The Edge of Maine Read online

  That the Popham Colony seemed to its sponsors to be such an unalloyed failure may have been coastal Maine’s ultimate good luck. England resigned itself to the paucity near the Kennebec of precious metals to be mined. So mid-coast Maine was left to the fishermen who had used its waters long before Popham and Gilbert planted their king’s flag at Fort St. George. In fact, European fishermen were so well established in the Gulf of Maine that the Abnaki were found by France’s early explorers to know a kind of pidgin Basque, which they’d learned from Spaniards come from the Bay of Biscay to catch and salt cod.* Monhegan was a fishing camp long before the Popham Colony was attempted. And Damariscove Island, near the mouths of the Sheepscot and Kennebec Rivers, was a busy port of call for transient fishermen. After the Virginia colony took root, its seafaring merchants made their way up the coast to Damariscove to trade for fish, and eventually in other commodities. One contemporary noted that servants brought to Damariscove were “sold up and down like horses.” Christopher Levett, an English visitor to the coast a few years after Popham Colony failed, was surprised to be addressed as “cozen Levett” by a sagamore of the Abnaki, and to learn that the sagamore’s preferred curse was “a pox on his hounds!”

  The English Parliament, responsive to the appetite of its belligerent navy for seamen, regarded its colonial fisheries as an apprenticeship for its crews, and encouraged the enterprise of catching and curing fish by declaring Wednesdays and Saturdays to be “fish days” at home. Cod was the staple: Easy to cure by simple drying (owing to its low fat content), Atlantic cod were so plentiful in the Gulf of Maine that the bottom feeders—gulping whole lobsters and squid at their preferred depth of twenty to more than a hundred fathoms, and growing themselves as fat as two hundred pounds and as long as six feet—were difficult not to catch. Fishermen are naturally secretive, but the plenty being harvested from the Gulf of Maine and its rivers did not go long unnoticed, inasmuch as fishermen are also naturally self-celebrating as to the size of their catch. James Rosier, in his 1605 expedition with George Waymouth, boasted of having caught in a few hours, using three hooks baited with cod, “fish enough for our whole Company for three days.” By 1620 the cod catch was so spectacular that a single shipment of 173,000 fish in that year from Monhegan weighed more than 170 tons and fetched at market $75,000.

  Also impossible to disregard was the Kennebec’s richness of forests. The experience of having built the Virginia, straight-masted and sturdy, made more than a few pennies drop across the sea, and some of them dropped at the court of King James. (A London lawsuit in the messy aftermath of the failure of the Popham Colony specified that the Gift of God had interrupted its rescue of the colonists by a detour to the Azores to unload and sell a shipment of thirty-three masts.) Having recently survived the Spanish Armada, the British Navy was in urgent need of warships, and England’s forests were running low on old-growth trees suitable for masts. England, requiring new masts as America today needs oil, was already at the mercy of imports, buying pricey timber from Scandinavia. There for the cutting was such an abundance of huge first-growth white pines—as great as thirty-eight inches in diameter and 115 feet in height—that King James marked them as his own personal best, engraving them with the sign of a broad arrow axed with three strokes into their trunks. This Broad Arrow Policy, at first applied only to trees—usually white pines exceeding two feet in diameter at a height of one foot from the ground—reserved for the crown’s ships, soon inclined toward wanton claims. By the end of the seventeenth century colonial agents of the king were scratching broad arrows on the masts of American-built and American-owned ships that had unluckily caught the agents’ fancy while sailing in American waters.

  A singular synergy was begun. To fish and to trade fish, ships were needed. For the ships timber was needed. As the forests were cleared along the banks of the Kennebec, farming flourished. An auxiliary benefit of the furious chopping and sawing was the comforting illusion of security: The cunning savages who used the forests to ambush white men and women would be foiled by clear-cutting. (The Abnaki, depending in their attacks on surprise, inasmuch as they were invariably outgunned, were reflexively accused of treachery, a charge akin to our country’s distaste for the tactics of the Vietcong.) Bath, like other towns along the river, had a “mast depot.” Huge masts were loaded aboard ships bound for England through ports cut in the bow or stern of the ship. Once loaded, the vessel’s port was planked over and caulked tight. The cutting of white pine, begun in earnest in the 1630s, ended in the exhaustion of the resource by the 1800s.

  English traders working the Kennebec and its neighboring region played the Native Americans as best they could. They continued to angle for beaver pelts, shipping tons of them to England during the 1630s. The slick settlers were no match for London slickers, who managed to keep the New World traders so deeply in debt to the company store that “despite beaver exports worth ten thousand pounds, they still owed twelve hundred pounds to their creditors,” as Neil Rolde tells, quoting William Bradford to the effect that Bradford’s fellow-colonial bumpkins had been “hoodwincte.”

