An excerpt from Notes on a Lost Flute, by Kerry Hardy; published by Down East.

Sir Ferdinando Gorges sponsored three successive voyages to midcoast Maine in 1605, 1606, and 1607. Though the account of the Hanham and Pring voyage of 1606 has been lost to history, the other two — Waymouth’s and Rosier’s in 1605, and that of Davies, the journal keeper who sailed with Popham and Gilbert two years later—are critically important early portraits of Maine’s Indians. For the first time, American natives were presented to English readers as living, breathing people tied to real places on the map, dressed a certain way, and more. Details like these inform us still.

Linguists treasure Rosier’s account, for he recorded eighty-nine words in the native language that help to shed light on the ethnicity of the people living on the coast at that time. Davies’ record, too, has special value, because Gilbert and his crew penetrated deeper into the region’s interior—up the Kennebec almost to Waterville—than any other English voyage of the whole colonial period. Students of Indian history pore over both journals, and rightly so. I would urge everyone to read these, but with an important caveat: Do not assume that these accounts offer pictures of precontact Maine. They don’t.

The Maine that Rosier and Davies saw was a war zone, and had been for a period of years. Tremendous upheavals had taken place in the prior century, and bigger ones were still to come, as different native factions struggled to control trade and gain influence with the Europeans.
The five natives that Waymouth kidnapped and took back to England described a confederacy called Mawooshen that represented the peak of Abenaki influence over their eastern neighbors. It seems to have spread eastward quickly, and it would retreat just as quickly in the following two decades as the Micmac and Maliseet, or “Tarrantines” as their enemies knew them, pushed back. The years from 1607 to 1615 marked the height of the struggle, and the culminating battle saw the death of a legendary figure known alternately as Bessabes, Beshabe, Bashabas, or The Bashaba.
I think that name, which I will give as Beshabe, has a story to tell. To me, the likeliest translation of it is Great Man or Head Man (a contraction of misha- or mesho-, great; and -abe, man; the substitution of B for the initial M—by either the speaker or the hearer—is a fairly common occurrence). It is a title rather than a name (on the testimony of Rosier, who recounts the Indians offering him tobacco for his own bashaba, or captain, i.e., Waymouth). I believe that Beshabe’s last stronghold, and the decisive battle, was someplace very close to today’s Camden.

The Penobscot River broadens into a bay as it enters the Gulf of Maine. The high hills on the western shore of that bay have been a landmark for sailors for centuries, and the earliest accounts offer the first two of our three names for this area. Champlain, who had Micmacs or Maliseets on board as his guides, sailed past the “mountains of Bedabedec” (the Camden Hills) and “Bedabedec Point” (Owls Head) in 1604. In 1614, John Smith, with a Pemaquid-area sagamore as a guide, called the spot Mecaddacut.

Though I haven’t yet been able to translate Mecaddacut, I think I know what Bedabedecis all about. I would look to Passamaquoddy or Micmac as the likely tongue, and I think it means “the place of the whale.” In this case, the whale is made not of flesh and blood, but of stone, and towers eight hundred feet above the town of Camden. Today we call it Mount Battie, but in 1600 it was a landmark to Micmac and Maliseet warriors and traders, the Tarrantines who menaced the coast as far west as Massachusetts. Seen from the water on an easterly approach to the harbor, Mount Battie’s massive form is uncannily suggestive of a sperm whale.

From farther out to sea, the Camden Hills are visible on the horizon long before any islands or other mainland features can be seen, and the whole cluster of mountains could be compared to the forms of whales. When the Popham colonists first arrived at Penobscot Bay, their chronicler commented on this: “Ten or 12 Leags from yo they ar three heigh mountains that Lye in upon the main Land near unto the river of penobskotin wch river the bashabe makes his abod the cheeffe Commander in those pts and streatcheth unto the river of Sagadehock under his Comand. Yo shall see theise heigh mountains when yo shall not perseave the main Land under ytt they ar of shuch an exceedinge heygts.” (If you enjoy fighting your way through spelling like this, the entire Relation of a Voyage to Sagadahoc, 1607–1608 can be read online at americanjourneys.org.)
It’s easy to see why the Indians thought that the European boats, with their billowing sails, were clouds or giant swans. The indefatigable John Smith sailed his own giant swan here in 1614 and spent the summer charting Penobscot Bay and reckoning how he and his kind might best turn a profit on this “new” continent. By the time of Smith’s visit, the island of Monhegan was already well known to the English; the two ships carrying the Popham colonists in 1607 had rendezvoused here, and two years earlier Waymouth and Rosier’s Archangell had visited. Though Smith’s entire account of this trip is required reading for any New England historian, one sentence in particular is especially important: And Northwest of Pennobscot [Bay] is Mecaddacut, at the foot of a high mountaine, a kind of fortress against the Tarrantines, adjoyning to the high mountaines of Pennobscot, against whose feet doth beat the sea.

To help you understand the significance of this passage, I will provide a bit of background.

1. Smith’s voyage took place in 1614, the summer before the Tarrantines succeeded in killing the Penobscot Beshabe, the paramount chief of the Abenaki-influenced Mawooshen alliance.

