The European Discovery of Maine
Edwin A. Churchill
Maine was host to a number of dynamic cultures before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century. Our review of these cultures illustrates the forces of change in the region: an environment rebounding after the glacial retreat and responding to climatic swings and the periodic arrival of new ideas, people, and goods from other areas. As we enter the historic period, with its comparatively rich sources of written documentation, our chronological focus narrows to the century and a quarter after Columbus made landfall in the New World, an intense period of change in population, culture, and land use along the coast of Maine. Despite the changed perspective, the themes are familiar ones.
Although the infusion of new ideas, peoples, and goods into the region is part of a much older story, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the impact of these new exogenous forces became overwhelming and indeed devastating to existing Indian peoples. The balance between local stability and outside pressures for change shifted dramatically; in the courts and countinghouses of Europe, enthusiasm for New World colonization waxed and waned, and European contact with the coast of Maine pulsed accordingly. Thus the age of exploration served as prelude to a long period during which European events dominated colonial Maine. It is appropriate, therefore, that this episode in Maine's history begin with a discussion of events in Europe.
Between 1524 and 1618, Europeans made their first tentative ventures into the Gulf of Maine. They returned again and again to flesh out their understanding of the region; finally they planted a few scattered settlements along the coast. In dramatic fashion, these events reinforce the point that historic change in regional cultures often comes from the outside. The arrival of European explorers and settlers profoundly altered the human forces in the region.
European imperatives propelling the age of exploration formed the basis of the region's colonial 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 