NORSE sagas chronicle the discovery of the New World by Leif Ericson and by Biarni Heriulfson before him, and a Norse settlement has been found and excavated at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. But it seems there was no follow-up to these voyages, and another half-millennium passed before explorers braved the western ocean again and discovered the bountiful coast to the south.
COPYRIGHT 2002 DIAMOND PASS PUBLISHING
The history of Europeans along the coast of Maine starts in 1524 with the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazano. Financed privately by French and Italian bankers, Verrazano sailed from North Carolina to New York and then to Maine, visiting Block Island and Narragansett Bay and rounding Cape Cod. His first landfall in Maine was probably at Cape Small. There he encountered Indians "exhibiting their bare behinds and laughing immoderately," as Samuel Elliot Morison put it, which led Verrazzano to call the place "Terra Onde di Mala Gente." Estevan Gomez, a Portugese mariner in the employ of Spain followed in Verrazzano's wake in 1524-25 and explored the coast of Maine from the other direction.
COPYRIGHT 2002 DIAMOND PASS PUBLISHING
Meanwhile, the French were busy fighting wars. Though French fishermen had earlier found their way to the rich banks off Newfoundland, it was not until Carter's voyage to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in 1534 that France started to develop a real interest in the Americas. Samuel de Champlain, known as the "Father of Canada," established a settlement on an island in the Saint Croix River and founded Quebec in 1604. He also ventured southward, exploring the coast of Maine as far as Penobscot Bay, giving us such names a Mount Desert and Isle au Haut.
IF YOU ARE READING THIS, YOU HAVE VIOLATED
Many of the early explorers, expecting to drop anchor in a harbor hitherto unknown, were dismayed to find two or three dirty fishing vessels already there. The fishermen, of course, wrote no accounts of their voyages and kept their favorite fishing banks secret. Thirty-six English, French, Spanish, and Portugese ships were counted fishing off Newfoundland in 1583.
INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT LAW.
After the discovery of Newfoundland by John Cabot in 1497, the English discoverers lagged far behind the French. But by the 17th-century, the English arrived in force, rapidly charting the gap between Florida and Nova Scotia. John Walker explored Penobscot Bay in 1580. Bartholomew Gosnold coasted southward from Cape Elizabeth to Martha's Vineyard and Cuttyhunk in 1602. And Martin Pring, who named the Fox Islands, roamed the Maine coast and Cape Cod Bay in 1603.
PLEASE RESPECT AND SUPPORT THE WORK THAT HAS
Two years later, in 1605, George Waymouth made his landfall on Monhegan, visited Allen Island, and explored a great river, probably the Saint George. He also captured a few Indians to take home as souvenirs, arousing great interest in London, but poisoning the relationship between the English and the Indians for two centuries.
BROUGHT YOU THIS INFORMATION. BUY THE GUIDE!
In 1607, George Popham and Raleigh Gilbert founded the Popham Colony near the mouth of the Kennebec River, but this ill-fated attempt at settlement succumbed to one of the severest Maine winters in history, and Jamestown, Virginia, founded the same year, went on to claim the title of the first permanent British colony in the New World.
COPYRIGHT 2002 DIAMOND PASS PUBLISHING
Captain John Smith, Governor of Virginia, sailed up the coast in 1614 to the Isles of Shoals and Monhegan. It was Smith's lyric descriptions of the beauty, lushness, and potential of New England that fired the English imagination and spurred the growth of the new colonies. And it was Smith who realized that the real treasure of the Maine coast was not gold or silver, but codfish.