Chapter 1

Introduction

Steven R. Pendery

Maine’s Saint Croix Island never fails to impress visitors with its beauty and the diversity andsignificance of its natural and cultural resources. This six-acre island is located in the St. Croix River estuaryin close proximity to the International Boundary with the Canadian Province of New Brunswick (Figure 1.1).From a distance, it appears as a verdant barge nosing up-river leaving islets and shoals in its wake (Figure1.2). At close range the island resembles a tilted tabletop lifted out of the river, exposing its upper surface tothe west while presenting sheer bedrock cliffs and sandy bluffs to all other directions (Figure 1.3). Boatersgoing to the island are at the mercy of banks of fog, shoals, and eight meter (25 ft) tides although a beach,however narrow, is always to be found. A set of wooden steps at the island’s south end leads to its uppersurface. There the visitor is rewarded with grassy meadows fringed with pines and hardwoods offeringdramatic views to the mainland and to island-studded Passamaquoddy Bay immediately to the south.

Saint Croix Island’s small size and undeveloped state belie its international significance as a historic andarchaeological site.1 It is one of earliest settings within the continental United States for sustained interactionbetween a Native American tribe, the Passamaquoddy, and a colonizing European power, the French. WithPort-Royal, it represents the earliestof two successive outposts leadingto permanent French settlement ofNew France. It was home base forexpeditions of exploration and set-tlement conducted by Pierre Dugua,sieur de Mons and Samuel Cham-plain resulting in the earliest accu-rate maps of the coasts of New Eng-land, New Brunswick and NovaScotia. It contains North America’searliest specifically-documentedEuropean cemetery and remains ofan autopsied individual. It was thesetting for the first application ofmethods of historical archaeologyto resolve a historical question, inthis case the adjustment of the inter-national boundary between theUnited States and Canada.

Despite the island’s signifi-cance, little specific information onits history and archaeology is avail-able to the public and to scholars.The last synthetic study of SaintCroix Island’s natural and cultural Figure 1.1 Locator map for Saint Croix Island, Maine. (by the author)

2 Chapter 1: Introduction

history was composed in 1902 (Ganong2003). The last large-scale archaeologicalexcavation was conducted in 1969, butthere are no publications in English de-scribing the results. North Americans nowobserve the unfolding quadricentennialevents marking Champlain’s progressionfrom Saint Croix Island in 1604 to thefounding of Québec in 1608 and discoveryof Lake Champlain in 1610 (Moss 2009; Nahra 2010). New publications on Cham-plain such as David Hackett Fischer’sChamplain’s Dream (2008) stimulate the public’s appetite for even more detailedand accurate information on New France.This volume presents historical and ar-chaeological data on Champlain’s and deMons’ biggest failure, the settlement ofSaint Croix Island. It presents old data ina contemporary format including the useof non-georeferenced distribution dia-grams that do not disclose sensitive sitelocations. There is also a need for accu-rate information for interpreting to thepublic the types of artifacts found at thesite. This volume presents clear photo-graphs and drawings of early French mate-rial culture from Saint Croix Island forcomparative study and analysis.

Research conducted in preparationfor the 2004 commemorative eventsbrought together an international researchteam qualified to address these unmetneeds in research and public education.They include a member of Passamaquod-dy tribe, Canadians from Québec, NewBrunswick and Nova Scotia, Americans

from across New England, and Europeans from France and Italy. Each contributor had completeindependence to explore their respective topic and no attempt was made to force a consensus oninterpretation, as apparent contradictions among data sets actually stimulates research in new directions. Thisvolume is presented as the first in a series of publications intended to explore specific lines of inquiry andapplication of material and biological sciences to the extraordinary archaeological legacy of Saint CroixIsland.

