Tag: New England

Why we really dig Fedco seeds

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my household, like many others in northern New England, the Fedco seed catalogue and ordering from it are something of a fond ritual this time of year, even a devotion.

Here’s some background.

  1. The company is a co-op founded in 1978 by back-to-the-earth followers of self-sufficiency gurus Scott and Helen Nearing, who had moved to Maine from Vermont in the mid-‘50s.
  2. At first, it functioned as a resource for food coops and sold to no one else.
  3. Heirloom apple trees were added in 1983 and autumn bulbs the following year. Seed potatoes came next,, and in 1988 Fedco took over the organic supplier role of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. (Many people know MOFGA for its big, hippie-infused Common Ground Fair every September. You may have read about that here.)
  4. In its first year, with a one-page mail-order page in a food-coop newspaper, Fedco and its part-time staff handled 98 customer requests. The initial list had 81 items, mostly vegetables, some herbs, liquid seaweed fertilizer, and no flowers. These days it handles more than 38,000 orders from all 50 states for an estimated $4 million revenue.
  5. The catalogue is funky, black-and-white on newsprint or similar stock, rather than the glossy photos of big commercial garden retailers. The illustrations lean toward sketches and 19th century printers’ images. It carries more than a thousand seed listings alone, along with a host of other things gardeners and small-farm operators find useful. The descriptions reflect careful study, helping buyers make reasoned decisions, especially regarding what’s new. It’s inspirational. You can also order online, using a catalogue that does have color photos and is easy to navigate.
  6. Legalization of cannabis has generated new business, even though Fedco has so far resisted selling its plants or seeds. Much of the business is in organic fertilizer, especially for home growers.
  7. Rather than growing the seeds itself, Fedco repackages from 100 to 150 seed growers, and other suppliers, mostly in Maine. Other products are more widely sourced.
  8. Fedco concentrates on a unique niche, mostly in the Northeast, and deliberately stays small, out of direct competition with large corporations.
  9. Its 60 full- and part-time employees own 40 percent of the company, while the consumers own the remaining 60 percent and get small discounts on their orders.
  10. The company’s charter aims at pay-level equity, preventing wage extremes between high and low.

Details from the company’s website and from Jeffrey B. Roth in Lancaster Farming.

Reading a history with your own hand in the game

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here we are, Thanksgiving Day, and I’m finally getting around to my reactions to Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2006 hit, Mayflower: Voyage, community, war.

Admittedly, having examined some of the period he covers, from the origin of the faithful and their sailing in 1620 through their struggles up to 1677, but from the settlements north of Boston, I come at the book from a different perspective than most readers. I appreciate his efforts to present the Separatists – the term he settles on rather than “Pilgrims” – as distinct from the Puritans who would invade New England a few years later. I also appreciate his emphasis on the non-members of the faith who participated in the Plymouth Colony settlement as well as the heavy financial burden the enterprise carried, which are details I develop more briefly in my own volume, Quaking Dover: How a counterculture took root and flourished in colonial New Hampshire.

What struck me in my reading was how little awareness Philbrick conveyed regarding the activities not just on the Piscataqua watershed, the center of my book, but north of Boston in general, including Salem, especially in the years before the Puritan influx. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, whom I see as the godfather of New England, is not even mentioned, though he and his investors were active behind the scenes in England. The Piscataqua venture was a source of food for the desperate Plymouth settlement and provided twice as much funding for anti-piracy efforts, among other things.

Philbrick, not surprisingly, takes a conventional gloss on Thomas Morton and the Merrymount settlement without noting that its roots were in Devonshire folkways, not just in personal eccentricities. Dismissing him as “a jolly down-on-his-luck lawyer from London” overlooks the argument that the settlement was thriving and apparently more successful, economically and as an attraction, than Plymouth.

Philbrick’s examination of the attempted Wessagussett settlement as a Plymouth satellite clarified some of the events for me, since it falls between Plymouth and Dover as the oldest permanent settlements in New England. I am also glad that he included the struggles and near devastation of the Jamestown settlement for perspective. The Virginia colony, like the Mayflower, tends to be romanticized in the public eye. The gritty realities need to be spotlighted, too.