  What happened to the Abnaki was more ruinous than any hoodwinking. That history of imperial greed, violence, and cynicism is not my subject in these pages, thanks be. All by now know the litany: rum, gunpowder, smallpoxed blankets, ethnic cleansing, misappropriation in the guise of godly zeal, false dealing, broken promises. The white settlers’ inventory of iniquities spurred by ungoverned appetite was played out here as elsewhere on our continent, according to the iron laws of Manifest Destiny. Now the scarce and scattered survivors of the Algonquin Nation* along Maine’s coast angle for recompense in the form of gambling casinos or liquid natural gas depots Down East. But when the Kennebec was beginning its heyday of shipbuilding, and Bath was a showplace of luxurious colonial architecture, the Abnaki—with the encouragement of the French (toujours)—burned the town to the ground, not in a single conflagration but in serial raids. Never mind, it was thriving so grandly that Bath rebuilt itself into a showplace of Federal architecture. Across the river from Bath, in Woolwich, at Days Ferry, the Abnaki attacked the Hammond family, killed the father and son and marched Mrs. Hammond and her young children to Quebec, where they were sold as slaves to the French, who preferred to title their slaves “converts.” Such raids were commonplace, as routine as terrorism in the Middle East, during the hundred years of war between the French and English, and the Kennebec, marking a boundary between the enemies, was liable to flare up at any time between 1675 and 1763. When these wars began, there were an estimated three thousand Abnaki in Maine and six thousand Maine settlers, of whom a thousand were killed and many hundreds taken captive. The settlers, increasingly aggressive in their own raids, more than evened the score during the final fifty years of the struggle, decimating the coastal Maine tribes. When the French settled with the English at the Treaty of Paris, the bloodshed ended at once. As usual, the ones in the middle had been torn apart.

  DURING THE 1800S THE KENNEBEC WAS ONE OF THE most productive shipbuilding centers in the world. Bath was the young country’s fifth busiest port and Kennebec vessels, accounting for one-quarter of all registered tonnage among Maine traders just before the Civil War, traversed the globe. In Lighthouses of Maine, Bill Caldwell quotes a couple of snippets taken from the Bath Daily Times of the 1880s, routine reports of comings and goings on the Kennebec: “Yesterday on the passenger steamer Henry Morrison, we counted 27 schooners at Bath, 13 more between Bath and Richmond, 55 more between Richmond and Hallowell, and two more docking at Augusta.” The other item reports that during March 1884, a single month, “the in-and-out traffic on the Kennebec was 892 vessels,” comprising schooners (757), sloops (39), barks (7), brigs(3), and steamers (86).

  Maine didn’t produce an impressive variety of goods, but what it did provide was in wide demand: pine masts and timber, limestone and granite, and later, when its mills and factories were thriving, wool and shoes. New England sassafras root was prized as a specific ag
ainst the French pox, the name the English of course gave to syphilis. Ships from Maine would typically journey south to Charleston or Savannah and pick up cotton, before crossing to Liverpool, say, to unload this freight and return to New England with paying passengers. Kennebec ships carried spruce and pine for railroad ties to the treeless pampas, returning from the Rio Plata with ox hides to supply Maine’s shoe factories; these skins, even those that had been tanned, stunk something awful, and green hides, swarming with insects, were almost as miserable a cargo as the beef bones brought back from the pampas to be ground into fertilizer. From the west coast of South America, Maine vessels fetched guano, so it was little wonder that despite Maine’s strict laws against slaving, many a captain and crew did a bit of outlaw trading. In a typical trade with the West Indies, a ship might take down salted cod and pine boards, returning with sugar, rum, molasses, cigars, and—after a detour to a southern port—human beings. From Africa they brought palm oil, gold dust, and ivory. To China the tall ships took opium and furs, returning with chinaware and tea. From India they fetched linseed, indigo, jute for gunnysacks, and cockroaches huge enough to terrify a Boston waterfront dog; to India—most remarkable cargo of all—they carried Kennebec ice. The first shipment of ice from New England to Calcutta was tried in May 1833, and after a passage of six months, twenty thousand miles aboard the Tuscany, two-thirds of the 180-ton cargo arrived still frozen.*

