It was a year of plenty, and I had seen the pickers busy in the berry pastures as I passed by. The fruit, being for the time a sort of currency—not quite so hard, by-the-bye, as the musket-bullets of the colonists—is received in barter at the stores. Whole families engage in the harvest, making fair wages, the annual yield exceeding in value that of the corn crop of the State. Maine grows her corn on the Western prairies, and pays for it with canned fish and berries.
At the village store I saw a woman drive up with a bushel of huckleberries, with which she bought enough calico for a gown, half a pound of tobacco, and some knickknacks for the children at home. Affixed in a conspicuous place to the wall was the motto, "Quick sales and small profits." Half an hour was spent in beating the shop-keeper down a cent in the yard, and another quarter of an hour to induce him to "heave in," as she said, a spool of cotton. The man, after stoutly contesting the claim, finally yielded both points. "The woman," thought I, "evidently only half believes in your seductive motto."
All along the road I had met women and children, going or returning, with pails or baskets. One man, evidently a fast picker, had filled the sleeves of his jacket with berries, after having first tied them at the wrists. Another, who vaulted over the stone wall at my side, when asked if he was going to try the huckleberries, replied,
"Wa'al, yes; think I'll try and accumulate a few."
Descending the last hill before reaching Cape Neddock Harbor, I had a good view of the Nubble, which several writers have believed was the Savage Rock of Gosnold, and the first land in New England to receive an English name. The reliable accounts of the early voyagers to our coasts are much too vague to enable later historians to fix the points where they made the land with the confidence with which many undertake to fix them. A careful examination of these accounts justifies the opinion that Gosnold made his landfall off Agamenticus, and first dropped anchor, since leaving Falmouth, at Cape Ann. The latitude, if accurately taken, would of itself put the question beyond controversy; but as the methods of observing the exact position of a ship were greatly inferior to what they became later in the seventeenth century, I at first doubted, and was then constrained to admit, that the reckoning of Gosnold, Pring, and Champlain ought to be accepted as trustworthy. Gabriel Archer, who was with Gosnold, says, "They held themselves by computation well neere the latitude of 43 degrees," or a little northward of the Isles of Shoals. John Brereton, also of Gosnold's company, says they fell in with the coast in thick weather, and first made land with the lead. By all accounts the Concord, Gosnold's ship, was to the northward of Cape Ann. Land was sighted at six in the morning of the 14th of May, 1602, and Gosnold stood "fair along by the shore" until noon, which would have carried him across Ipswich Bay, even if the Concord were a dull sailer. In 1603 Martin Pring sailed over nearly the same track as Gosnold. It is by comparing these two voyages that Savage Rock appears to be located at Cape Ann.
Pring, says Gorges, observing his instructions (to keep to the northward as high as Cape Breton), arrived safely out and back, bringing with him "the most exact discovery of that coast that ever came to my hands since; and indeed he was the best able to perform it of any I met withal to this present." Pring's relation wrought such an impression on Sir F. Gorges and Lord Chief-justice Popham that, notwithstanding their first disasters, they resolved on another effort. He had no doubt seen and talked with Gosnold after his return; perhaps had obtained from him his courses after he fell in with the coast.
The Speedwell, Pring's vessel, also made land in forty-three degrees. It proved to be a multitude of small islands. Pring, after anchoring under the lee of the largest, coasted the main-land with his boats. The narrative continues to relate that they "came to the mayne in 43½, and ranged to south-west, in which course we found several inlets, the more easterly of which was barred at the mouth. Having passed over the bar, we ran up into it five miles. Coming out and sailing south-west, we lighted upon two other inlets; the fourth and most westerly was best, which we rowed up ten or twelve miles." Between forty-three and forty-three and a half degrees are the Saco, then barred at the mouth,[67] the Mousam, York, and the Piscataqua, the "most westerly and best."
"We (meeting with no sassafras)"—to follow the narrative—"left these places and shaped our course for Savage's Rocks, discovered the year before by Captain Gosnold." Savage Rock, then, was by both these accounts (Archer and Pring) to the southward of forty-three degrees, while the Nubble, or rather Agamenticus, is in forty-three degrees sixteen minutes.
"Departing hence, we bare into that great gulf which Captain Gosnold overshot the year before." This could be no other than Massachusetts Bay, for Gosnold, according to Brereton, after leaving Savage Rock, shaped his course southward ("standing off southerly into the sea") the rest of that day and night (May 15th), and on the following morning found himself "embayed with a mighty headland," which was Cape Cod. Pring, on the contrary, steered into the bay, "coasting, and finding people on the north side thereof." If my conjecture be correct, he was the first English mariner in Boston Bay.
It is hardly possible that a navigator falling in with the New England coast in forty-three or forty-three and a half degrees, and steering south-west, should not recognize in Cape Ann one of its remarkable features, or pass it by unperceived in the night. He would have been likely to find Savage Rock and end his voyage at the same moment. Champlain and Smith are both in evidence. The former, who examined the coast minutely two years after Pring (June, 1605), has delineated "Cap des Isles" on his map of 1612, which accompanied the first edition of his voyages. The account he gives of its position is as clear as that of Archer is obscure. Says the Frenchman, in his own way: