Maine History Online

In May 1607, four months after the Jamestown colonists left England, Popham and Gorges sent two vessels to the Sagadahoc, as the Kennebec was known. Aboard were George Popham, nephew of John Popham, as president of the colony; and his assistant, Raleigh Gilbert, a son of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, along with 120 "planters."

They stopped first at Monhegan Island, then, guided by one of Waymouth's captives, they sailed to Pemaquid where their attempts at trade were understandably rebuffed.

Sailing south, the colonists were caught in a midnight storm with fierce winds blowing directly onshore. "In great danger and hazzard," they struggled among the perilous rocks and reefs, and in the morning made anchor at the mouth of the Sagadahoc.

On a peninsula on the west side of the river the colonists set to work building their fort and a 30-ton "Pynnace" they christened Virginia. Gilbert sailed westward to Cape Elizabeth, up the Androscoggin, and then east to the Penobscot, trying without success to establish relations with the Indians. By October, Fort St. George mounted 12 cannon and enclosed 50 log cabins, a church, and a storehouse.

The colonists spent the winter half-starved and freezing in their dreary log cabins. In February George Popham died and two months later Gilbert learned he had inherited a family estate in England and decided to return there, abandoning the colony. The two leaders had been poorly suited to their roles, and the colonists were notably undisciplined. They grossly mistreated the Indians, who finally raided the fort and burned the storehouse.

There was little enthusiasm for another colonizing effort, but Virginia's Captain John Smith tried in 1614, looking for whales, copper, and gold. He found none of those, but created an amazingly accurate map of the country he named New England. Expeditions in 1615 and 1617 failed as well.

Still, Smith managed to encourage settlement with his Description of New-England, published in 1616, which included a plan for settlement that combined the quest for empire with the individual colonist's interest in land and self-improvement. Smith's imperial vision, brilliant in many respects, brought with it the persistent English weakness in viewing native inhabitants as one more commodity to be plucked from the land.

Like the English after Sagadahoc, French merchants turned away from the region after the St. Croix disappointment. But two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Pierre Baird and Enemond Massé, in 1613 sailed from Port-Royal to Somes Sound on Mount Desert Island to establish a colony called St. Sauveur.

British Captain Samuel Argall of Jamestown destroyed the colony a few weeks later. The region shifted from French to English control several times over the next century, but keeping the French from establishing a fortified outpost in northern New England allowed the Pilgrims to settle safely in Plymouth seven years later.

The years following Smith's voyage brought a halting movement toward English settlement in Maine. The earliest colonies were semi-permanent fishing stations under the nominal authority of Ferdinando Gorges, who had been granted a monopoly over the region by the Council for New England. By 1623 some 400 vessels plied the banks between Cape Ann and Monhegan, working mostly out of year-round fishing stations on the islands and peninsulas of the central coast.

In 1622 Gorges and his partner John Mason divided northern New England, with Gorges taking the land east of the Piscataqua, and for more than 40 years Gorges directed the colony's development as "Lord Palatinate" of Maine. Fishing and trading colonies appeared at Damariscove in 1622, Piscataqua, Cape Newagen, and Monhegan in 1623; Pejepscot in 1625-1630, and Richmond Island in 1628.

By the 1630s Pemaquid was the center of commercial activity on the New England coast. English, Abenaki, and French traders rubbed elbows on its cobblestone streets, and its merchants sent fur, fish, grains, corn, timber, and livestock to other provincial ports or England.

Markets changed abruptly and the fishing stations frequently disappeared when a scarcity of bait or timber undercut the operation. Still, the little hamlets gradually acquired the fundamentals of stable communities, holding informal "combinations" to elect local leaders, enforce moral codes, and settle land disputes.

By 1635 Gorges's Maine included several small communities: York, Saco, and Cape Porpoise established in 1630, Kittery and Scarborough the following year, Falmouth in 1633, North Yarmouth in 1636, and Wells in 1642. In 1640 he sent his nephew, Thomas Gorges, to Maine to establish a capital at Agamenticus on the York River. Gorges prescribed an elaborate system of government, set the local church on an even keel, and adjudicated several disputed land titles.

When the Puritans won the English civil war of 1642-1649, they encouraged Massachusetts's expansionist tendency, annexing most of southern Maine. A dispute over the ownership of the Casco Bay region, claimed by 1632 settler George Cleeve, who persuaded English merchant Edward Rigby to purchase the area, and by Gorges, eventually allowed Massachusetts to lay claim in 1652, winning some local support by offering secure land titles, local rules, freedom of worship, and protection from rival French claims.