BRISTOL, England – We’ll be marking a lot of 400th anniversaries along the coast in the coming years. Last year it was the 400th anniversary of the first failed European colony on our coast (a French one on an island near Calais). This year the residents of Thomaston celebrated English explorer George Waymouth’s 1605 landing thereabouts. In 2007 the Popham Colony – England’s unsuccessful first attempt to colonize New England – turns 400, and not long after that English fishermen started living year ’round on Damariscove and Monhegan. Maine, as a European society, is turning 400, but nobody is really sure of the place and date of its birth.
Oddly enough, the strongest candidate for Maine’s birthplace is probably here, on the other side of the Atlantic, in he English West Country. For the ports of Bristol and Plymouth were the primary staging areas for the exploration and colonization of the Maine Coast in the early 17th century, their residents providing a large proportion of the ships, crews, colonists, fishermen, captains, and investment capital for these ventures.
Back then, Bristol was emerging as the second most important port in England, a bit surprising given the fact that it lay more than eight miles from the sea, on the banks of a muddy, narrow river afflicted with 40-foot tides. But it was also an extremely protected anchorage located at a primary crossroads between England and Wales, on an estuary that, unlike London, opened out onto the Atlantic and the New World beyond.
It was from Bristol that John Cabot sailed in 1497, discovering Newfoundland and the Grand Banks for the English. On his return, Cabot gave a long whale rib to the Church of St. Mary-Redcliffe, in which it can be found today, decorating the entrance to the America chapel. (A replica of Cabot’s 78-foot ship, the MATTHEW, was constructed in a purpose-built shipyard in 1996 and, after retracing Cabot’s trip across the Atlantic, now takes tourists on trips around Bristol harbor.)
Many of the early exploratory expeditions to Maine originated in Bristol; Martin Pring, who led expeditions here in 1603 and 1606, was a native of this city, and is buried in St. Stephen’s church at the center of town. Bristol merchants continued to invest in ventures in what is now Maine through the Society of Merchant Venturers, a secretive medieval guild that still exists today, its members now having maintained considerable control over Bristol’s affairs for half a millennium.
It was the residents of much smaller Plymouth, however, who would spearhead the colonization of Maine and New England. Plymouth, in south Devon, was still a small town then, a naval station defended by a large fortress. But the townspeople were perhaps the first of our coast’s non-resident enthusiasts. That’s because George Waymouth’s 1605 expedition returned here after an extended exploration of Monhegan, eastern Muscongus Bay and the St. George River valley. Waymouth brought intriguing samples of plants and animal life, including five captive Indians.
The Indians, members of the Sheepscot band, lived in Plymouth for the next few years, learning English and providing intelligence about their homeland to the fortress’s commander, an eccentric knight by the name of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges, captivated by the Indians’ descriptions of their homeland, decided it would be a fitting location to build a vast feudal estate for himself and managed to convince the King of England that this would be a good idea.
Armed with a royal charter from the King, Gorges organized a series of colonization schemes in Maine, with capital from the merchants of Plymouth, Bristol and other West Country towns. Two colony ships sailed from Plymouth in 1607, intending to settle a town at what is now called Popham Beach; they returned in failure the following spring, the local Indians having been hostile as a result of Waymouth’s kidnappings two years earlier.
Gorges dispatched fishermen to Monhegan and Damariscove and even sent Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) to set up a proper colony at Monhegan; the former made only modest profits, the latter never made it to Maine, being captured by French pirates instead.
It was Gorges and his colleagues who gave the Pilgrims their land grant, and it was from Plymouth that the MAYFLOWER set sail for New England. They also organized the settlers who founded Maine’s first permanent communities in the 1630s and 1640s.
Not surprisingly, most of these early settlers came from Plymouth, Bristol or their immediate surroundings. One sample of 124 Maine colonists who came between 1620 and 1650 reveals that two-thirds came from the West Country, and nearly a third of them from Plymouth and its adjacent outports and villages.
The towns they formed followed West Country models, with settlers scattered across the landscape in longhouses, their towns set far apart and linked poorly, if at all, by roads.
Not surprisingly, they often named their communities after the West Country places they’d left behind: Kittery (a manor in South Devon), Biddeford (in North Devon), Wells (in Somerset), Falmouth (in Cornwall) and Bristol, the original name for York, before Gorges decided to name it Gorgeana after himself.
This was in sharp contrast to Massachusetts Bay, whose settlers tended to be from eastern England, with towns close to one another and each clustered around a shared common. Their communities- Calvinist, rather than Anglican – were named for towns in the east of England, like Haverhill and Ipswich (in Suffolk), Malden and Braintree (in Essex), Lynn and Newton (in Norfolk) and Boston (in south Lincolnshire). Motivated by religious mission – a plan to create a Calvinist utopia in the New England wilderness – these settlements grew many times faster than their Maine counterparts.
When the English Civil War broke out in 1642, Maine and Massachusetts found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Maine, like the West Country, sided with the King against the Parliament, which, like Massachusetts, was lead by Calvinists from the eastern counties. The King lost the war – and his head – and the Calvinist leader Oliver Cromwell took control of England. This gave Massachusetts’s Puritan leaders a free hand to annex the Maine settlements, which they did under threat of arms during the 1650s.
Over the next 150 years, large numbers of Massachusetts settlers moved to Maine, bringing with them many of the institutions and architectural features we now associate with New England: selectmen and town meetings, saltbox and Cape Cod houses, town greens and Congregational meeting houses. Maine’s West Country origins all but vanished by 1820, when it again became an independent political unit, but the notion of being a separate culture seems to remain with us to this day.
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier and maintains a website at colinwoodard.com.