Radio Script #1244

Little Talks on Common Things
June 8, 1980

To many of us older folk, World War II seems only yesterday, but the fact is that that war ended almost 35 years ago. I like to put on this program occasional incidents of that war and the peace agreements that followed it, when some Waterville man had a part in the incident.

One of Waterville’s most renown sons is Abbott Smith, son.of William Abbott Smith, long the distinguished pastor of the Waterville Congregational Church, and Abbott himself is the author of the recently published history of that church.

Abbott Smith graduated from Colby in 1926, then was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he received the coveted B.Litt degree. He had notable service in the Navy in World War II and subsequently did historical work for that branch of the service. After a brief period of college teaching, he entered the service of the Central Intelligence Agency, and rose to the position of chief analyst, in which capacity he was responsible to analyze and interpret all messages received from CIA agents, as they sifted down to his department after original review. Abbott retired only a few years ago, and before the CIA came under attack in connection with Chile, Watergate and other episodes. He now makes his home in Boothbay, Maine.

In 1946 Abbott Smith was stationed in Vienna, and he gives the following amusing account of the first annual celebration there of the liberation from Nazi control in 1945. At the time of the celebration Abbott wrote this memorandum: “Yesterday the Viennese celebrated their liberation of a year ago, with much parading and milling around, and no small amount of general political and international complication. If they celebrated too much the Western allies would be mad. If they didn’t celebrate enough the Russians would be very much annoyed. So they hung out red banners on which one could see, inadequately covered with red dye, the remains of white circles with swastikas inside them, a pretty piece of unintentional symbolism. The four Commanders-in-Chief (British, French, Russian and American) had to review the parade, and it was dreadful trying to decide where they should start from to go to the reviewing stand. If they came from the Allies Commission building, it wouldn’t give credit enough to one ally, the Russians. If they came from the Soviet Headquarters at the Imperial Hotel, it would give the Russians too much credit. At last the British made a suggestion acceptable to all. It was that the four Commanders should descend by parachute from the top of the United Nations building. That was accepted, and the four top commanders came to that Austrian parade from out of the air.”

Among Abbott Smith’s writings is a book on indentured servants for which he did a great deal of research, especially in his native Maine. Like all researchers he ran across many incidents that had nothing to do with his particular research, but proved to be worth recording. Abbott says that, when going through several volumes of the collection of the Maine Historical Society, he encountered two religious entries of the Waterville area that may give a chuckle to today’s generation.

In 1789 there was a complaint in Sidney that no good sermon had been preached in that town for a year, and the people wanted a real preacher. The other item was that a Baptist preacher in Fairfield assured his listeners that if a man stole $500 and got converted the same night, his sins were forgiven and he might continue in possession and enjoyment
of the $500 without guilt.

One of Maine’s truly historic towns is Castine. All of the early 16th century maps – Rosier’s, Captain John Smith’s, and those of the French explorers, clearly show the outline of Penobscot Bay and the big river flowing into it. The point where grew up the settlement that became Castine was called by the Indians Pentagoet. When the white men came, it was a village of the Penobscot Indians, a people to whom the whites gave the name Tarratines, a name that is still preserved in the well known Tarratine Club of Bangor.

How long the Castine area had been known to explorers before any white settlement was made is only speculation, but we are confident that several had see it before 1600, and there is evidence that it was visited by Weymouth, John Smith, and other Englishmen during the early years of the 17th century.

By the middle of the 18th century, a few years before the American Revolution, Castine was well known to sailors and even by Boston merchants by quite a different name – Bagaduce, an Indian word meaning “no good cove,” or “bad harbor.” Since Castine has a very good harbor, that certainly demands an explanation. There was a local Indian tradition that, in some remote past two canoes filled with Indian men, women and children had overturned in a squall and all occupants had drowned. Hence the harbor was a place of sorrow, a bad, a no-good place.

The first Europeans known to have landed at Castine were not British but French. Champlain planted there the flag of France in 1604 yet even before that it had been a drying place for the fishing fleets of several nationalities. In 1613 France was determined to make a settlement at the place, and a colonizing group was sent out from Brest. They landed, however, not at Castine, but upon Mount Desert Island. Yet in the next year, 1614, when Captain John Smith stopped at Castine, he found a few French cabins. When the first permanent settlement was made in 1629, it was from neither France nor England, but by people already on this side of the Atlantic, the Pilgrim Colony of Plymouth. That was the year when Plymouth got the exclusive rights of trade with the Kennebec Indians and established a trading post at Augusta. Their trading rights in the Penobscot area were more tenuous, but such as they were, they enabled the Pilgrims to set up another post at Castine, and that little post was soon surrounded by a small group of settlers’ cabins.