He acknowledges the second ship to the Plymouth settlement, the Fortune, in the fall of 1621, which doubled the population of the colony as well as its growing pains. The next ships, the Anne and Little James, arrived in the summer of 1623, but only one is named, briefly. I follow their impact through immigrant William Hilton, the brother of the founder of Dover, New Hampshire, and a Fortune passenger. His wife and children came on the Anne. Though he’s often erroneously identified as co-founder, he didn’t arrive north until he was ejected from Plymouth after he and his wife had a child baptized by the Anglican John Lyford, an event that triggered events that Philbrick briefly notes. I am now wondering if Lyford later, in 1628, performed the first Anglican wedding in New England, the one uniting Samuel Maverick and the widow Amias Cole Thomson on an island in Boston Harbor. That, too, weaves back to my book.

Within the period covered in Mayflower, Quakers were making inroads into the Plymouth colony, though Philbrick makes only fleeting reference to the persecutions led by the Puritans.

While he goes into great detail regarding the Pequot War and the one after, known as King Philip’s, he makes no mention of the mock war games in Dover in 1676 that sent an estimated 400 or more Natives into captivity and is often credited as bringing the King Philip’s conflict to an end. Some were hanged but many, women and children, especially, were sold into slavery and exported.

Still, he develops a much more complex understanding of conflicts among the varied tribes and their leaders than is usually seen. The concept of a unified “Indian” front quickly crumbles away.

I’m also interested in the Winslow lines that left Plymouth, including those who came to the Piscataqua region about the time William Hilton did and others who joined with Dover Friends in establishing a Quaker presence in what eventually became Greater Portland, Maine.

For southern New England, the closure of King Philip’s War, where Philbrick’s book ends, essentially ended the conflicts with the First Peoples. Not so in the north, where fresh outbreaks would hammer on for decades, abetted by the forces of New France, ending only with the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

Ghosts in the neighborhood

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve previously posted on the phenomenon of ghosts residing in homes in New England, especially, somehow, Maine.

In that vein, I’m surprised we haven’t sensed anything in the household, especially considering its age. Maybe Anna Baskerville’s good vibes should get some credit here.

But I have asked about a few of our neighbors, and they quickly told of theirs. I am surprised by the details, including a smell or two. Also, so far, they seem to be limited to one per house and do prefer to don dark clothing.

At least they seem to be benign, only sad.

Note to self: Keep asking around. It is a great conversation starter.

~*~

Here are some related facts gleaned from Harper’s Index in recent years:

  • Minimum percentage of Americans who say they’ve had a paranormal experience: 67.
  • Who say this experience involved “smelling an unexplained odor”: 30.
  • Who say they have the ability to psychically sense others’ emotions or auras: 24.
  • Percentage of U.S. homeowners who believe their homes are haunted: 49.
  • Of Gen Z homeowners who believe this: 65.
  • Number of states in which sellers must respond truthfully if asked whether a murder has occurred in a home: 9.
  • If asked whether a home is haunted: 1.

Some Maine towns were named after Sacred Harp tunes

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

New Englanders sometimes joke that a town name will be found repeated in five of the six states of the region. It can be confusing. You know, people moving from one place to a new one but keeping the town name.

Maine, however, has its own twist, since much of the settlement occurred after the American Revolution, especially in the early 1800s, when “singing schools” became a popular community activity. Many of these were related to church life and the spread of four-part harmony hymn singing. So what if someone else had claimed the town name you had hoped to repeat, here was a fresh source.

Today many songs in a hymnal carry a title reflecting the words, but in earlier times the name identified the music itself – many of their lyrics can be transported from one composition to other scores within a given syllable-count system anyway.

That older tradition is continued today in a style of a four-part cappella singing called Sacred Harp, reflecting the title of the hymnal of shape notes that it used. Shape notes, should you ask, are not all of the round kind you see in most musical scores. Instead, some are little flags called fa; others are little boxes called la; or diamonds called me but spelled mi; and the round notes are called so. And there are no instruments, not even harps, much less pianos or organs, in this often rowdy tradition.

So much for that arcane sidetrack. Back to the song names.

I had assumed that the composers applied them to honor where they were written or some such. “Detroit” is one that always makes me smile.

At any rate, during a sacred-harp singing session a while back, it was mentioned that some Maine towns were actually named for the tunes, rather than the other way around.

