A recent visitor
Category: Postcards
Sometimes it feels like living at the edge of the known universe
Some distances from Eastport to wherever:
While driving from Eastport to Lubec, kind of in the neighborhood, as it were, I got to thinking about how far you could get from one point to another in the same hour elsewhere. Sometimes, it led to a lot more options.
Where could you drive in an hour from your home?
On occasion, a few critical details do change the course of history
As I detail in Quaking Dover, my history of New England’s third-oldest permanent settlement, the odds against success for early European settlers were nearly overwhelming.
It wasn’t just the English, either.
The French made their first attempt just up the coast from Eastport, where Samuel de Champlain selected an island in what’s now called the St. Croix River at the western edge of the Bay of Fundy or, more specifically, its smaller Passamaquoddy Bay.
The famed explorer was working for Pierre Dugua de Mons, a noble and Protestant merchant who had been given a fur trading monopoly in New France by the king.
In 1604 the expedition set about establishing a fortified trading post on the security of St. Croix Island and its tidal currents.
And then they settled in for the winter, ill prepared for harsh conditions that buried their compound under three feet of snow and iced in the river, cutting them off from fresh water and game.
The lack of fresh water, especially, was a fatal flaw in their plan.
By the time spring arrived, 35 of the French expedition’s 79 men and boys had died, many from scurvy. The remainder survived largely because the thawing river allowed Native Passamaquoddy to arrive and trade nutritious food in exchange for any remaining bread and other goods.
After the colonists’ health improved and ships brought new supplies and more men from France, they abandoned the island and relocated to what would become Port-Royal, Nova Scotia, soon the center of L’Acadie, or Acadia, a large and contested province of New France.
In 1607 the English then made two attempts of their own in the New World. Their Popham colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine fared no better, while the Jamestown settlement in Virginia managed to hang on.
In 1608, Samuel de Champlain successfully founded Quebec City along the St. Lawrence River. What we know of the St. Croix Island experience comes largely through his journaling.
Quite simply, we could have been speaking French here, had someone thought about drinking water earlier in the game. Or perhaps simply been listened to and respected.
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Sculptures at the St. Croix Island International Historic Site, Red Beach in Calais, Maine, are by Ivan Schwartz, Studio EIS.
Rose medallion
The petals had fallen from a vase and got me thinking.
Up to mustard
While most of Eastport’s sardines were packed in cottonseed oil, some brands boasted of mustard, too, or of even smoking them first.
Even those that weren’t still might be smothered in a mustard sauce.
In 1900, J. Wesley Raye, the 20-year-old son of an Eastport sea captain, founded his mustard business in the family smokehouse in 1900 and moved it to its current site in 1903 to meet demand from the canneries.
Not just Eastport’s, either. Much of the family’s mustard, as the Raye’s website touts, was shipped by both rail and steamship, two means of transport long gone from the city. But, as they boast, their mill remains the last one in America to make mustard the old way. Theirs is made in small batches from mustard seed they’ve ground slowly on millstones made in France.
If you don’t recognize the name, you might know the taste. It’s rebranded by some high-end labels.
Got something? Like a saltine, maybe?
Clouds are essential for a spectacular sunrise or sunset
You think it’s all about the sun, but I’ve found that without clouds in the right positions, it’s just lights on, lights off.
It’s best when the sunlight can angle up under the cloud.
And that’s before you see it mirrored in the water.
Little Prince Cove has its charm
The inlet gets its name from an early family rather than royalty, even if the British Navy did land here when it captured Eastport during the War of 1812.
Crow ambush
How about corporate naming rights for hurricanes?
Running out of baby’s first names for hurricanes and tropical storms has me wondering.
Can we turn to corporate behemoths, you know, for naming rights, like sports stadiums do?
Hurricane Amazon would be a natural. Or Geico, reminding folks of the need of home insurance. Victoria’ Secret Hurricane could be hot. You get the drift.
And let’s think about all the good uses we could put the money to, starting with relief for impoverished folks in those storms’ paths.
So how ’bout it?
What corporations would you nominate as the most amusing or fitting for the storms?
~*~
Jnana's Red Barn 