I finally began working with some photos from my trip earlier this summer to Maine. We were up the coast further then I'd been before, in Hancock County, near Mount Desert Isle, but away from Bar Harbor, overwheening metropolis that it is, and off among the quieter peninsulas nearby. Castine and Blue Hill and Deer Isle were the principal places we visited, and along the way Searsport and Bucksport and even tinier crossroads.
This is a place of character, full of lost pasts, but also people who enjoy their present and work hard at making it possible, work hard at the job of being able to live someplace that is unto itself, and not a way station on the way somewhere else.
All around are the reminders of the past. Castine is a town that has as its point of pride how many times it was destroyed: overrun, burnt down, abandoned, resettled, renamed--and all as a part of a struggle that has largely been forgotten in modern America. It was a waypoint and a battleground in a grinding of frontier against frontier in a struggle of empires we're barely aware of anymore.
And in between and around were the Native American peoples who had dwelt in the northern woods for so long, and now a few generations were caught up in a world that had powdered French monseigneurs making promises on behalf of a distant French king and beefy red English colonels making promises on behalf of a distant English king, and there were guns, ships, cod, axes, rum, furs, and forts in the mix, and some tribes leaned towards the French, and some towards the English, and some began to pray with the Jesuits, and some with the Puritans ministers, and like all humans everywhere, some Indians couldn't give up battling their traditional next-door-neighbor tribal enemies long enough to wonder where this was all going.
And here was this blue peninsula with its deep, safe harbor amid the rocky and maddening folds of the Maine coast. The place is remote from everywhere now, but was once at the center of important things, when the world was ruled from the ocean.
The place got its current name from Jean-Vincent d'Abbadie de Saint-Castin, sent out at the age of thirteen as an ensign in the French army to join its battles to hold Acadia against the Iroqois. Somewhere along the way he became a close ally of the local Penobscot people--he became the third Baron de Saint-Castin on the death of his elder brother, but married an Indian wife and became also a chief of the Abenaki, and spent much time harrying the English settlements till the authorities in distant Boston set a price on his head.
The peninsula he'd set up a fort on in 1613 would change hands again and again for the next two centuries, with French and British forts and settlements rising and falling, not to mention an interlude of Dutch, and Indian raiders and allies alternately befriending and attacking the Europeans as they waged their interminable wars. At the end of the French and Indian War, the storied Acadians lost their grip and were swept off to play their role in history elsewhere, while the Native Americans were pushed off over the western horizon or lost their lands, in the tragic early acts of a global drama.
The American revolution and War of 1812 found Castine caught up still in those bigger world conflicts, torn between the British in Canada and the new forces of the United States. Some unfortunate early heroes had the misfortune to lose an entire Yankee fleet to the English right around here, during the Revolution. It wasn't a big fleet--some of its mighty vessels were provided by the not-exactly-famed in military history Massachusetts State Navy, including the awesomely named Tyrannicide. But still, the survivors had to walk overland home to Boston, with one imagines, the local townsfolk asking at every point, "hey fellers, what happened to your boats?"
Penobscot Expedition By Dominic Serres the Elder (1719-1793) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Since then timber and cod-fishing, canning and granite-quarrying, the age of sail and the age of steam, have come and gone, leaving gracious captains' houses and the humbler home of canners and fishers, great rambling old inns for the tourists who came with steamer trunks, and newer venues for those who come in wafting organic greens and craft beers and lycra biking trousers. The Maine Maritime Academy is here now, with a little brick campus and a big training ship, The State of Maine. And other ships still take refuge here in storms, so said the captains of the day-charter we sailed out on, in the deep and sheltered harbor.
The forests here are much thicker then they were a century ago, when logging and farming were mightier--the wooded mountainsides running down to the harbor look more like they did in the day when nations fought here. It's just interesting to think about, how quickly history slips beyond our reach, falls into the footnotes and annals of the little local historical society. Our country fights its current wars far away, and the old cannons here look out over peaceful waters.