Bangor was one. Though not in the Sacred Harp collection, the tune was written in 1734, “Oh very God of very God,” and influential. The Maine city was incorporated in 1834 from what had been known as Sunbury or Kenduskeag Plantation. The name “Bangor” is said to have been taken from a Welsh tune. Voila!

Now, for ten examples drawn from the shape-note collection. The name of each tune and town is followed by its date of composition and then the first line of the text it accompanies in the Sacred Harp collection, the date of the founding of the town, and then by something about the Maine community.

  1. Chester: 1770, “Let the high heav’ns your song invite”; settled in 1823, the town north of Bangor had 201 households in the most recent tally. The name, however, came from an arrival from Chester, New Hampshire. No dice for the hymn, then.
  2. China: 1801, “Why do we mourn departing friends”; 1774, with the name being chosen by Japheth Washburn. He wanted to call the town Bloomville, but people from a town of that name objected, saying that the similarity could cause confusion. Washburn then settled on the “China” because it was the name of one of his favorite hymns. Today, the summer youth camp of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quaker) is on the town’s China Lake.
  3. Enfield: 1785, “Before the rosy dawn of day”; about 1820, originally called Cold Stream. A third of the town is occupied by Cold Stream Lake. A possibility.
  4. Liberty: 1800, “No more beneath th’ oppressive hand”; incorporated in 1827. Another possibility.
  5. Milford: 1760, “If angels sung as Savior’s rest”; incorporated in 1833 from what had been known as the Sunkhaze plantation. Milford is a town name found across New England.
  6. Newburgh: 1798, “Let ev’ry creature join to praise”; settled about 1794 and incorporated in 1819, it is spelled like the town along the Hudson River in New York, which probably influenced the naming of both the hymn and the Maine town.
  7. Northfield: 1800, “How long, dear Savior, o how long”; the town was settled about 1825 and incorporated in 1838. Thus, a possibility.
  8. Oxford: I’m not sure about the hymn’s date, “Shepherds rejoice, lift up your eyes,” though when the town incorporated in 1829, the honor went to the university town in England. Well, that left the other famed university town, which also has a hymn title in the Sacred Harp collection, “The Lord will happiness divine.” In the second case, the name came up at a town meeting when the community was preparing to be set off from Ripley. The 11-year-old daughter of the household where the discussion took place was asked to suggest a name for the new town. She proposed the name Cambridge, from the English town of the same name about which she had just been reading. It was applied in 1834.
  9. Poland: 1785, “God of my life, look gently down”; when the town was incorporated in 1795 from Bakerstown Plantation, early resident Moses Emery was given the privilege of naming the town. He had always been fond of an old melody called “Poland,” found in most of the collections of ancient psalmody, as the history goes. Today the place is best known for the Poland Springs bottled water brand.
  10. Portland: 1802, “Sweet is the day of sacred rest”; the Maine city was set off as a town in 1786, named after an isle off the coast of Dorset, England. Alas for the influence of the hymn, though it may have been the other way around. The city in Oregon, should you wonder, was named in honor of the one in Maine in an 1844 toss of a coin. Otherwise, the Pacific Northwest city would have been Boston, which somehow doesn’t seem to be a tune name.

There are arguments that some of the hymns were named after Maine towns. Just consider Mars Hill, 1959, or Mount Desert, 1985.

How many types of boats under sail do you recognize?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Living around big waters, as I do now, means hearing a number of new terms to identify boats big and small. When you merely read about them, say in a history book, you can usually skim over the word and move on.

Not so when you’re trying to describe what you just saw.

Today we won’t attempt to get into the array of mostly motorized vessels. Not even a Bayliner versus a Boston Whaler. Naval ships alone would require a long list.

Instead, let’s look at a general overview of boats originally powered by the wind. (Admittedly, today many of them will have an internal engine for additional power.) These can range from small sailboats to majestic tall ships.

