Silent they speak from out the shadowy past."
THE PENOBSCOT.
The peninsula between the Kennebec and the Penobscot River is traversed by a railway route through the forests of Lincoln and Knox Counties, named after two famous Revolutionary Generals. It crosses the Sheepscott and St. George Rivers and skirts the head of Muscongus Bay, amid a goodly crop of rocks, passing Wiscasset, Damariscotta (near the lake of that name, which got its title from the old Indian chief, Damarine), Waldeboro' and Thomaston to Rockland, upon the deeply indented Owl's Head Bay looking out upon the Penobscot. This peninsula is serrated by more of the numerous bays and havens of which Whittier sings:
"From gray sea-fog, from icy drift,
From peril and from pain,
The homebound fisher greets thy lights,
O hundred-harbored Maine!"
We have now come to the chief river of Maine, the Penobscot, draining the larger portion of its enormous forests, and emptying into the ocean through a vast estuary, which is the greatest of the many bays upon this rugged coast. Three centuries ago this was the fabulous river of Norumbega, enclosing unknown treasures and a mysterious city, as weirdly described by the Spaniards and Portuguese, who were the first visitors to the prolific fishing-grounds of America. At that time Europe knew of no river that was its equal, and no bay with such broad surface and enormous tidal flow. Hence many were the tales about wonderful Norumbega. The Penobscot estuary, with its connecting waters, embraces an archipelago said to contain five hundred islands, making a large portion of the Maine coast, which in many respects is the most remarkable in the country. It is jagged and uneven, seamed with deep inlets and guarded by craggy headlands, projecting far out into the ocean, while between are myriads of rocky and in many cases romantic islands. This coast is composed almost wholly of granites, syenites and other metamorphic rocks that have been deeply scraped and grooved ages ago by the huge glacier which, descending from Greenland and extending far into the sea, was of such vast thickness and ponderous weight as to plough out these immense valleys and ravines in the granite floor. The chief of these ridges and furrows lie almost north and south, so that the Maine shore-line is a series of long, rocky peninsulas separated by deep and elongated bays, having within and beyond them myriads of long islands and sunken ledges, with the same general southern trend as the mainland. Large rocks and boulders are also strewn over the land and upon the bottom of the sea, where they have been left by the receding glacier. These fragments are piled in enormous quantities in various places, many of the well-known fishing-banks, such as George's Shoals, being glacial deposits. These rocks and sunken ledges are covered with marine animals, making the favorite food of many of the most important food-fishes. The Penobscot from its source to the sea flows about three hundred miles. The wide bay and wedge-shape of the lower river, by gathering so large a flow of tidal waters, which are suddenly compressed at the Narrows just below Bucksport, make a rapidly-rushing tide, and an ebb and flow rising seventeen feet at Bangor, sixteen miles above. When Weymouth came in 1605 he set up a cross near where Belfast now stands, on the western shore of the bay, and took possession for England, and he marvelled greatly at what he saw, writing home that "many who had been travellers in sundry countries and in most famous rivers affirmed them not comparable to this—the most beautiful, rich, large, secure harboring river that the world affordeth." The Indians whom he found on its shores were the Tarratines, an Abenaquis tribe, who inhabited all that part of Maine. The Jesuit missionaries early came among them from Canada, and they were firm friends of the French. They called the great river Pentagoet, or "the stream where there are rapids," while its shores were the Penobscot, meaning "where the land is covered with rocks."
PENTAGOET AND CASTINE.