This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, making it the first permanent settlement in New England. It also is the 200th anniversary of Maine becoming a state. With two hundred years separating these events, it is easy to forget that Maine played a much earlier important role in shaping New England’s history, including helping the Pilgrims to survive.
Although thrown off-course from their original plans to settle near the Hudson River, in what is today, New York, the Pilgrims were not completely unfamiliar with the area, when they landed at Cape Cod. In fact, the name “Cape Cod” was coined almost two decades earlier in 1602 by an English explorer, Bartholomew Gosnold, who marveled at the amount of fish he caught there. Between 1524 and 1613 Europeans had sent several exploratory voyages to the Gulf of Maine. Thanks to their descriptions of the abundance of fish, the New England coastline was already a favorite destination of European fishermen at least a decade before the Pilgrims even arrived. This especially held true for the area now known as Maine, where seasonal fishing outposts were already dotting the remote coastline by the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts.
As Colin Woodard explains in The Lobster Coast, “English fishermen from the western ports of Devon, Dorset, Somerset, and Cornwall had been living at Monhegan, Damariscove, Southport, and other Maine islands for the better part of a decade by the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.” So why do the Pilgrims get credit for the first permanent European settlement? Well for one thing, these early fishermen did not specifically intend to settle here. They would come during the harsh winter months when fishing was at its best, and return with full ships to England and other European ports during the summer. Only one or two members of their crew would stay behind at the end of the season to work on building gear for the next year, as well as protect their prime fishing ground from other fishermen. For you see while the Pilgrims wanted the world to know they had arrived, the fishermen did not.
Overfishing in Europe led boats to travel farther away for this profitable commodity. Brian Fagan explains in Fish on Friday, that the settlement of the New World is due to forgotten fishermen. “They led Europeans to North America to fish and then settle there, well before the Pilgrims landed.” So why don’t we know more about their exploits? Again it goes back to supply and demand. Fish was big money back then, and those who profited from it were not willing to reveal their location.
Therefore, we don’t know for certain when the first permanent settlement in Maine began. We do know that by 1619 Monhegan Island in Maine had a substantial fishing and trading station, one year before the Pilgrims even set foot on Plymouth rock. We also know that in 1608 Humphrey Damerill, who was with the failed Popham Colony of Maine, established a store to supply fisherman on Damerill’s Island, which is better known today as Damariscove Island off of Boothbay, Maine. It was the residents of this island that saved the Pilgrims from starvation.
The first Thanksgiving took place in 1621 to celebrate a bountiful harvest, but by the spring of 1622 the Pilgrims were once again in danger of starving to death. They had underestimated their harvest, combined with the arrival of new residents who did not bring adequate supplies, and they soon found themselves struggling once again to survive. Desperate they sent a boat to the fishing outpost at Damariscove Island for supplies. There they found 13 year round residents and approximately 30 sailing ships, as well as a ten-foot-high spruce palisade, armed with a cannon and “ten good dogs,” to protect this important fishing outpost. For those interested in learning more about these brave dogs, sorry but once again William Bradford and Edward Winslow failed to elaborate further in their journals. But I digress.
Luckily for the Pilgrims, the fishermen took pity on them, filling their boat with much needed fish to prevent them from starving until their crops could be harvested. Shortly after that, the Pilgrims followed their example and began making routine fishing trips to Maine. Captains also made a point to stop at Plymouth during their fishing voyages to Maine to deliver messages to the Pilgrims, and bring letters back to England. Yet references to these neighbors to the north are brief, if mentioned at all, in the early sources written by the Pilgrims from this period. After all, they had their own agenda for being there.
It all comes down to the world loves an underdog. So while these secretive hardworking fishermen remain lost to the annals of history, it is the quirky ill-prepared Pilgrims’ struggle to establish a better life in New England who we celebrate today. But that’s ok. Because Mainers instinctively always lend a helping hand, but tend to shy away from the spotlight. I think the early settlers of Maine would appreciate the tagline used by a local TV show of, “Don’t go braggin’ just because you’re from Maine.”