  1. Sloop. The most common type of sailing vessel, it has a single mast, usually with one triangular mainsail (in what’s called Bermuda rigging) and, in the front, a triangular headsail, usually a jib. These can range from small, single-person fun boats to larger racing boats manned by trained crews.
  2. Cat. Or catboat. Has a single mast rising from the front of the boat and a large, single sail on a long boom. A second beam of wood, called a gaff, runs along the top of the sail, turning it into a four-sided sheet of hexagonal shape rather than the triangle. They were popular New England workboats around the early 1900s, short (typically ) 20 to 30 feet long and wide, highly stable, and have made a comeback today.
  3. Cutter. A single-masted vessel resembling a sloop, but often having a gaff-rigged mainsail and an extended spar called a long bowsprit extending from the bow, which allows a second headsail (a staysail, or “staysul.”)
  4. Schooner. Two or more masts, with the largest sail (the mainsail) at the aft, plus a foresail (resembling the mainsail) on the mast ahead of it as well as a jib and staysail at the bowsprit. They may also have one or more topsails and a small sail called a mizzen aft of the mainsail. With their complex rigging, they can be fast and undeniably majestic. And, yes, my favorite.
  5. Ketch. Resembles a schooner but has an extra mast behind the mainsail.
  6. Yawl. This term has several different meanings, the first regarding rigs with one or two fully equipped masts plus a mizzen mast aft. It can also refer to a double-ended hull boat that could be worked from the beaches, not that I’m finding any reference to sailing in what would be the equivalent of reverse gear. Some of them, if you’re a bettor, may have been the fastest-sailing open boats ever built. And it even seems to be a kind of dinghy. Just so you get an idea of how loose some of these terms can be.
  7. Brig. This two-masted ship introduces us to square-rigging with sails arrayed on horizontal spars perpendicular to the keel and masts – that is, “squared.” The spars, called yards, present the sails to face the wind from behind. The foremast of a brig is always square-rigged, but some varieties may have a gaff or lateen sail on the mainmast. (Lateen is an ancient arrangement I won’t get into unless you’re going to Egypt.) “Square,” as far as masts go, means more or less perpendicular to the hull, unlike the ones more or less parallel to the hull. Trust me on this.
  8. Barquentine. Its foremast was square-rigged, with gaff-rigged masts behind. But let’s skip ahead.
  9. Barque (or bark). A three- to five-masted square-rigged ship consisting of a foremast, mainmast, and a smaller, often gaff-rigged mizzen mast at the aft for steering stability. Far and away the most numerous of the square-rigged vessels. Enough of the finer points. Let’s turn to the most glorious.
  10. Tall (or full-rigged) ship. Three or more masts, all fully square-rigged, one sail above another, often five or six on a mast, with a hull often much longer than a schooner. The individual sails were smaller than a schooner’s and less likely to rip out in a storm, but the number of them provided more overall sail surface, allowing for maximum speed. The downside was that crews of 30 or more sailors were required for handling those sheets. Still, seeing one of them is exciting. It’s what you really picture first, after all. Now, for all of the subcategories, such as a frigate.

Lorenzo Sabine was a Yankee, all the same

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After running across his name repeatedly while researching the history of our old house, I decided to look him up. Lorenzo Sabine turns out to have been a remarkable character. Best known today for his two-volume, provocative 1864 book Loyalists of the American Revolution, his adulthood included an influential span in Eastport.

Here are some highlights.

 

  1. He was born in 1803 in what’s now Lisbon in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with a Methodist minister for a father and roots going back to French Huguenots who arrived in Rehoboth, Massachusetts from Wales in 1643. Lorenzo moved with his parents to Boston in 1811, and then to Hampden, Maine, in 1814, where he completed his preparatory studies. His father had been taken prisoner by the British in the War of 1812 while working in a military hospital.
  2. At age 18, following his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage, he came to Eastport not long after Maine gained statehood from being a district of Massachusetts. At first, he was employed as a clerk, then tried his hand at his own business but went bankrupt, followed by working as bookkeeper of Passamaquoddy Bank and then engaging in a series of enterprises, including stints as a mercantile partner with William and Jacob Shackford, sons of the Revolutionary War veteran who built our house and much more. He shows up as a witness on many property deeds and other court records.
  3. He was editor of the weekly Eastport Sentinel newspaper to 1834, during Benjamin Folsom’s time as publisher. He was also founder of the Eastport Lyceum, and incorporator of the Eastport Academy and Eastport Atheneum.
  4. He served as a member of the Maine House of Representatives, 1832-33, and was deputy collector of customs at Eastport, 1841-43.
  5. From early childhood, he was what he called “revolution-mad,” something that grew in other directions after his move to Eastport, abutting Canada and having many residents descending from Loyalist lines. This led to his insight that “there was more than one side to the Revolution.” Prior to this “every ‘Tory” was as bad as bad could be, every “son of Liberty” as good as possible.” During the 1840s, the results of his research appeared in the North American Review, America’s first literary magazine.
  6. Quite simply, his work was not favorably received by “patriotic” Americans though it did receive support from several important historians. Lorenzo then revised and expanded his material into an 1847 book The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in The War of the Revolution; Alphabetically Arranged; with a Preliminary Historical Essay, erupting a firestorm of controversy. The work received a more thorough two-volume edition for its republication in 1864. You can read it online to see why it challenged many of the conventional treatments of the Revolutionary War and the tensions leading to the War of 1812 from the British side. He did, do note, receive honorary degrees from Bowdoin College and from Harvard.
  7. He moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1848 as a trial judge and was elected to Congress in 1852 to fill a seat vacated by death but did not run for reelection.
  8. Appointed secretary of the Boston Board of Trade, he relocated to Roxbury and also served as a confidential agent of the U.S. Treasury Department.
  9. He was married three times, to Matilda F. Green in 1825, Abby R.D. Deering in 1829, and 1837 to Elizabeth M. Deering, who survived him. Only one of his five children survived him.
  10. He died in Roxbury in 1877 but is buried in Eastport’s Hillside Cemetery.