GEOLOGY AND THE PRE-CONTACT PERIOD

The location and natural features of Saint Croix Island have attracted human beings for at least 3,000years. In Appendix 1, Harold Borns of the University of Maine’s Department of Earth Sciences and ClimateChange Institute leads us through the geology and hydrology of the island and reviews physical and historical

Figure 1.2 View of Saint Croix Island looking north. (Courtesy of the NPS)

Saint Croix Island, Maine 3

evidence for the island’s evolving size and shape. Thegeological past is our best guide for what we may expectfrom future sea level rise and land subsidence. Evidenceindicates a relative sea level rise at an annual rate of 1.39mm/year over the past century. Extrapolating back to 1604is problematic, however. It is also a challenge to calculatethe rate of erosion at the island’s exposed south end.Depending on the accuracy of Champlain’s maps, up to30.4 m (100 ft) may have been removed through erosionand quarrying (Figure 1.4). Borns also argues that thewinter of 1604-1605 was especially harsh, occurring duringa period when the climate was already a couple of degreescolder than it is today. In Appendix 2, David Sanger,emeritus professor at the University of Maine, examines thearchaeological evidence for Native American use of theisland in the context of other archaeological sites in thePassamaquoddy Bay area. The earliest archaeologicalmaterial dates to the Terminal Archaic period, about 3400to 3000 years ago (Figure 1.5). Pottery was also found, butit dates to about 2200 to 1600 years ago. There is no directevidence of intensive Native American use of the islandwhen Europeans settled there in 1604, but erosion mayhave claimed such evidence long ago (Sanger 1973).

STAGES IN FRENCH COLONIZATION

Saint Croix Island International Historical Site issignificant in the context of events that began to unfold

Figure 1.3 View of Saint Croix Island from the west. (Photograph by the author)

Figure 1.4 Overlay of Champlain’s map (1604),Ganong’s map (1902), and NPS map (1976)demonstrating changes in Saint Croix Island’sconfiguration over 366 years.

4 Chapter 1: Introduction

throughout the western hemisphere in theearly sixteenth century. At that time,French economic activity in the New Worldincluded fishing expeditions in the NorthAtlantic and trade in exotic wood and otheritems in coastal Brazil. With the 1494Treaty of Tordesillas that demarcated theseareas into Portuguese and Spanish spheresof influence, Francis I of France sponsoredGiovanni da Verrazano to explore the coastfrom the Carolinas to Cape Breton in orderto gain information with which to insertFrance into the newly emerging geopoliticalorder (Knecht 1994: 371-375). Verrazanoreturned to France with accurate informationon the coastal area along with much specu-lation about its mineral wealth. This led tothe first of Jacques Cartier’s three voyagesto the St. Laurence area (Biggar 1924). Hislast settlement was built on the bluffs over-looking the St. Lawrence River, a site thatwas discovered in 2005. Although coloniza-tion failed, French fisherman from Nor-mandy and Brittany fanned out along thecoast from the Petit Nord in Newfoundlandto the Caribbean to harvest what they couldfrom the sea. Some French corsaires weredrawn to plundering stray galleons fromSpain’s treasure fleet.

The success of trade with Braziliantribes inspired Gaspard de Coligny to at-tempt a permanent settlement of FrenchHuguenots. Three ships carrying 600 men

and women left France in 1555 under Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon. Soon, Fort Coligny was built on anisland in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro and there were plans to establish Henryville not far away. As the dogmaof Swiss Protestants riled Villegagnon and other Catholics, many returned to Europe in 1558. The presenceof the settlement angered the Portuguese who took the fort in 1560 and returned in 1565 to remove theremaining French from the countryside. So ended “La France Antarctique,” although trade continued withthe Tupinamba for the duration of the century (Dickason 1984:184-185).

Coligny then decided to challenge the Spanish and masterminded a French settlement in La Florida(McGrath 2000). Charlesfort was established by Captain Jean Ribault in 1562, with the express purpose ofpreying on Spanish treasure galleons as well as seeking precious metals. This site has apparently come to lightin excavations conducted at Santa Elena in South Carolina by Stanley South and Chester DePratter (South2005). In 1564 de Laudonnière landed with 300 men and constructed Fort Caroline as the main Frenchsettlement on the St. John’s River. Finally, Ribault returned from France in 1565 with entire families. Frenchagricultural practices were not successful, and the settlers remained dependent on Native provisions althoughFrench and Indian mistrust was never far from the surface. The Spanish under Menendez captured FortCarolina and put its marooned Huguenot settlers to the sword, ending the French challenge to SpanishAmerica for the duration of the century (Pendery 2010:47-51).

Figure 1.5 Ground stone artifacts from the Saint Croix Island site.