2. The topography described is unmistakably Camden Harbor. Elsewhere in Smith’s account he makes it clear that his base of operations is in the southern end of Penobscot Bay (he planted a salad garden on an island at 43.5 degrees latitude; almost certainly Monhegan), which is why he describes Mecaddacut as being to the northwest.

3. On this trip, Smith had a native guide and informant, Dehanada — one of the five captives taken by Waymouth in 1605. Smith called him “Dohannida, one of their greatest Lords; who had lived long in England.” In other words, Smith was getting his geography and politics straight from a midcoast sagamore who understood English.

4. Though I’m no great fan of John Smith, I will give him his due as a keen observer of military and political matters. Consequently, I pay close attention to his description of Penobscot Bay: “On the East of it, are the Tarrantines, their mortall enemies...” This suggests that the mouth of the river is already a war zone, and that the Beshabe had sought safety somewhere in the vicinity of the Camden Hills.

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Given all of this, a compelling case can be made that Mecaddacut is a village located at today’s Camden Harbor and that Mount Battie is the “high mountaine” behind it that serves as “a kind of fortress against the Tarrantines.” With its steep sides and flat top,this promontory overlooking all of Penobscot Bay was probably the single best lookout available to the Penobscots, while still allowing easy access to the sea; a good runner can go from harbor to summit in fifteen minutes. In 1615, as the Tarrantines pressed the advantage that their French muskets gave them, this probably became the last safe haven—and perhaps the final resting place — for Mawooshen’s last sagamore.

 

 

Four years later, in Massachusetts, Nanepashemet’s death at the hands of the Tarrantines left his wife, known to history only as the Squaw-Sachem, in charge of his confederacy. Like the Mawooshen alliance, the Massachusett confederacy retreated northwestward; it soon morphed into the Pennacook confederacy under Passaconaway.

This, in turn, allowed Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags and an ally to the Plymouth colonists, to control the coast from Boston southward.

Abenaki chiefs in Maine and Massachusetts traveled the coast freely during the period from 1600 to 1625, and they had hopes that a strong English presence in New England would protect them from the Tarrantines on the east and the Mohawks on the west. On the strength of this, the English would travel and trade freely between Boston and Monhegan for the next fifty years with little fear of trouble from the Indians.

Just as they had in 1604 with Champlain, the Penobscots entreated Smith to stay and protect them from their eastern enemies. This he promised them during the summer of 1614, and he intended to do so, for in New England he saw a land just as promising for colonization as Virginia.
Leaving an associate, Captain Thomas Hunt, in charge, Smith sailed back to England to unload a cargo of furs and take on more men and provisions for a fledgling colony. At this point, fate turned against the Penobscots: Hunt promptly kidnapped twenty-seven natives and set sail for Spain to sell them as slaves, while Smith sat in England and fumed as his backers scrambled to provision a return voyage. He set sail in the spring of 1615, but a short way into the journey his ship was mauled by storms and had to limp back to England, the first of many misfortunes that would keep him from ever returning to Maine. By the end of the year, the Beshabe was dead and Mawooshen was disintegrating.

A final name for Camden is the one its first white settlers heard: Negunticook. This has several possible translations, depending on who was speaking it and how accurately it was recorded. It may yield to a Passamaquoddy or even a Micmac translation, for these eastern Indians were apparently visitors here in the 1770s, when the brothers James and Dodiphar Richards settled in town. John Huden translates Negunticook as Micmac, “at the big-mountain harbor,” but translations like “at the first river” or “at the ancient river” should also be considered. Sometime after1800, Negunticook became Megunticook, a form retained today in the name of Camden’s signature lake and mountain.

We are left to wonder how Maine’s Indian and colonial history might have turned if Smith and his soldiers had made it back to Maine in 1615. Would the Beshabe, and the Mawooshen confederacy, have regained control of the coast? Would the first major American port have been on the Penobscot—Castine, in all likelihood—rather than in Boston? However things might have played out, it seems safe to say that history’s course was changed by the storm that ended Smith’s Maine adventures.


Fortresses That Failed
As protection against Tarrantine attacks, the Penobscots would have had one or more forts behind circular log palisades (the Abenaki name for this protective wall, wakanr∞sen, translates roughly to “halo”). We know that the Massachusett confederacy, headed by Nanepashemet, helped the Penobscots in this war against the Tarrantines and that his men won several small skirmishes and took a few prisoners. Soon afterward, he constructed several such palisades in the vicinity of today’s Medford, Massachusetts, where he lived in fear of the vengeful Tarrantines.

His fears were well justified, as this 1621 account from Edward Winslow reveals: A mile from hence, Nanapashemet, their king, in his lifetime had lived....Not far from hence, in a bottom, we came to a fort, built by their deceased king — the manner thus: There were poles, some thirty or forty feet long, stuck in the ground, as thick as they could be set one by another, and with those they enclosed a ring some forty or fifty feet over. A trench, breast high, was digged on each side; one way there was to get into it with a bridge. In the midst of this palisade stood the frame of a house, wherein, being dead, he layed buried. About a mile from hence we came to such another, but seated upon the top of a hill.

—From Lewis and Newhall’s History of Lynn