How French-speaking Canadiens provoked the American Revolution

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my research for the book that became Quaking Dover, I became much more aware of the ongoing tensions in New England with the French to the north.

I thought that ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, but I was wrong.

The British tried to assimilate the Canadiens into the wider society but by 1774 realized the futility of the effort.

To alleviate the situation, Parliament passed the Quebec Act, covering the former New France. The measure permitted the continuation of the French language, legal system, and Roman Catholic religion in what was now enlarged and renamed Quebec. Crucially, reference to the Protestant faith was removed from the oath of allegiance required for holding public office, and the Catholic church could again impose tithes.

Many of the English in the New World were outraged, seeing this as a granting freedoms and lands to their former enemy and including the possibility of stripping them of their self-elected assemblies and voiding their claims to land in the Ohio Country, granted by royal charter to New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia but now unilaterally ceded to Quebec.

The act had been passed in the same session of Parliament that imposed punishments on the Boston Tea Party, among other affronts the Patriots derided as the Intolerable Acts.

Patriots also saw the measure as establishing Roman Catholicism in the 13 colonies and promoting the growth of “Papism.” in general.

I was unaware of its inflammatory influence as a direct cause of the American Revolution until I heard of the measure as an aside on a CBC Radio commentary.

Just nine months after the act’s enactment came Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the “shot heard ‘round the world” in the rebellion at Boston.

Barely two years after its passage, the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed in Philadelphia.

C’est vrai.

Of ship captains and their families at sea

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The era of commercial wooden ships under sail is long gone, and Maine played a big role in its glory days. The town of Searsport, in fact, late in the 1880s claimed to be home to a tenth of the masters of American full-rigged ships, and thousands of ships were built along the state’s shores. Do note, though, steamships and steel hulls were rapidly changing the business.

As I learned in researching the history of our house, built by a shipmaster who raised four captains of his own, there seems to be nowhere they didn’t venture.

Unlike many, though, the Shackford wives seem to have stayed on land rather than venturing forth with their husbands and serving as the trusty navigator.

Here are some other families for perspective.

