For the first two weeks of July, the Calais region will be celebrating the 400th anniversary of a key event in this history of what is now New England: the founding of the first European colony here.
While considerable ink has been spilt about later colonial enterprises – the early fishing stations at Monhegan and Damariscove, the Popham colony and the Plymouth settlement – the St. Croix Island colony has been largely forgotten. That’s because the colony doesn’t fit into the traditional narrative of American history: English arrive, break bread with the Indians and found a free republic. In fact, this first New England colony wasn’t English at all, but French.
One day in late June, 1604, a pair of French ships sailed up the St. Croix River and weighed anchor off a small island in the middle of the channel, just on the Maine side of what is now the U.S.-New Brunswick border. The ships contained 79 settlers led by a French gentleman, Sieur de Monts, and his trusted captain, Samuel de Champlain. Both men thought they had found the ideal spot from which to build and govern New France.
St. Croix Island was only 300 yards long and 50 yards wide. But what it lacked in size, it made up for in location. With the ship’s cannon installed on the high ground, islanders could determine who would and would not be allowed to sail in and out of the St. Croix River to trade. The soil appeared fertile, and an island location offered protection from surprise attack by Indians and English alike.
“Here seemed to be a Paradise,” Champlain wrote, “for the weather was warm, fish and deer were plentiful, and the location was convenient for shipping.”
Unfortunately, de Monts and his party had no idea what the Maine winter had in store for them.
The party set to work, clearing trees from both the island and a parcel on the adjacent Maine shore at Red Beach, and built dwellings, a storehouse, smithy and chapel. They adorned the governor’s residence with carved wood brought from Paris and planted crops beside the sawmill at Beaver Brook. Their optimism was captured by a poet in the company: “Gay musketeers at game with destiny, thronged laughing in the rough-hewn barricade; While the dark priests on holy mission sent, raising their symbol in rude cedar, blest La Sainte Croix, where the Christian faith should be.”
As construction continued, Champlain took one of the vessels on an exploratory mission down the coast of Maine. Along the way he named Mount Desert Island (Isle des Monts Deserts), Grand and Petit Manan, and Isle au Haut (Isle Haulte). In Penobscot Bay he established friendly relations with local Wabanaki Indian leaders, who told him where one could portage boats from the Penobscot to the St. Croix rivers via several lakes.
But shortly after Champlain returned to the island colony in late September, winter struck, and struck hard. “The snows began on the 6th of October [and the] cold was sharp, more severe than in France, and of much longer duration,” he wrote. Soon the river jammed with ice, marooning the colonists from their mainland facilities. Soon they had cut down most of the trees on the tiny island for firewood, and were running out of drinking water.
“During this winter all our liquors froze, except the Spanish wine,” Champlain recalled. “Cider was dispensed by the pound…[and] we were obliged to use very bad water and drink melted snow…”
Unable to fish or hunt with any regularity on account of the ice, the company was reduced to eating salted meats, and soon many of them were overcome by scurvy. Despite receiving a cache of fresh meat from a party of friendly Indians, nearly half the colonists died that winter, filling the colony’s cemetery with disease ravaged bodies. (In the 19th century, when the cemetery area began to erode into the river, the site became known, appropriately, as Bone Island.) Archeologists recently investigated many of the remains and discovered that the settlers had conducted autopsies on several of the dead, the earliest skeletal evidence of such practices uncovered anywhere.
“It would be very difficult to ascertain the character of this region without spending a winter in it,” Champlain concluded. In “summer everything is very agreeable [because] of the woods, fine country, and the many varieties of good fish. [But]… there are six months of winter.”
In the spring, de Monts led the survivors across the Bay of Fundy to establish a new colony at what is now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, and St. Croix was abandoned to the elements. But the episode marked the beginning of both European settlement in what would become New England and the French colony of Acadia, which turns 400 this summer.
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier. He lives in Portland and maintains www.colinwoodard.com.