The sea is Maine’s permanent frontier zone, where Maine and Mainers encounter the other. Longfellow’s “Spanish sailors with bearded lips,” so different, were seen at Portland’s harbor. Maine and the sea remain closely linked, from recreational boaters to ships’ officers trained at Maine Maritime Academy to famous boat builders to windjammer cruises.
Lincoln P. Paine’s brief and readable book “Down East” is, as subtitled, “A Maritime History.” It sees shipping linked to all of Maine’s occupations, from logging to tourism.
Rowing, sailing, steaming, crewing, commanding, building and repairing, loading and unloading, buying and selling, all were obvious roles for Mainers. There is plenty of coast, and harbors, rivers, fishing grounds and trade routes. Maine also offers excellent building materials, and mixed cargoes to be traded for prized goods from away, but it had poor land routes until the railway era. And the railways didn’t reach overseas. Indeed, they revived Portland as Canada’s winter port.
The canoe was Maine’s first and perhaps its most adaptable vessel. Indians used it on streams and lakes, even on the sea. It then became, for centuries, convenient transportation for Euro-Americans, and is now a popular vacation tool. Maine has since produced an extraordinary variety of craft, using its abundant forests, eventually transferring marine building skills to new materials. The scope of Maine’s boat and shipbuilding is best covered in Nathan Lipfert’s new book “Two Centuries of Maine Shipbuilding,” with its clear prose and great illustrations.
Water always constituted Maine’s highways, whether rowing across the bay or out to the island, or sailing to the Caribbean, Europe, or the Orient. Fish drew many Mainers offshore, to the banks for cod, nearer home for many species of the continental shelf. Maine’s iconic pursuit, lobstering, has a literature of its own: methods, to conservation, to gang warfare. Colin Woodard’s “The Lobster Coast” is a good introduction.
To grasp what it meant to be a seafarer, there are first-hand accounts, factual and fictional: Richard Henry Dana Jr. and Herman Melville are great. Reviews for Daniel Vickers’ “Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail,” are fascinatingly, all of the evidence, and includes life ashore, and women’s place, as parts of the whole. (He focuses on Massachusetts: extrapolate.)
All our maritime museums are worth visiting. The biggest is the best: Maine Maritime Museum at Bath is based in a shipyard, but covers most things maritime, and tours of Bath Ironworks bring the story up-to-date. Then there are contemporary ferries, historic
schooners . . .
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