Then in 1623 the French took over. A French vessel entered the harbor when the trading master and many of the men at Castine were on a trip to Boston for supplies to continue trade with the Indians. Taking advantage of the unusual opportunity, the French captain seized the post, looted it, then sailed away. The Pilgrims were never able to reestablish the post, and in 1635 the governor of French Canada put a garrison at the place. In the next 20 years the French were in firm control.

In 1655 Castine changed hands again. In England, King Charles I had been dethroned and executed, and the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell controlled the government. Cromwell issued orders that the port of Pentagoet should be taken out of French hands. The Massachusetts Bay government obeyed the order and for the next dozen years until 1667 British possession was supreme. When, in that year, the Treaty of Breda ended one of the many wars between England and France, the whole province of Nova Scotia was ceded to the French, and at that time Nova Scotia included all of what is now the part of Maine east of the Penobscot River.

In that same year, 1667, there came to Penobscot Bay the great leader who would give his name to the town, Baron Jean Vincent de Castine, a native of aleron, a small Franch town at the foot of the Pyrenees. Counting on the security of the Treaty of Breda, Castine built a frame house on the peninsula at Pentagoet, strengthened the fort and armed it with a dozen big guns. Baron Castine became so popular with the local Indians that they regarded him as a god. He was both feared and bitterly hated by the English, especially because he supplied the Indians friendly to him with muskets to use against the British. In 1692 the Massachusetts government launched a plan to kidnap Castine, but the plot failed.

In 1703 when it became apparent that the Massachusetts Government did not intend to respect the Treaty of Breda, and by sheer force of numbers was likely to prevail along Penobscot Bay, Baron Castine returned to France taking with him what an old record describes as “3 old canoes of good, dug gold.” He never returned to America.

A half-breed son of the Baron, named Anselm, the result-of Castine’s liason with an Indian girl, became a chief of the Penobscots (or at least a branch called the Tarratines) and received a militia commission from the King of France. He did boast a splendid French uniform, but in other reports he was more Indian than French. He served as an officer in the French attack on Port Royal in Nova Scotia in 1707.

To keep the record straight, let us now go back for a moment to the year 1676. At that time a third nation entered the picture. From their settlement at New Amsterdam, now the city of New York, the Dutch sent an expedition to Penobscot Bay, captured the fort and took possession of the port. They obviously wanted a share in the lucrative fur trade but Dutch supremacy lasted less than a year. From the Bay of Fundy the French sent a small fleet, captured fort and town, and was in undisputed possession.

Meanwhile the Massachusetts Bay government had in 1678 purchased from the heirs of Ferdinando Gorges all the land that Gorges had received by royal charter in Maine. Although it was questionable that the purchase gave Massachusetts title to land as far east as Penobscot Bay, the Massachusetts governor demanded that the French surrender the fort at Castine and leave the Bay. When the French refused, the Governor personally went from Boston to Castine in an armed frigate. The French fled to the woods, and the Massachusetts party seized ammunition and supplies. They then notified the French commander that, if he would return to Castine and swear allegiance to the King of England, his personal property would be returned, because the captured loot had included furniture and clothing that belonged to the commander when he took flight. Soon the Council in Boston was at odds with the Governor, the notorious Andros, and that controversy allowed the French to return to Castine without any thought of swearing allegiance to the British king.

In 1690 a Maine man of historic fame came on the scene. He was Sir William Phipps, a native of Woolwich near the mouth of the Kennebec. Phipps had won fame and fortune by salvaging the treasure of an early 17th century Spanish galleon wrecked in the West Indies, and in gratitude the King of England had made Phipps a knight. When he turned his attention to the trouble between French and English in Maine, Phipps proceeded to subdue the whole French province of Nova Scotia or Acadia, all the way from the Penobscot to Port Royal. That was the end of French domination on Penobscot Bay, and for 75 years until just before the American Revolution, Castine saw comparative quiet and escaped the Indian raids made on other Maine towns during the first half of the 18th century.

When Governor Pownal, builder of Fort Richmond on the Kennebec and Fort Pownal on the Penobscot, came to Castine in 1759, he gave the following account of the place: “Went in the ship Massachusetts to Pentagoet with Captain Argyll and twenty men. Found the old, abandoned fort and some ruined, deserted houses. Hoisted the King’s colors and drank the King’s health.”

The next year Governor Pownal announced that 50 families in Boston were ready to go to Castine as permanent settlers. Naturally with its fine harbor and its strategic site near the mouth of the Penobscot, Castine saw much action during the Revolution. The most important engagement, though it was celebrated last year on the 200th anniversary of its occurance, was a bad defeat for the Americans. It was the ill-fated Penobscot expedition, the story of which had already been told on this program.

And now we must say goodbye for today.

Year: 1980