Saint Croix Island, Maine 5

SAINT CROIX ISLAND: HISTORY AND SOURCES

France re-focused its attention on Canada with the resumption of official voyages of exploration andsettlement under Henry IV. Objectives included the search for the Northwest Passage and for mythicalNorembega with its precious metals. There was also growing interest in the fur trade. A Huguenot supporterof Henri IV, Pierre Dugua, sieur de Mons, was appointed as Lieutenant-Governor of New France and wasgranted a monopoly on the fur trade on condition of establishing a permanent settlement in Acadia. Thisterritory extended from 40 and 46 degrees latitude, roughly from today’s Philadelphia to Cape Breton.

In Chapter 2, French historian Eric Thierry describes the outcome of de Mons’ 1604 expedition toexplore and settle Acadia. His fleet reached the coast of Nova Scotia in June of that year and then split up toexplore and to seek out resources. De Mons and Samuel Champlain, his geographer, explored the Bay ofFundy. To the northwest they found a river with its tributaries forming the shape of a cross. Midway up thisriver, which they named the River of the Etchemins, was an island with excellent defensive qualities, goodanchorage and a favorable location, as Champlain expressed it, “…on account of the intercourse which weproposed with the savages of those coasts and of the interior” (Champlain 1922:2:271, 272 [1613]). Theisland was named the Isle de Sainte-Croix or Saint Croix Island.

Although French occupation of Saint Croix Island lasted less than a decade, historians and archaeologistshave puzzled over this important settlement for more than two centuries. Its rich documentation containscontradictions and omissions which still provoke scholarly discourse (Fischer 2008: 148-173). Thisdocumentation includes the writings and cartography of an expedition participant, Samuel Champlain, andof two later visitors, Marc Lescarbot and Pierre Biard. Samuel Champlain’s own account was published inParis in 1613 titled Les Voyages Du Sieur de Champlain (Champlain 1922:2 [1613]). His chapter on SaintCroix Island contains two engravings showing the island and a detail of the habitation area (Figure 1.6). Aslightly earlier account is found in Le Mercure François for the year 1608, published in 1611 (Richer 1611).Next in importance to Champlain’s narratives is the 1609 account published in the Histoire de la NouvelleFrance by Marc Lescarbot, a Parisian lawyer who visited the island in 1607 (Lescarbot 1911 [1618]). In thespring, following the disastrous winter of 1604 to 1605, the island was abandoned and the settlement wasmoved to Port-Royal in today’s Nova Scotia. In the winter of 1611 the island was re-occupied by a trader,Captain Platrier from Honfleur and his crew, as described by the Pierre Biard in his Relations (Biard 1898)The site was attacked by an English expedition in 1613 and the remaining storehouse and other structureswere destroyed. Biographies of the early French and English visitors to Saint Croix island are found inAppendix 3 by Joyce Pendery.

The St. Croix River remained the focal point of Passamaquoddy settlement in Maine and NewBrunswick. During commemorative ceremonies held on the island on June 26, 2004, Donald Soctomah, nowthe Passamaquoddy Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, delivered an address highlighting the important roleof the Passamaquoddy tribe in global events beginning with the arrival of French colonists to the island. Inrecognition of these contributions, the Passamaquoddy Tribe was inducted into the French Legion of Honorwhich represents France’s highest civilian award. We are honored to include Donald Soctomah’s addresspresented on this occasion as Chapter 3.

The St. Croix River quickly passed from being a place of importance containing the only Europeansettlement north of Florida to being on the periphery of both English and French colonies. The river bisectedthe tribal territory of the Passamaquoddy but Europeans saw it as a convenient political boundary forCanadian seigneuries and later as a boundary between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia and later still as aninternational boundary between the State of Maine and Canadian Province of New Brunswick. As EricJohnson explains in Chapter 4, economic development on the St. Croix River was precipitated by lumberexporting and ship building during the Age of Sail. The St. Andrews merchant and fledgling archaeologistRobert Pagan was key to this development and to the founding of St. Stephen and Calais as the river’s mainports. Increasing river traffic led local interests to request that a lighthouse be built on Saint Croix Island,which occurred in 1856. The lighthouse and its keepers are not central to the themes discussed in this book

6 Chapter 1: Introduction

except to the extent that they had a detrimental effect on the island’s earlier archaeological resources. The only surviving visible evidence for the lighthouse period are terraces, boundary markers and a boat house.The nineteenth-century economic expansion of the St. Croix River valley has also left us the community ofRed Beach located immediately opposite the island on the American shore. Here, the modest water powerof Beaver Brook supported a plaster mill and granite cutting and polishing operation (Figure 1.7).