  Along the Kennebec ice was big business. One can see the simple appeal once the transaction has been described, but whoever first reckoned to peddle ice to people jaded by sunshine has to have been a Yankee, with Yankee ingenuity. The pioneer of the ice trade was a Bostonian, Frederic Tudor, who cut blocks of frozen water from his Massachusetts pond in Saugus, hauled three hundred tons of it by teams of horses to nearby Charlestown, and shipped it by his brig Favorite from Boston to Martinique during a yellow fever epidemic there in 1805. Amid gales of laughter from Boston’s competing merchants, Tudor’s first go at the enterprise put him in the hole, an almost life-changing loss. Melting was a problem, of course, and the novelty of the initiative didn’t help. But Tudor, in his twenties, was startlingly indifferent to the opinions of others, and he tried again. Following the War of 1812, the English government forgave Tudor’s payment of colonial port duties and granted him monopolies in the ice trade to Jamaica. The Tudor Company received a similar dispensation from Spain in return for shipping ice to Havana (Tudor wrote, “drink, Spaniards, and be cool,” so that he might keep himself warm and comfy), and soon it was competing with rival New England enterprises to sell ice to the colonies of Barbados, Trinidad, and Martinique. Added to these markets, Tudor and his competitors sold ice to consumers in Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. At first all of these markets were served from ships home-ported in Boston, but by 1820 word of the alchemy that was translating a wintertime nuisance into a valued commodity had spread north and east, and Maine made its fruitful entry into the ice boom.

  The creation myth has an air of apocrypha about it, but responsible historians tell it, so here goes, from William Hutchinson Rowe’s Maritime History of Maine:

  Sometime around 1820, William Bradstreet came up the Kennebec in his little 125-ton brig Orion. It was late in the fall, and she was frozen in at Dearborn’s wharf in what was then Pittston. When the river broke up in the spring and the heavy cakes of ice floated about the brig, they were pulled aboard and stowed in the hold, and the Orion sailed for Baltimore with a cargo that cost nothing and sold for $700. This was the first shipment of “Kennebec River Ice,” a name soon to be familiar the world over. It was a business which put millions of dollars into the pockets of Maine farmers, merchants, and shipowners. For years it was Maine’s surest crop. In 1890, when the State House was remodeled, a picture [of an ice harvester] was placed on the stained-glass windows of the old senate chamber.

  By the 1830s icehouses were being built all along both banks of the Kennebec, below the head of navigation at Augusta and above Thorne Point in north Bath, where the sea’s tidal reach ceases to salt the water. In the harvest’s heyday half a century later, many of these structures would be airplane-hangar huge, as grand as seven hundred feet in length, forty feet wide, and stacked thirty feet to their eaves with frozen blocks. Farmers had earlier built small ice sheds to preserve butter, milk, meat. The huge riverside ice warehouses were often double-walled structures, with sawdust between the walls serving as insulation, assisted by straw or spruce boughs laid under and over the slabs of ice—uniformly twenty-two by forty-four inches and a foot thick—cut from the river. Kennebec ice—which competed with Penobscot River and Hudson River ice—was prized for its assumptive purity. The river enjoyed the profitable outcome of brand recognition: The product, clear and without bubbles, was known as “Kennebec diamonds.” Encouraged by reliably bitter winter temperatures, an idle workforce of farmers educated in the methods of food preservation and the tools of harvesting, with teams of horses and neighboring lumberjacks and sawyers to cut ice, enjoyed their situation near a river up which deep-draft sailing ships could venture. Gently sloping riverbanks combined with deep water close to shore made for a geographic characteristic as favorable to ice loading as to shipbuilding. An abundance of sawmills along the river shaped timber to shipbuilders and sold sawdust to icehouses.

  F. H. Forbes, in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, entertainingly narrates the history of New England’s ice trade, nearing its peak as he wrote in 1875. To stimulate the already far-flung and avid market for ice to preserve butter and to cool fevers and to make iced drinks and ice cream, in 1842 Jacob Hittinger, a Boston speculator in Maine ice harvests, invaded the land of warm bitter and scotch whiskey neat. This was a meticulously planned attack, undertaken with an advance guard of American bartenders whom Hittinger had “initiated into the mysteries of mixing juleps, smashes, cocktails, and other drinks known only in Yankeeland.” Preceding the arrival of the ice-laden bark Sharon at a Thames wharf, Hittinger used his letters of introduction to officers of the better London clubs to display his bar-keeps’ wiles and lure the clubmen from their tepid beverages. Despite an encouraging brush fire of publicity from Fleet Street, then as now longing for novelty, nothing was doing. Ice “appeared to them a strange fish that no one dared to touch,” as Hittinger told Forbes:

