of the Kennebec, they paddled down the shores to New Harbor, then carried overland to the beach at Pemaquid, re-embarking and proceeding west from there, thus avoiding the turbulent waters around Pemaquid Point, the most exposed and roughest on the coast.”

When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, Pemaquid was an obvious point of attack. It did not fall, however, until several years after King Philip was dead. In 1689 Fort Charles was successfully attacked by Indians, inspired by Baron Castine’s French, and razed to the ground.

In 1692 a Maine man became the royal governor of Massachusetts. Born to a poor family in the tiny settlement at Woolwich, William Phips had risen to such fame that he was knighted by the king and appointed to head the king’s province of Massachusetts. In 1694 Phips rebuilt in even larger dimensions old Fort Charles at Pemaquid and renamed it Fort William Henry.

Four years later, in 1698, the French captured the fort and it lay in waste for thirty years. By 1720 there were only a few scattered cabins at Pemaquid. In 1729 David Dunbar arrived, with the King’s command to rebuild Fort William Henry. It was again given a new name, Fort Frederick, and in 1750 was commanded by John North, who was to become the father-in-law of William McKechnie, true founder of Waterville.

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 ended the French and Indian Wars and at last freed Pemaquid from the danger of frequent Indian raids. The town of Bristol was incorporated in 1765, and more than a hundred years later, in 1872, there was created the Pemaquid Monument Association, which rebuilt Fort Frederick as a memorial that still stands facing out to sea at Pemaquid Beach.

Year: 1967