In 1894 New Brunswick native William Ganong took up his teaching post as the first Professor ofBotany at Smith College. Ganong traveled widely but his native New Brunswick was never far from his heartor as a topic of research. He helped to edit and to translate Champlain’s 1613 Les Voyages for the ChamplainSociety and was a prolific contributor of articles to the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada.Anticipating the 1904 tercentennial of the French discovery of Saint Croix Island, he wrote a definitivehistorical study of the island (Ganong 2003). He tried to correlate Champlain’s maps with later ones to pindown the likely location of the habitation and cemetery but stopped short of conducting any archaeology onthe property.

Chapter 5 describes the long process of federal acquisition, preservation, and study of Saint Croix Islandas a heritage site, first as a National Monument authorized in 1949, and in 1984 as the only InternationalHistoric Site in the American National Park system. Archaeology has been used as a tool to authenticate andto study the site since 1796. The island is significant as the first setting where a historical problem, the fixing

Figure 1.6 Plan of the Saint Croix Island habitation from Champlain’s Les Voyages (1613). (Library of Congress)

Saint Croix Island, Maine 7

of the international boundary between Canada and the United States, was resolved through archaeological excavation and documentation. Today we benefit from the results of three field seasons of archaeologicalresearch giving us insight into key aspects of colonialism including settlement and defense, architecture, dietand daily material life, and economy and tribal relations. Archaeological researchers have included WendellHadlock (1950, 1954) and Jean Harrington (1951), John Cotter (1978), Jacob Gruber (1970), David Sanger(1973), the author (Pendery 2004) and physical anthropologist Tom Crist and his team (2005) and variousgeophysical surveyors in recent years.

The term ‘cultural landscape’ is applicable in describing Saint Croix Island’s unique blend of naturaland cultural features. Because of the lack of manpower and materials, most early French New Worldfortifications exploited the natural defensive properties of their settings (Pendery 2010). Champlain describedthe ease with which Saint Croix Island could be fortified, and we may argue for this reason that its naturalcharacteristics are also its most important cultural features. Unfortunately, these are actively eroding on theisland’s south end which is exposed to storm events and record high tides. Chapter 6 uses as a starting pointthe key texts from Champlain, Lescarbot and Biard bearing on aspects of the cultural landscape including thefeatures of the habitation, agricultural, and mortuary use. One of these sources is an image of the Saint CroixIsland habitation published in Les Voyages in 1613, arguably one of the most intriguing period representa-tions of a colonial American settlement (Figure 1.8). To what extent is this view based on historical fact, oris it a clever piece of propaganda to help promote the settlement of New France? Did tensions exist between Champlain and his superior, the sieur de Mons, that are expressed in the plan of the habitation? What impactdid Captain Platrier and his crew have on the island in 1611- 1612? What did Captain Argall and his soldiersdestroy in 1613? The cultural landscape and material culture of the island are invoked to support or challengethe documentation upon which most of our knowledge of key moments in the establishment of Acadia isbased.

Colonial French artifacts found by archaeologists at Saint Croix Island include some of the earliestexamples from the New World. The metal artifacts are few in number. As seen in Chapter 7 they give usinsight into the locations and types of buildings on the site, the utensils used for preparing and serving food,and trade items. For reasons described in Chapter 8, the site’s ceramics are dissimilar to contemporaneousdomestic French ceramic assemblages, and are an important source of information on the diet, nutrition andstatus of the French colonists. In Chapter 9, Giovanna Vitelli demonstrates how the fragmentary evidence forglass artifacts provides architectural information on use of glass windows in some of the buildings. Glassbottle and flask fragments also document the likely presence of distilled alcoholic beverages at the site. Glasstrade beads found at the site provide further documentation of the economic interests of the island’s French

Figure 1.7 Pre-1926 view of Saint Croix Island from Red Beach, Maine. (Courtesy St. Croix Historical Society)

8 Chapter 1: Introduction

Figure 1.8. Plan of the Saint Croix Island habitation from Champlain’s Les Voyages (1613). (Library of Congress)

Saint Croix Island, Maine 9

occupants between 1604 and 1613. James Bradley in Chapter 10 establishes the likely origins for the beadsin the Netherlands rather than in France.

