Along the Coast at Bar Harbor, Me.
For more than a century after Champlain first looked upon this island, the French made ineffectual attempts at settlement, but it was not until 1761 that any one succeeded in establishing a permanent home. Then old Abraham Somes, a hardy mariner from Cape Ann, came along, and entering the Sound that bears his name, settled on the shore, and his descendant is said to still keep the inn at Somesville on the very spot of his earliest colonization. After the little colony was planted, the cultivation of the cranberry and the gathering of blueberries kept the people alive, these being almost the only food-products raised in the moderate allowance of soil allotted the island. The population grew but slowly, though artists and summer saunterers came this way, and about 1860 it began to attract the pleasure-seekers. When the island, in its early government, was divided into towns, the eastern portion was called, with a little irony, Eden. Bar Harbor, an indentation of Frenchman Bay, having a bar uncovered at low tide, which named it, being easy of access, the village of East Eden on its shores became the fashionable resort. It has a charming outlook over the bay, with its fleets of gaily-bannered yachts and canoes and the enclosing Porcupine Islands, but there is not much natural attractiveness. It is a town of summer hotels and boarding-houses, built upon what was a treeless plain, the outskirts being a galaxy of cottages, many of great pretensions. Here will congregate ten to twenty thousand visitors in the season, and Bar Harbor has become one of the most fashionable resorts on the Atlantic coast. Its bane, however, is the fog, a frequent sojourner in the summer, though even fogs, in their way, have charms. There are days that it lies in banks upon the sea, with only occasional incursions upon the shore, when under a shining sun the mist creeps over the water and finally blots out the landscape. But light breezes and warm sunshine then soon disperse it and the view reappears. The fog-rifts are wonderful picture-makers. Sometimes the mist obscures the sea and lower shores of the attendant islands, leaving a narrow fringe of tree-tops resting against the horizon, as if suspended in mid-air. Often a yacht sails through the fog, looking like a colossal ghost, when suddenly its sails flash out in the sunlight like huge wings. Thus the mist paints dissolving views, so that the fogs of Mount Desert become an attraction, and occasionally through them appears the famed mirage which Whittier describes:
"Sometimes in calms of closing day
They watched the spectral mirage play;
Saw low, far islands looming tall and high,
And ships, with upturned keels, sail like a sea the sky."
Somes Sound has off its entrance on the southern side of Mount Desert, the group of Cranberry Islands with a lighthouse on Baker's Island, the outermost of the cluster. These make a picturesque outlook for the summer settlements which have grown around the spacious indentations of North East Harbor and South West Harbor, on either side of the entrance to the Sound. To the eastward is another indentation in the southern coast, Seal Harbor, also a popular resort, having one of the finest beaches on the island. The five high rocky Porcupine Islands partially enclosing Bar Harbor get their names from their bristling crests of pines and spruces, one of them, the Bald Porcupine, having some stupendous cliffs. The visits to the cliffs along the shores and the ascent of the mountains are the chief excursions from Bar Harbor. Four miles southward is the summit of Green Mountain, its sides being rugged, and the charming Eagle Lake to the westward nestling among the mountain peaks. The view from the top is fine, over the deeply-cut Somes Sound, penetrating almost through the island, and the grand expanse of Maine coast, seen, with its many bays and islands, stretching from the Penobscot northeast to Quoddy Head. All around to the southward and eastward spreads the open ocean bounded by the horizon, and like a speck, to the south-southeast, twenty miles away, is the lighthouse upon the bleak crag known as Mount Desert Rock, far out at sea, the most remote beacon, in its distant isolation, upon the New England coast.
ENTERING THE MARITIME PROVINCES.
The Maine coast beyond Mount Desert has more deep harbors and long peninsulas. Here are Englishman's Bay, Machias Bay, Cutler Harbor and others, and finally Passamaquoddy Bay, opening into the Bay of Fundy. Grand Manan Island lies off this Bay, the first land of the British Maritime Provinces, twenty-two miles long and distant about nine miles from the coast of Maine, the frowning yet attractive precipices of its western verge rising four hundred feet. Over opposite in Maine, as the strait between the two narrows, are dark, storm-worn crags, which end with a promontory bearing a conspicuously red and white-striped lighthouse tower. This is the termination of the coast of Maine and of the United States at Quoddy Head, and the entrance to St. Croix River to the northward, the boundary between New England and the Canadian Province of New Brunswick. Quoddy Head is a long peninsula, with Campobello Island directly in front. Just beyond is another peninsula, bearing a village of white cottages, rising on the slopes of a high rounded hill having a church with a tall spire perched upon its pinnacle. This is Lubec, the easternmost town of the United States. Out in front upon Campobello lived for many years the eccentric old sailor, William Fitzwilliam Owen, a retired British Admiral, who built there on the rocks a regulation "quarter-deck" of a man-of-war, whereon he solemnly promenaded in full uniform and issued orders to a mythical crew. Finally he died, and as he had desired, was buried by candlelight in the churchyard of the little chapel he had built on the island. Campobello is now a summer resort, with numerous hotels and cottages. All these waters are filled with wicker-work fish-weirs, wherein are caught the herring supplying the Eastport sardine-packing establishments. This is another town of white houses on an island adjoining the mainland, having a little fort and a prominent display of the sardine-factories in front, with a background of fir-clad hills in Maine.