  1. Joanna Carter Colcord, daughter of Lincoln Alden Colcord, was born at sea in 1882 and is famed, among other things, for her collecting and musically notating maritime ballades and chanteys. She and her brother spent much of their childhood at sea, where they sent extensive letters to relatives in Maine. Later reminiscing how, after a break ashore where she could attend school, “when I was eight, I took my turn at seafaring, and Link got his introduction to the halls of learning. We put out from Portland lumber-laden into a full gale of wind, and I was sea-sick for the first (and last) time. On the fourth day out it faired away, and father took me, convalescent now, on deck and set me inside a life-ring that was lashed to the top of the after house. … I was not afraid; and I remember to this day the awe and enchantment of the scene. I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful, and I still think so. The little barkentine was running bravely, among the great seas which heaved up all around in sunlit walls of liquid sapphire. When she roe on one of the huge swells the seas stretched to a horizon of living blue, barred with mile-long white-capped combers. The sun warmed me, and its play on the snowy sails fascinated me.”
  2. Her brother Lincoln Ross Colcord, a year younger, was born at sea during a storm off Cape Horn. Recalling the life they shared growing up, he wrote: “I know no other home than a ship’s deck, except the distant home in Maine that we visited for a few weeks every year or two. My countryside was the ocean floor, where I could roam only with the spyglass; my skyline was the horizon, broken by the ghostly silhouettes of passing vessels, or at intervals by the coasts of many continents, as we sailed the world.”
  3. Also from Searsport was Georgia Maria Gilkey, who headed off to sea in 1906 as the bride of Phineas Banning Blanchard, of the same town. As she observed: “It seemed like old times being on board a vessel again. I spent most of my youth at sea with my parents, brothers, and sister. Banning grew up at sea, too, and he was a captain before he was twenty.”
  4. Not that the life was always so bucolic, as Captain John C. Blanchard noted in candid letters in 1844 to his wife Caroline in Searsport. “I am very anxious for to leave here for the mosquitoes,” in confessed in one, followed in another with “and the hot sun has made me look more like a native of Cuba than one from the North.  My health is tolerable good although I have no appetite to eat and the clothes that used to fit me now set like a ship on a handspike, as the saying is.” There was no respite in others, where “The mosquitoes would make you look more like a person with the smallpox than otherwise … The climate seems to me just as healthy in New York in heat of summer.” Also, “It seems as if the mosquitoes was determined on having the last drop of my blood. They were so plenty last night that we could but just breathe without swallowing them and as hungry as wolves. They make nothing of getting my blood right through my shirt and pants and now while I am writing they are doing their best.” Later, he noted having the American consul and two gentlemen from New York on board to dine as well as “a long string of Spanish ladies and gentlemen” who came calling. “I tell you what it is Dear C, you don’t know what a knack these Spanish ladies have of casting sheeps’ eyes but the gentlemen don’t like us Americans to even wink but dear Wife, all the Ladies in Cuba is no object to me.”
  5. Perhaps that provides one more reason for brides to join their sea captain husbands on his voyages. Nancy Sherman Mackintosh, for one, set forth with her new husband Alonzo Follansbee in 1837 and two months later admitted, “By this time I had learned all the nautical phrases, though I did not choose to use them, lest I get in the habit and use them on shore, which would be very mortifying for a captain’s wife.” Yes, salty language. At least she remained behind on shore in 1856, when her husband vanished at sea.
  6. Another bride, Fidelia Reed, in 1853 was so occupied with getting her quarters “systematized” for her honeymoon voyage from Boston that she barely noticed setting sail. Having “arranged all our books and movable articles so that they would not shake about by the motion of the ship,” she then saw “the steward fastened our trunks to the floor by nailing a bit of wood on each side of them to the floor, quite a new sort of arrangement to me.” As for her husband, John Jay Heard, “The Capt. says it seems quite as strange to him to have me on board, as it is to me to be here. He having always been alone, it looks rather queer to see ladies’ clothing hanging in the state room.” This, even though this was his second marriage. Novice Fidelia, by the way, did master the art of navigation.
  7. Manhattan native Cornelia “Connie” Marshall first set sail in 1855 as the bride of Captain Enoch Wood Peabody. Two days shy of Liverpool, their ship was overtaken by a tempest. As she wrote of that honeymoon cruise, “Weather continues very bad. Enoch is hard at work. Scarcely had a chance to speak to me during the entire day.” Conditions worsened, culminating in a cry in the night, “Breakers ahead! Hard down the helm!” as well as “That fearful sound, never shall I forget it, and amidst the noise I heard my poor husband’s voice in such tones as never before.” Amid the crisis, “He enters the cabin, how pale his cheek, my heart seems almost bursting. Oh, that he would but speak to me. His look is almost wild.” As for their life after that?
  8. Another Searsport-based wife, Maria Whall Waterhouse, took command of the S.F. Hersey in Melbourne, Australia, when her husband died, and according to legend faced down a mutiny with the aid of her late husband’s two pistols and the ship’s cook.
  9. Should you care to really dive into this topic, the academic article “Excitement and prey: Captains’ wives and the experience of marine animals on U.S. whaling ships in the 19th century” in the International Journal of Maritime History should be right up your alley, so to speak. Dealing with a more defined set of examples, author Emilia Svyalsami observed, “The ship’s society was hierarchical, and the captain had absolute power. A wife’s presence brought much needed comfort to captains, who often were lonely figures. They were even more so on the whaling ships, where the pressure of catching whales created tension and underlined the captain’s skills.” Many of the wives closely observed the natural world around them. Quoting shipmaster wife Mary Brewster, for instance, we have this about sunfish: “Had I never seen the fish perhaps it would have tasted better, but seeing it was sufficient to produce contrary feelings.” How droll. Add to that, from the following day, “Had porpoise for breakfast. The liver tastes very much like beefs’.”
  10. Missing from the records, though, are the observations of women like Sarah Bates, the wife of Captain Mariner S. Crosby, from the fatal last days before the ship went down. According to the memorial monument in Eastport’s Hillside Cemetery, the 33-year-old and her 44-year-old husband along with their four children, including an infant son, were “all lost at sea about Oct. 25, 1867, with the brig Sarah B. Crosby.” Similar markers, found across the region, have no bodies buried below.

