In autumn 1965, while on an Indian artifact hunt at Gilbert's Cove, Pemaquid, Maine, resident-archaeologist Mrs. Helen Comp noticed that the middle of a newly tilled field was sagging. Inspecting the depression, she reasoned it could be one of the 300 stone cellars which authorities since 1873 have claimed to be buried under Pemaquid.
Fellow archaeologists helped her excavate the first cellar hole. They unearthed a host of relics piercing the obscure past before the time of the Pilgrims. Leads to more cellar holes developed, indicating that Gilbert's Cove had once been a busy colony which academic history absentmindedly forgot.
The first question the archaeologists asked was: - were the remains Viking? Reconstructed cellar holes bore a strong resemblance to the ruins of Eric the Red's colony at Brattahlid, Greenland.
At Popham Beach and Manana Island, Maine, Icelandic rock inscriptions give dates, A.D. 1018 and 1031 respectively, eight and twenty years after Thorfinn Karlsefni's initial North American Viking colony. In Massachusetts, amateurs found rusty Viking weapons, and at L'Anse Au Meadow, Newfoundland, Norwegian archaeologists dug out a genuine Viking village. Was Pemaquid a candidate, too?
Further excavation uncovered more fitted stone cellars and reclaimed 15,000 artifacts. The topmost was colonial. Below Puritan stratum, relics dated heretically to before the Plimouth Plantation. Indian stonework lay embraced with exquisite German saltglaze tankards, pewterware atop Florentine Quattrocento trade beads; flint knives held hands with Reformation-vintage lead sinkers, fish hooks, and spears. Chipped stone tools nestled beside Iron-Age appliances and bits of brass and bronze added to such confusion that specialists were drafted to help.
They found skeletons.
One rested on its side, knees drawn up and flexed, typical of local Tarrantine Indian burials. About five feet away, a woman's skeleton lay on its back, skull on a brass plate. Three hammered brass plates covered the torso; across the shoulders were five brass tubes, each nine to ten inches long, strung with three-strand braided cord. A baby, which Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, American Museum of Natural History anthropology chairman, estimated to be a few days old, lay on the woman, head on her shoulder.
This skeleton they sent to Dr. Junius Bird of the American Museum of Natural History for radiocarbon dating.
The result was 1630 + 90 years, in other words, between 1520 and 1720. This ruled out Viking and Icelandic origins, which should be dated A.D. 1000-1300.
Who were these people living in a thriving Pemaquid settlement, next door to Samoset's Wawenock Indians, a Tarrantine Abernake branch, possibly at the very time Jamestown and Plymouth were fighting tremendous odds? Archaeological evidence places not only fisherman, but blacksmiths, carpenters, and artisans.
Such a settlement could hardly have been established overnight.
Could fishermen have set up a Pemaquid station which evolved into a bustling Norumbega by the time history admitted New England? As examples of historical inattention, when Jacques Cartier "discovered" the St. Lawrence, he found Breton and Basque fishermen there. Accredited Elizabethan discoverers, landing in New England, read to surprised English fishermen profound proclamations claiming the entire territory in the name of royal charter companies.
Can we reconstruct Pemaquid history on the basis of what has been excavated so far?
Before going into it, let's consider archaeological background. The New World was never completely isolated; nor did scholars and navigators of antiquity, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance believe that the world was flat. Circumstantial evidence including hemispherical excavations admits that European and Asiatics, even barbarians outside Old World ecumenical civilization, sailed to the Americas before Columbus, but only Christopher Columbus linked the New World with the Old and forever changed history.
Our story begins in Elizabethan England, emerging from its insular coccoon, hitherto preoccupied with periodical dynastic bloodbaths.
Thus armed with Queen Elizabeth's charter, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh, sent a ship, John Walker captain, to explore Maine for the purpose of possible colonization. the 1598 passage was the second English expedition after the Cabots, a hundred years earlier. Landing at Penobscot Bay, Captain Walker took possession in the name of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I. Pemaquid is across Muscognus Bay from Penoboscot Bay.
Was Captain Walker really the first Englishman after the Cabots to reach North America? And why Maine? Remembering that the much publicized Jacques Cartier found Breton fisherman in his river, we may deduce that unlettered, unadvertised English fishermen had occupied Maine stations, including Pemaquid, during the hundred years between the Cabot discoveries and John Walker's 1598 landfall. Some of the fishermen could have been Walker's pilots.
When Sir Humphrey Gilbert's ship made the Penoboscot passage, Europe was thirteen years away from the naval Battle of Lepanto which had stopped the Turks and Moors once and for all. Europe was mastering army-massed firepower and was beginning to build ships strong enough to support devastating broadsides, two critical factors giving her world dominance.
What followed Sir Humphrey Gilbert's initial Maine landfall was a trickle, then a flow, and finally a deluge of English ships; John Hawkins, Francis Drake, and Henry Morgan on the Spanish Main; Sir Martin Frobisher in the Arctic; Dorchester and Cornish fishermen in New England; and Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated try in Virginia.
What ships they had! Caravels, carracks, galleons, barques, ketches, pinnaces, cromsters, and fluyts. Only a man with true Elizabethan love for the sea and ships could understand them.
Columbus' ninety-foot Nina, rigged with lanteen sails, was a caravel. The Santa Maria with a single fores'l, main, and maintop, and lanteen-rigged mizzen was a carrack. The Mayflower with a sprits'l on her bowsprit, fore and foretop, main and maintop, and lanteen mizzen was a sturdy English 180-ton barque. The galleon was a barque with exceptionally high freeboard and stern. The cromster looked like something a committee put together.
