PINE-TREE SHILLING.
The honest farmer kept his own counsel, using his treasure from time to time to pay his store bills in the town, dollar for dollar, accounting one of Master Hull's pine-tree shillings at a shilling. The storekeepers readily accepted the exchange at the farmer's valuation; but the possession of such a priceless collection was soon betrayed by its circulation abroad.
Dr. Joseph L. Stevens, the esteemed antiquary of Castine, of whom I had these particulars, exhibited to me a number of the coins. They would have made a numismatist's mouth water. French écus, Portuguese and Spanish pieces-of-eight, Bremen dollars, piasters, and cob-money,[30] clipped and battered, with illegible dates, but melodious ring, chinked in better fellowship than the sovereigns whose effigies they bore had lived in. A single gold coin, the only one found in the neighborhood of Castine, was picked up on the beach opposite the fort.[31]
The theory of the presence of so large a sum on the spot where it was found is that when Castin was driven from the fort by Colonel Church, in 1704, these coins were left by some of his party in their retreat, where they remained undiscovered for more than a century and a quarter. Or it may have been the hoard of one of the two countrymen of Castin, who, he says, were living two miles from him in 1687.
The detail of old Fort Pentagoët just given is believed to describe the place as it had existed since 1654, when captured by the colony forces of Massachusetts. General Sedgwick then spoke of it as "a small fort, yet very strong, and a very well composed peese, with eight peese of ordnance, one brass, three murtherers, about eighteen barrels of powder, and eighteen men in garrison."[32]
It would require a volume to set forth in extenso the annals of these mounds, scarce lifted above the surface of the surrounding plateau. But to arouse the reader's curiosity without an endeavor to gratify it were indeed churlish. I submit, therefore, with the brevity, and I hope also the simplicity, that should characterize the historic style, the essence of the matter as it has dropped from my alembic.
The reader is referred to what is already narrated of Norumbega for the earliest knowledge of the Penobscot by white men. The first vessel that ascended the river was probably the bark of Du Guast, Sieur de Monts, in the year 1604. De Poutrincourt was there in the year 1606.[33]
No establishment appears to have been begun on the Bagaduce peninsula until our colonists of New Plymouth fixed upon it for the site of a trading-post, about 1629.[34] Here they erected a house, defended, probably, after the fashion of the time, with palisades, loop-holed for musketry. They were a long way from home, and had need to keep a wary eye abroad. Governor Bradford mentions that the house was robbed by some "Isle of Rhé gentlemen" in 1632.
The Plymouth people kept possession until 1635, when they were dispossessed by an expedition sent from La Have, in Acadia, commanded by the Chevalier Charles de Menou, or, as he is usually styled, D'Aulnay Charnisay. The chevalier's orders from Razilly, who had then the general command in Canada, were to expel all the English as far as Pemaquid.