ISLES OF SHOALS

Southern Coast
42° 58.70’N 070° 36.70’W
Charts: 13283, 13287
Chart Kit: 56 (D), 14
Southern coast overview chart





IN 1614, when the venerable Captain John Smith dropped anchor among the Isles of Shoals, he was so captivated by them that he named them “Smith’s Isles” for himself. “Of all foure parts of the world that I have seene not inhabited,” he wrote, “could I have but the meanes to transport a Colonie, I would rather live here than any where.”
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Lying just six miles southeast of the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor, five of the nine islands are in Maine (Duck, Appledore, Smuttynose, Malaga, and Cedar) and four are in New Hampshire (Star, Lunging, White, and Seaveys). The islands are spectacularly scenic, and their long history is crammed with tales of buried treasure and bloody Indian attacks.
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Smith’s name didn’t stick. More impressive than his praise or his unmatched contributions to the exploration of New England were the schools, or shoals, of cod near the islands, in an abundance never before seen by European fishermen. By the eighteenth century, the Isles of Shoals were considered one of England’s most valuable colonies because of the astounding quantities of cod caught, dried, and shipped home.
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The early cod-fishing communities were based primarily on Smuttynose and Appledore Island, but when the Massachusetts Bay Colony started to levy onerous taxes on the islanders in 1680, they crossed over to New Hampshire’s Star Island, named their new town Gosport, and continued their thriving fishing industry for another century. During the Revolution, however, everyone was evacuated to the mainland. Those who returned to Star Island after the Revolution acquired a reputation for “laziness, drunkenness, lawlessness, and cohabitation,” and the community never returned to its former prominence.
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The islands had a modest revival in the nineteenth century, and a widely read poet, Celia Thaxter, grew up in the midst of it. Thaxter was the daughter of Thomas Laighton, the lighthouse keeper on White Island. Aware and sensitive at an early age, she referred to the area as “these precious isles set in a silver sea.”
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Enterprising Laighton built Appledore House around 1850 and publicized it as the first resort hotel between Nantucket and Eastport, Maine. At the peak of their combined popularity in the 1890s, both Appledore House and Celia Thaxter attracted such literary and artistic figures as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Orne Jewett, Childe Hassam, and John Greenleaf Whittier.
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The rival Oceanic House, built on Star Island in 1872, advertised itself as “an ideal summer resort of the highest class and full of historic associations. Preeminently the place for the tired worker. No noise, no dust, no trolleys.”
With the advent of the automobile, the Isles of Shoals resort business declined, and in 1915 Star Island was sold to an association of Unitarians and Congregationalists as a conference center for religion, natural history, and the arts.

HARBOR, ANCHORAGE INFO
STAR ISLAND
WHITE ISLAND
SEAVEYS ISLAND
WHITE ISLAND
DUCK ISLAND
APPLEDORE ISLAND
SMUTTYNOSE ISLAND
MALAGA ISLAND
CEDAR ISLAND




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