In general, they were round ships; round bowed, narrow decks 'tween gunnels, hulls bulging out and around the keel like tulip bulbs; they had square sterns to which was attached the rudder, a Crusader import. The rudder had a long tiller with a whipstaff thrust perpendicularly through the tiller. The whipstaff pierced a platform at quarterdeck, on which the helmsman stood, protected by a canopy. Later an ingenious shipwright thought of reeving a series of blocks and tackle to a tiller, and the steering wheel was born.
The towering afterdecks terminating in a tiny, narrow poop, hardly large enough for the captain's daily constitutional, made the ships look like overdressed Victorian dowagers. The sprits'l and lanteen mizzen gave them nimble maneuverability.
For record, the Mayflower II's passage under Captain Alan Villiers was as fast as the average crossing of a huge, 20th-century four-masted steel barque like the Pamir.
Merchant ships and warships were floating hells, manned by desperadoes whom hard disciplinarians, backed by bucko mates, kept in check. A long voyage meant scurvy and starvation. Fishermen belonged to a different caste. They were a breed of free seamen taking to sea as inevitable inheritance, seamen with generations of ocean spray in their blood.
Geography has much to do with fishermen's choice of a Pemaquid station. Maine is nearer Grand Banks than is Europe. Pemaquid is just south fo the very foggy, stormy Down East coast, with more curses per nautical mile from Penobscot Bay to Cape Breton than along the rest of our Atlantic coast. A fishing station had to be in a sunny area in order to dry cod for shipment to Europe.
Now nearer to fishing waters, the first things these fishermen built after shelter were drying racks and a shipyard. This is confirmed not only by lead sinkers and fish hooks, and carpentry and smithy tools among Pemaquid remains, but by traces of boat runways.
How did those fishermen live and work, especially when records show that in 1616, four years before the Mayflower passage, Maine waters were alive with fishing boats?
At that time, technological progress slowed snails to a leisurely pace. Fishermen of 1500, of 1600, and of 1700 had much in common. Let's look at the Pilgrims and Puritans as examples.
The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth abysmally in debt. They cleared it by building two strong shallops and harvesting cod. The Puritans foudn New England soil too poor to support a population explosion. They, too, built shallops to reap cod. These were thirty-ton open boats with one or two masts, lugger rigged, broad of beam and with a square stern. In general, they resembled the Dutch fishing boats of Vermeer's landscapes. 'Midships they rigged stone fireplaces for cooking meals when weather permitted. Sometimes these shallops were so worn that Puritans held their boats together by running chains from gunnel around keel to opposite gunnel. Natually in wintry Grand Bank storms, casualty was high.
They had no trawls. They handlined their fish from fifty to seventy-five feet, six feet to the fathom, while fighting a Grand Bank Gulf Stream drift. They hauled out bait, fished without break, sometimes for forty-eight hours in open shallops, heedless of fog, snow, and storm until the school of fish had passed. Think of this; Puritan fishermen were in open boats in the icy Grand Banks, without shelter of any kind, without warmth except dubious stone fireplaces 'midships, bitterly cold, their hands frozen raw and painful. Only later-age dorymen could appreciate their hardihood.
Mastering the art of shipbuilding, they developed the colonial ketch which made Grand Bank fishing easier. This was the first of a long line of Maine and New England maritime innovations; the chebacco, the pinkie, the snow, the brig and tops'l schooner, culminating in the Yankee clipper, the Down Easter, and the Gloucester fishing schooner.
There were two kinds of dried fish. The green variety, corfish, dried straight, was suitable for sale in the West Indies plantations as slave food or to make train oil. The best, dunfish, they buried in the ground and then dried in open air until it was black. English and Dutch gourmets considered dunfish delectable.
Pemaquid settlers found greater riches 'longshore. Spring came with runs of alewives and salmon up Damariscotta River. Whales sounded just offshore. Pemaquidders made friends with the Wawenock Tarratines, trading for furs which brought enough financial returns so they could build substantial houses and stock them with imported finery.
In 1622, Plymouth Pilgrims came Down East and Pemaquid passed into history.
On July 15, 1625, Indians and white man signed the first deed executed in America - at Pemaquid. On one side were the Wawenock sachems, Samoset and Unogoit. On the other, John Brown of New Harbor, in the presence of Abraham Shure, bought Pemaquid land for fifty beaver pelts. Who were John Brown and Abraham Shure? It is unlikely that they materialized out of the sea, bought the land, and disappeared again. They must have lived at Pemaquid for a time.
Three times the Pemaquid settlement and fort were destroyed in those French and Indian wars that broke out to decide which European monarch would occupy what European throne. In 1775, patriots razed the fourth Pemaquid fort.
To the original Pemaquid settlement we owe the survival of the Plimoth Plantation. To begin with, it is unlikely that the Mayflower made the Cape Cod landfall by accident, as academic histories suggest. Captain Christopher Jones probably headed toward New England because he knew there was a successful English settlement, presumably Pemaquid, not to say the Dorchester fishing station at Cape Ann.
Samoset was a Wawenock Tarratine sachem, living next door to Pemaquid, with whose settlers he was friendly. That was where he must have learned to speak English.
When Samoset met the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, he said: "Welcome Englishmen!"
Hardly had they recovered from their surprise when he asked them for beer. Satisfied, he left in his seagoing canoe, returning a few days later with Squanto. The meeting with Squanto on a warm March day, after a killer winter, was the decisive moment. Squanto showed the white men vital agricultural secrets. He also introduced the local chief. Massassoit.
This is the debt we owe the Pemaquid settlers - that they helped plant the democracy of Plymouth.