Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast - Samuel Adams Drake

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have had no little share in the world's doings. Corsica, Elba, and St. Helena are linked together by an unbroken historical chain. Homer and the isles of Greece, Capri and Tiberius loom in the twilight of antiquity. Thinking on Garibaldi or Victor Hugo, the mind instinctively lodges on Caprera or Guernsey. An island was the death of Philip II., and the ruin of Napoleon. In the New World, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Newfoundland were first visited by Europeans.

      The islands of the New England coast have become beacons of her history. Mount Desert, Monhegan, and the Isles of Shoals, Clark's Island, Nantucket, The Vineyard, and Rhode Island have havens where the historian or antiquary must put in before landing on broader ground. I might name a score of others of lesser note; these are planets in our watery system. On this line many peaceful summer campaigns have been brought to a happy conclusion. Not a few have described the more genial aspects of Mount Desert. It has in fact given employment to many busy pens and famous pencils. I am not aware that its wintry guise has been portrayed on paper or on canvas. The very name is instinctively associated with an idea of desolateness:

      "The gray and thunder-smitten pile

       Which marks afar the Desert Isle."

      Champlain was no doubt impressed by the sight of its craggy summits, stripped of trees, basking their scarred and splintered steeps in a September sun. "I have called it," he says, "the Isle of Monts Déserts."

      In a little "pattache" of only seventeen or eighteen tons burden, he had set out on the 2d of September, 1604, from St. Croix, to explore the coast of Norumbega. Two natives accompanied him as guides. The same day, as they passed close to an island four or five leagues long, their bark struck a hardly submerged rock, which tore a hole near the keel. They either sailed around the island, or explored it by land, as the strait between it and the main-land is described as being not more than a hundred paces in breadth. "The land," continues the French voyager, "is very high, intersected by passes, appearing from the sea like seven or eight mountains ranged near each other. The summits of the greater part of these are bare of trees, because they are nothing but rocks." It was during this voyage, and with equal pertinence, Champlain named Isle au Haut.[12] According to Père Biard, the savages called the island of Mount Desert "Pemetiq" "meaning," says M. l'Abbé Maurault, "that which is at the head." A crowned head it appears, seen on land or sea.

      It is curious to observe how the embouchure of the Penobscot is on either shore guarded by two such solitary ranges of mountains as the Camden and Mount Desert groups. They embrace about the same number of individual peaks, and approximate nearly enough in altitude. From Camden we may skirt the shores for a hundred and fifty miles to the west and south before meeting with another eminence; and then it is an isolated hill standing almost upon the line of division between Maine and New Hampshire that is encountered. On the shore of the main-land, west of Mount Desert, is Blue Hill, another lone mountain. Katahdin is still another astray, of grander proportions, it is true, but belonging to this family of lost mountains. Although they appear a continuous chain when massed by distance, the Mount Desert range is, in reality, broken into little family groups, as exhibited on the map.

      Another peculiarity of the Mount Desert chain is that the eastern summits are the highest, terminating generally in precipitous and inaccessible cliffs. I asked a village ancient his idea of the origin of these mountains, and received it in two words, "Hove up." The cluster numbers thirteen eminences, to which the title "Old Thirteen" may be more fitly applied than to any political community of modern history. This assemblage of hills with lakes in their laps at once recalled the Adirondack region, with some needful deductions for the height and nakedness of the former when compared with the greater altitudes and grand old forests of the wilderness of northern New York.

      Should any adventurous spirit, after reading these pages, wish to see the Desert Isle in all its rugged grandeur, he may do so at the cost of some trifling inconveniences that do not fall to the lot of the summer tourist. In this case, Bangor or Bucksport will be the point of departure for a journey of from thirty to forty miles by stage. I came to the island by steamboat from Boston, which landed me at Bucksport; whence I made my way via Ellsworth to Somesville.

      After glancing at the map of the island, I chose Somesville as a central point for my excursions, because it lies at the head of the sound, that divides the island almost in two, is the point toward which all roads converge, and is about equally distant from the harbors or places of particular resort. In summer I should have adopted the same plan until I had fully explored the shores of the Sound, the mountains that are contiguous, and the western half of the island. In twenty-four hours the visitor may know by heart the names of the mountains, lakes, coves, and settlements, with the roads leading to them; he may thereafter establish himself as convenience or fancy shall dictate. At Somesville there is a comfortable hostel, but the larger summer hotels are at Bar Harbor and at South-west Harbor.

      The accentuation should not fall on the last, but on the first syllable of Desert, although the name is almost universally mispronounced in Maine, and notably so on the island itself. Usually it is Mount Desart, toned into Desert by the casual population, who thus give it a curious significance.

      Mount Desert is one of the wardens of Penobscot Bay, interposing its bulk between the waters of Frenchman's Bay on the east and Blue Hill Bay on the west. A bridge unites it with the main-land in the town of Trenton, where the opposite shores approach within rifle-shot of each other. This point is locally known as the Narrows. When I crossed, the tide was pressing against the wooden piers, in a way to quicken the pace, masses of newly-formed ice that had floated out of Frenchman's Bay with the morning's ebb.

      You get a glimpse of Mount Desert in sailing up Penobscot Bay, where its mountains appear foreshortened into two cloudy shapes that you would fail to know again. But the highest hills between Bucksport and Ellsworth display the whole range; and from the latter place until the island is reached their snow-laced sides loomed grandly in the gray mists of a December day. In this condition of the atmosphere their outlines seemed more sharply cut than when thrown against a background of clear blue sky. I counted eight peaks, and then, on coming nearer, others, that at first had blended with those higher and more distant ones, detached themselves. Green Mountain will be remembered as the highest of the chain, Beech and Dog mountains from their peculiarity of outline. A wider break between two hills indicates where the sea has driven the wedge called Somes's Sound into the side of the isle. Western Mountain terminates the range on the right; Newport Mountain, with Bar Harbor at its foot, is at the other extremity of the group. In approaching from sea this order would appear reversed.

      The Somesville road is a nearly direct line drawn from the head of the Sound to the Narrows. Soon after passing the bridge, that to Bar Harbor diverged to the left. Crossing a strip of level land, we began the ascent of Town Hill through a dark growth of cedar, fir, and other evergreen trees. A little hamlet, where there is a post-office, crowns the summit of Town Hill. Not long after, the Sound opened into view one of those rare vistas that leave a picture for after remembrance. At first it seemed a lake shut in by the feet of two interlocking mountains, but the vessels that lay fast-moored in the ice were plainly sea-going craft. Somesville lay beneath us, its little steeple pricking the frosty air. Cold, gray, and cheerless as their outward dress appeared, the mountains had more of impressiveness, now that they were covered from base to summit with snow. They seemed really mountains and not hills, receiving an Alpine tone with their wintry vesture.

      After all, a winter landscape in New England is less gloomy than in the same zone of the Mississippi Valley, where, in the total absence of evergreen-trees, nothing but long reaches of naked forest rewards the eye, which roves in vain for some vantage-ground of relief. Jutting points, well wooded with dark firs, or clumps of those trees standing by the roadside, were agreeable features in this connection.

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