Casco Bay is the westernmost of the great bays of Maine, eighteen miles from headland to headland. The product of glaciers, Casco Bay is speared by a series of points extending in a generally southerly direction. Beyond the points are the islands, many laying on the same axis after being chopped off the peninsulas by the dull but indefatigable knife of the sea. Maine has thousands of islands -- a survey in the 1980s found 2,000 of uncertain ownership alone -- and if its coastline were stretched taut it would reach the Panama Canal. But nowhere is it more jagged and idiosyncratic, nor its waters more jammed with the potsherds of glaciations, than in Casco Bay. The Maine Times claimed once that there were 768 islands and ledges visible above the 9-10 foot high tides. Old tourist material referred to "The Calendar Isles," a reflection of the alleged island count. This count goes back at least to 1700 when an English document cautiously reported that
Sd bay is covered from storms that come from the sea by a multitude of islands, great and small, there being (if report be true) as many islands as there are Days in a Yr.
The US Coast Pilot doesn't tally the rocks and says there are only 136 islands and ledges. The Portland City Guide says 222 islands -- based on a state study that listed only those outcroppings "big enough for a man to get out and stand on. " And a 1992 computer-aided study found 763 islands and ledges appearing at mean high water.
In any, case there are a lot of islands, rocks and ledges. It is why, perhaps, that the lobsterman, upon it being proposed that he undoubtedly knew the location of all the rocks, replied, "Nope. But I know where they ain't."
The bay is also home to an unusual variety of wildlife. The Casco Bay Estuary Project reported in 1995 that 850 species had been identified in local waters. The density of organisms in the bay is more than ten times that of Delaware Bay. Included are over 30,000 water birds of 150 different species, over 2,000 harbor seals, and over fifty pair of nesting osprey and even a few eagles.
Many of the islands are uninhabited. The country's oldest mail boat service plies among the largest of the others, bringing letters, tourists, food and palettes of construction materials. In the lower corner of the bay is Portland, one of the east coast's great natural harbors, with a channel deeper than that of Boston, Philadelphia or New York. During and after World War II, the Navy formed transatlantic convoys and moored as many as 60 vessels off Portland. The islands provided a natural barrier to storms and enemy subs, with anti-submarine netting strung between them completing the task.
At least three U-boats were sunk near Casco Bay - one five miles southeast of the Portland sea buoy, one off Small Point and the other seven miles off Halfway Rock after being spotted by shore gunners on Bailey's Island.
Among the Navy ships using Casco Bay was the battleship Missouri which moored right off Clapboard Island. Years after she had departed, the mammoth buoy of the vessel on whose deck the Japanese surrendered remained as a memento as it lazily filled with water and finally sank.
The first Europeans to visit these waters were probably Scandinavian fishermen, who could make the northern transit of the Atlantic and never be more than a few hundred miles from shore. John and Sebastian Cabot, five years after Columbus, passed through and charted Casco Bay on their way from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas. By 1602, when Bartholomew Gosnold arrived at Cape Neddick, his presence was considered by the Indians to be less than remarkable. John Bereton, the chronicler of the voyage, wrote:
One who seemed to be their commander wore a coat of black work, a pair of breeches, cloth stockings, shoes, hat and band.... They spoke divers Christian words and seemed to understand more than we, for lack of language, could comprehend...They pronounced our language with great facility; for one of them sitting by me, upon occasion I spake smilingly to him with these words: How now sirha are you so saucy with my tobacco, which words (without any further repetition) he suddenly spake so plaine and distinctly as if he had been a long scholar in the language.
As far back as 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, arriving to the west of Casco Bay near Ogunquit, got a reception from the Indians that suggested possible previous contact with Europeans. The Indians insisted on standing on a cliff and trading with Verrazano's crew by use of a rope. "We found no courtesy in them," Verrazano complained. Worse they rounded out the transaction by "showing their buttocks and laughing immoderately."
Captain John Smith may have been the first person to put in writing the attraction the Maine coast would have to centuries of later arrivals:
Here are no hard landlords to racke us with high rents; no tedious pleas in law to consume us with their many years deputations for Justice; no multitudes to occasion such impediments to good order, as in the popuar States. So freely hath God in his Majesty bestowed his blessing on them that will attempt to obtaine them as here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land; or the greatest part in a small time."
Recent archeological work suggests that the Indians first came to these parts as much as 8,000 years ago. In the late 17th century they retrieved much of the land along the western Maine coast from the European usurpers in a series of bloody clashes known as King Philip's War. Not until the early 18th century did Europeans return to these parts and reassert old land claims. For decades in between, Maine from York County east, was devoid of Europeans. As late as 1870 Indians summered on Great Chebeague Island.