  My feelings were just about the temperature of my ice, and wasting as rapidly. At last I was introduced to the Chairman or President of the Fishmongers’ Association, an association which I was not long in discovering had the merit of wealth, if not social position. He was sociable, and seemed to comprehend my position if I didn’t his. Matters were soon arranged; a magnificent hall or saloon had been secured; I ascertained that my barkeepers, through constant drill, had attained the correct sleight of hand in mixing the drinks. The hour had arrived. The hall was long and brilliantly lighted. After the company was seated, the chairman introduced me and the subject of the evening’s discussion. Now, thought I, I am all right. At a given signal the well-trained waiters appeared, laden with the different drinks. The effect was gorgeous, and I expected an ovation that no Yankee had ever had. But, alas!…

  Hittinger, after a hasty embarkation for Boston, tallied his substantial losses. England had used ice before Hittinger’s arrival, and would use it again, sparingly, but it fished its paltry cubes out of its own ponds and lakes, or imported them from Norway.

  Tudor was nothing if not a promoter, and to drum up business in hot-weather ports he not only entered into ruinous price wars with his competitors but supplied the know-how and manpower to build icehouses in which to store the commodity. Other speculations in this product ended badly: Tudor borrowed three thousand dollars at 40 percent to ship an ice-packed cargo of tropical fruit from Cuba to Boston, but the dunnage of marsh hay packed too tightly in the ship’s hold began to smoke, threatening spontaneous combustion, and was jettisoned. On his return to Boston, Tudor wrote, his “creditors at once became active.”

  The ice market was elsewhere. New
York consumed as much as a million tons per year. By the 1880s ice was only incidentally a luxury in the big cities. It preserved food and medicine from spoiling, rescuing sweltering tenement dwellers as well as nabobs from epidemics, and was considered late in the nineteenth century by the urban poor to be a staple as necessary as bread and milk. In 1886 the Kennebec shipped south a million tons, carried on a thousand ships, sold at ten dollars per ton, picked up aboard the vessel. When the mild winter south of Maine prevented the Hudson from freezing in 1872, there was jubilation from Bath to Augusta.*

  Robert P. Tristram Coffin, born in 1892 on a saltwater farm southeast of Brunswick a few miles from the Kennebec, was that river’s most ardent laureate. In poems, essays, novels, and histories, the Bowdoin professor celebrated the river, most vividly in Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (1937), the most exuberant chapter being “Kennebec Crystals.” Nothing heats the blood of a Maine writer like a midwinter cold snap blown in from the Arctic on a northwest gale, “good freezing nights for starting the crop of the water.” While Coffin was still in grade school, the market monkey-business of voracious monopolists such as Charles Morse of the Knickerbocker Ice Company* had outraged consumers, and the spread of electric refrigeration was quenching the boom forever (the last sea shipment of ice left the Kennebec in 1919), but Coffin had seen a few harvests and heard his family and neighbors tell about the very good and not-so-old days. “Down Hudson, up Kennebec! In the morning, there would be no more waves running on the river. The water looked like a long, dark looking glass dropped between the hills. In a hundred sheds the grindstones were humming.” Humming was right: Schools let out so that kids could help their parents mark and cut and haul the ice. The river ice required a thickness of at least a foot, and more reliably fifteen inches. So many hands were demanded during the ice rush that migrant laborers would materialize at the Kennebec immediately following the first cold snap and deep freeze. They hopped freight trains in the later years, or walked the tracks. They’d put up in boardinghouses in Bath, if they could afford it, or—if they couldn’t—sleep in icehouses as inviting as an English public school dormitory. From the time they arrived at the river until they left, to walk the ice they wore steel-pronged boots, which were hard on Bath’s floors and wooden sidewalks. In “The Harvest of Diamonds,” an essay revisiting the ice boom written fifteen years after Kennebec: Cradle of Americans, Coffin describes the arrangements: Bedded in huge sheds built by the ice companies, each migrant worker was supplied with a blanket. A fellow was hired to keep the one woodstove fired through the night. “The other men lay down in windrows in their calked boots.” Packed like fish in a can, they were obliged to indulge their restlessness concurrently. “‘Break joints!’ was the cry, and then men rolled over in unison. The workers slept with their picks, too.” The picks, employed to break ice and to save their lives if they broke through, were plenty sharp, but every spring a dozen or so bodies clad in layers of wool and shod in calked boots would pop to the surface near Popham Beach. For the risks they ran these vagrants were paid less than two dollars per day, and of that would give back fifty cents for a bed and three meals. At the tail end of the job chain were boys who followed the horses and swept their turds from the river’s surface. And the least shall be best: Without the sweeper’s care a Cuban mojito chilled by Kennebec ice would have been a less tasty highball.