Behind the first English ocean-going vessel built in the New World

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Most Americans, dare I venture, have vast gaps in their knowledge of the history we inhabit. And inherit, as well.

Even though I had visited the site several decades before I wrote my book Quaking Dover, the impact of the attempted Popham settlement came back with a whammy in the developments that followed.

More recently, a post-concert conversation with Fred Gosbee of the folk-music duo Castlebay thickened the plot.

Here we go with ten points.

  1. As far as North America goes, the French had already failed with their St. Croix Island settlement, 1604-1605. I’ve posted on that previously, since it was only a few miles from where I now live. Quite simply, New England winters can be brutal. The English established a toehold in Virginia, at Jamestown, 1607, and were attempting a twin in today’s Maine, at Popham. Again, weather would be a factor.
  2. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the godfather of New England, as I describe in my book, was the major mover behind the project. As I’ve argued, he’s largely overlooked in his impact on what would become New England. The Native honored today as Squanto actually lived for a few years in Gorges’ manor in England, where he learned English. (Alas, he had been kidnapped. Another story, no matter that Gorges was appalled.) The Puritans would arrive in New England only because they ran a successful end play around Gorges, and then had King Charles I, fatefully, fall prey. Not that I’m particularly pitying the king.
  3. Back to Popham, 1607, where the settlers at the mouth of the Kennebec River somehow managed to build a seafaring vessel during their dark winter. Try to picture them felling and shaping trees in the depth of winter, and then framing them into a ship. Where did they get the sails, nails, and other essential items? They were barely surviving as it was.
  4. The ship, which they named Virginia or Virginia of Sagadahoc, was a pinnace, a small tender. Even so, once a supply ship arrived in 1608, they were able to use it to abandon the new colony and sail back to England. The small ship not only made it but later returned to the New World.
  5. The second and third “local” pinnaces (Deliverance and Patience) were built soon afterwards in Bermuda following the loss of Sea Venture, another story altogether. Let’s just say that conditions in Jamestown were dire.
  6. One of the Popham colonists, a young boy named David Thomson, was intrigued enough to return in 1623 to the mouth of the Piscataqua River and briefly lead the settlement in what’s now New Hampshire. That plays into my Dover book, even though he vanished before he could claim any title. His colleague Edward Hilton, however, stayed on and earned due rewards.
  7. Gosbee also told me that one of the Popham leaders had also received a major inheritance during his New World sojourn. Hearing the news of his windfall, he joyfully headed a return to Merry Old England on the new ship.
  8. The site of their colony later served the bunkers at Fort Popham and Fort Baldwin on the opposite side of the river, defenses against intruding vessels. The beach, meanwhile, is a very popular state park with some of the best swimming along the Maine coast.
  9. The Jamestown colony, meanwhile, could be the basis of a big, juicy, scandalous streamed series. Folks who are opposed to “woke” would be truly rattled by the turns in Virginia’s origins.
  10. A replica of the Virginia now has naval scholars wondering about some of the rigging. She is a most unusual vessel, from today’s perspective.
A replica of the Virginia of Sagadahoc plies the waters of the Kennebec in Bath, Maine, upriver from the site of the ill-fated Popham Colony. Can you imagine crossing the Atlantic in such a small craft?