The remains of animals used as food by the French provide evidence for diet and nutrition. An analysisof faunal remains by Arthur Spiess (Appendix 8) and a context study by Stéphane Noël are combined withinformation about food from metal, ceramics and glass artifacts into a broader consideration of diet andnutrition in Chapter 11. Three key questions are addressed: 1) What was the diet and does it reflectdiminishing reliance on imported foodstuffs and increasing reliance on local resources? 2) Are statusdifferences expressed either directly or indirectly through evidence for food consumption? 3) There is cleardocumentation of individuals who suffered from and died of scurvy at Saint Croix Island. What was the linkbetween nutrition and the state of ill health of these de Mons expedition members? Chapter 11 blendsdocumentation and archaeological evidence both to address the research questions listed above and to definenew approaches to these problems.

Discovery of the island cemetery by Wendell Hadlock in 1950 provided dramatic evidence for the failedSaint Croix Island settlement. The site was re-discovered by Jacob Gruber’s crew in 1969 and completelyexcavated at that time, resulting in the discovery of a total of 23 skeletons including the two that had beenpreviously documented by Hadlock (Hadlock 1950, 1954; Gruber 1970). Some of the human remains thentook a long detour before returning to their final resting place. Two crania, numerous mandibles, select femursand miscellaneous bones were transported to Temple University for analysis in 1969 and were returned toNew England only in 1993. The decision by the superintendent of Acadia National Park in 2003 that thesebones were best returned to the exact locations from where they had been removed in 1969 led to a re-burialproject. The result was the re-excavation and forensic study of all interments at the island cemetery by aninternational team including Thomas and Molly Crist of Utica College, Marcella Sorg from the MargaretChase Smith Center for Public Policy of the University of Maine, Robert Larocque and Marcel Mousette ofUniversité Laval in Québec City, and the author (Crist et al. 2005). This project included the remarkablediscovery of an autopsied skull of a European, one of the earliest such finds from the Americas, as well astwo additional interments bringing the total to 25 described by Thomas Crist and his team in Chapter 12.

Part of the core mission of the National Park Service (NPS) is to interpret park natural and culturalresources. In Chapter 13 Virginia Reams presents an overview on interpretation based on her interviews withformer Acadia National Park Superintendent Sheridan Steele, former Chief of Interpretation Deborah Wadeand Saint Croix Island International Historic Site Manager Meg Scheid. The facilities and interpretiveprogram for the International Historic Site have been radically transformed since 2001 to better educate parkvisitors about the Native American and French interaction during the period of the de Mons settlement on theisland. This included NPS support for the now defunct Downeast Heritage Center in downtown Calais anddevelopment of an interpretive trail on the mainland at Red Beach. Saint Croix Island and Passamaquoddytopics have been introduced into local school curricula as well.

CONCLUSIONS

Saint Croix Island’s 400 year documented history covers only a small part of its entire human story, onewhich extends back at least 3,000 years. Archaeology and geology are critical to our understanding of howthe island was physically transformed, the long-term human adaptations to its resources, and more recent historical events. The French and then the British were attracted to its shores in the pursuit of their respective economic interests. Their negotiations with local Native groups were always conducted with the implicitthreat of force. Along the entire eastern seaboard of North America the outcome was the appropriation ofNative American land and resources to promote European economic and geopolitical objectives. It is thepurpose of this study to extract new meanings from the combined use of documentary and archaeologicalsources and to re-interpret the momentous events as well as the transformation of daily life for all groups onAcadian shores in the early seventeenth century.²

10 Chapter 1: Introduction

NOTES

1. See Frank Lestringant Le Livre des Îles (Geneva: Droz, 2002) for considerations of the cultural and literarysignificance of islands in French history.2. The notion of hybridity has been used in recent years to explore mutual transformations of groups in contact wheretraits are adopted with a measure of ambivalence rather than outright resistance. See Liebmann 2008:4-6.

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Dickason, Olive 1984 The Myth of the Savage. University of Alberta Press.Fischer, David H. 2008 Champlain’s Dream. Simon and Schuster, New York.Ganong, William F. 2003 Champlain’s Island. An Expanded Version of Ste. Croix Island [1902]. New Brunswick Museum, St. John.Gruber, Jacob 1970 The French Settlement on St. Croix Island, Maine: Excavations for the National Park Service, 1968-1969.

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