Casco Bay, Sam Smith, 2016 - Casco Bay, which once lay under a mile high pile of ice, 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.
The former state geologist Jack
Rand described the rocks on our shore this way once:
Well, [your]
bedrock, the "ledge" where she plans to hang a new landing and float,
is primarily closely foliated gneiss - metamorphosed felsic volcanic rocks -
whose age may approach more than 500 million years, and whose original home
prior to being jammed into what they now call Maine, may have been west Africa.
Some of the most interesting
rocks aren't on the shore. These large objects, known as erratic boulders and
found scattered in woods and fields, were moved as much as a hundred miles or
more during the glacial retreat.
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 glaciation, 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 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 to complete the task.
The Atlantic coast was far more
dangerous than Americans realized. Years after the war it would be revealed
that in the first months 46 merchant ships were sunk off the east coast.
Another 126 would be sunk before the war was over. And Portland was among the
first targets for U-boats after war was declared. 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.
The U-boat story even came closer
to home than that. Emily Rhoades lived part of the war on Bowman's Island off
the end of Wolf Neck. One night, around midnight, she went out to get some
water at the well. Standing by the well was a man all dressed black including a
black mask. He put his finger to his mouth and pointed her back to the house.
There was little doubt about how he had gotten there.
The first Europeans to visit New
England 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 Maine's Casco Bay on their way from Nova Scotia to the
Carolinas. Among other things they found
on this voyage were 1,000 Basque fishing vessels working the coast of
Newfoundland having kept it a secret for about 500 years.
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."