lonial economy. As a true picture of the continent emerged during the first decade of the seventeenth century, the possibilities of commercial exploitation crystallized in the minds of colonizers and their merchant-backers. Their objectives, for better or worse, decisively shaped Maine's colonial development. Thus Maine's environment--in this case, in the form of a European catalog of potential commodities--remains a central theme of the colonial period.
The period of European exploration also brought rival land claims, setting the stage for imperial wars that kept Maine and much of the North American frontier in turmoil throughout the colonial period. Other forms of conflict originated in this crucial period: clashes between Indians and Europeans and factionalism among the European colonizers themselves. These struggles--between French and English, Indians and Europeans, and among the settlers themselves--helped shape the history of colonial Maine.
European Background to the Age of Exploration
Numerous histories of Maine or its coastal communities indicate that around AD 1,000, Norse explorers sailed along the Maine coast and may have landed in the area. The evidence for these brave claims, however, is not terribly convincing. The ancient Norse sagas that describe New World exploration offer no precise geographic reference points, and time after time much-heralded "Norse" remains have proved to be no more than misread native or colonial objects, or even outright frauds. The eleventh-century Norse penny found at the Goddard site at Naskeag Point in Brooklin, Maine, was a different matter. Excavated in 1961 and reexamined in the late 1970s, the coin was found to be authentic. But as Bruce Bourque pointed out in chapter 1, the best explanation is that it was acquired by northern Indians and carried south to Maine along prehistoric trade routes. There is still no convincing evidence the Norse visited the Maine coast.
What can we say with certainty about the Norse travels? Their discovery and occupation of Greenland has been long known, and in 1960 Norwegian archaeologist Helge Ingstaad found an eleventh- or twelfth-century Norse occupation site at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. Since then, other probable Norse artifacts have been retrieved from Labrador at similar latitudes. No artifactual evidence has been found that verifies voyages farther south, although it is conceivable that some of the early Norse voyagers traveled down as far as the St. Lawrence basin. We just don't know.
Ultimately, the extent of Norse explorations is of minimal historical consequence, since their discovery had little impact on European or American cultures. Medieval Europe at the time of the Norse discovery was simply too fragmented, too decentralized, and too conservative to take advantage of the exploits of the Vikings. Historically, it was not until the fifteenth century that western Europe was ready to expand outward, to probe beyond the limits of the known world. In contrast to the Norse landfall, the second discovery of the New World by Columbus was an epochal event, launching both Europe and America into a new age.
The age of exploration capped a period of vigorous political consolidation and modernization in Europe during which emerging nation states like Spain, Portugal, France, and England centralized political authority, reduced the power of the Church and the rural nobility, and developed bureaucracies capable of sustaining national programs. If the creation of powerful nation-states established the context for the age of exploration, the religious crusades of the late Middle Ages provided a motive. The great crusades of the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian peninsula, and the long struggle with the Ottoman Turks in northern and central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave intense religious import to the fifteenth-century exploration of the New World and the Far East.
A second motive, often inextricably entwined with the first, was the desire for commer