In case you missed it, this month marks the 400th anniversary of the Waymouth expedition, an English reconnaissance mission to midcoast Maine that yielded the first sustained contact between English explorers and Maine’s native inhabitants. The official chronicle of the 1605 expedition, written by crewman James Rosier, remains one of the finest sources of information about what the coast and its people were like before the arrival of European settlers.
But the Waymouth voyage was hardly successful on its own terms. The 29-man expedition had been conceived and financed by a group of prominent nobles who were seeking to establish the first English colony on the North American mainland. The investors, including Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, and England’s Chief Justice, Sir John Popham, hired Captain George Waymouth to explore the North American coastline, gather information about the native inhabitants and scout out a site for the planned colony. Ultimately, the expedition may have doomed, rather than helped, this colonial enterprise.
Waymouth came to Maine by accident. He arrived off New England in early May, intending to explore the sandy shores of southern Massachusetts, which another English expedition had visited briefly two years earlier. But a powerful storm drove his ship, ARCHANGEL, deep into the Gulf of Maine where, running short of food, firewood and water, he made landfall on Monhegan instead. The rocky coast dominating the northern horizon looked promising: Maine, by a fluke of meteorology, would become the focus of English colonization efforts for more than a decade.
At Monhegan, Waymouth’s men caught a remarkable quantity of cod, gawked at the enormous eggs of the (now-extinct) Great Auk, and filled their casks from a freshwater spring. But, finding the anchorage awkward, they shifted their base of operations to an anchorage between Allen and Benner Islands near what is now Port Clyde. It was there, in what we now call Georges Harbor, that Waymouth took actions that helped ensure the failure of the Popham Colony two years later.
Ten days after their arrival, a lookout on the ARCHANGEL saw three birch bark canoes entering the anchorage. In the canoes were two-dozen Sheepscot Indians, who had paddled over from their camp at Pemaquid to hunt for seabirds and Auk eggs on the islands. The Sheepscots were wary, but curious.
Over the next few days, Waymouth and the Indians slowly built trust, exchanging gifts, trading goods and even holding dinners for one another. The Indians held a beach party of sorts, at which Rosier and others smoked their tobacco from a pipe made from a gigantic lobster claw. The Indians, for their part, were extremely fond of boiled peas and, inexplicably, the ship’s rock-hard, four month-old biscuits. Rosier wrote of “the kinde civility we found in [these] people” from whom “we little expected any spark of humanity.”
Unfortunately, the English were not as gracious. After a few days of increasingly friendly relations, Waymouth ordered his men to kidnap a group of six Indian men at the anchorage. Five were captured, stowed in the hold, and were carried off to England when the ship sailed the following week. One got away, alerting Indians far and wide of the Englishmen’s treachery. (The French explorer, Samuel de Champlain, sailing into the mouth of the Kennebec two weeks later, was told by Chief Anassou that an English crew “had killed five savages of this river, under cover of friendship.”)
Back in England, the captured Indians were turned over to Sir Popham and a colleague of his, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who kept them as houseguests, teaching them English and learning what they could about their home country. One captive, Nahanada, was sent back to Maine in 1606, as a guide for Martin Pring, who allowed the Indian to return to his people at the end of the visit.
In 1607, Popham’s nephew, George Popham, led the actual colonization mission, intending to build a fortified trading station at the mouth of the Kennebec, and took along another captive Indian, Skidwarres, as his guide. But when the English made contact with the Sheepscots shortly after making landfall, they received a hostile reception. The Pemaquid band was by then led by none other than Nahanada, who was none too happy with the English. The Sheepscots withdrew into the woods without saying goodbye, taking Skidwarres with them.
During the cold winter that followed, the Sheepscots, Kennebecs and other allied Wabanaki bands remained wary of the English as a result of Waymouth’s kidnappings. Indians would later tell a Jesuit missionary that during the winter, the Popham colonists became abusive, beating up Indians or setting their dogs upon them. At some point, a fight broke out between Indians and English inside the fort, resulting in an explosion or fire that destroyed the colony’s storehouse. Needless to say the fur trade with the Indians was frozen in its tracks.
Not surprisingly, when a supply ship arrived at Popham Beach in the spring of 1608, the surviving colonists resolved to leave with it. George Popham had died during the winter, and his deputy, Raleigh Gilbert, was eager to leave for England to claim an inheritance. Those who couldn’t fit aboard the supply ship sailed back to England in the VIRGINIA, a ship they’d built themselves the previous fall.
Things might have been different for the Popham colonists if the Waymouth party hadn’t soured Anglo-Wabanaki relations in 1605. Had it been successful, the Popham Colony would have pre-dated both Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation, and Popham Beach would have taken Plymouth Rock’s seat in the pantheon of American mythology.
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(Corrections Department: In my piece on Maine media ownership, I erroneously included the Lincoln County News in a list of Crescent/Courier-owned weeklies; that should have read the Lincoln County Weekly. Apologies to Chris Roberts and the staff at the independently-owned News for the error.)
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Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier. He lives in Portland and has a website at www.colinwoodard.com.