Beyond Borders - Mapping Maine and the Northeast Boundary

Initially, however, the primary legacy of these efforts prior to the US-Canada northeast border commissions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was one of jurisdictional confusion and uncertainty. The abortive seventeenth-century British forays into the region, for example, were codified in the new 1691 Massachusetts Charter, which re-defined the borders of that colony. The charter contains a clear vision of the different British political jurisdictions between Cape Cod and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In addition to Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay proper, and New Hampshire, British observers also recognized a distinct “Province of Maine” that stretched from Piscataqua to the Kennebec, Nova Scotia, and a separate—although poorly defined—region that lay in-between the two, generally referred to as the “Sagadahock Country.” While the charter gave Massachusetts full jurisdiction over Plymouth and the Province of Maine, control of Sagadahock and Nova Scotia—which at the time were under de jure French and de facto Wabanaki political control—was decidedly more provisional. While the Bay Colony was given political jurisdiction over both regions, the charter stipulated that no grants of land made in the area east of the Kennebec River would be legally recognized unless separately and specifically approved by the British crown.