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."