Essay by Alexandra L. Montgomery, University of Pennsylvania
Department of History
The European history of the borderland region between what is today the American state of Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick was, prior to about 1800, one largely of failure and confusion. For example, in 1604, Passamaquoddy Bay was the site of one of the first French overwintering settlements in the Americas under an expedition led by Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons and Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Québec. They named the island they camped on that first winter “St. Croix,” either as a reflection of the cross-shaped conjunction of the rivers around it or as a reflection on the party’s hopes of using the site as a base for converting the local population. The French quickly abandoned the island, however, after a disastrous winter that left nearly half the colonists dead.
A few years later, an English settlement was established at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Known as the Popham or Sagadahock Colony, it barely lasted a year, from 1607-1608. The region was also impacted by the 1621 grant given by the Scottish Crown to William Alexander, First Earl of Stirling. This grant, of a new colony to be named Nova Scotia—the first time the name was used to refer to the region—covered all the land northeast of Passamaquoddy Bay, from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and used Champlain’s Saint Croix River as a western boundary. Yet Alexander’s attempt to actually make good on his grant by transporting settlers was an immediate and complete failure. These seventeenth-century efforts to bring the region into the European world each collapsed so quickly and immediately that the Wabanaki inhabitants of the region could be forgiven for barely considering them. And yet, their ghostly skeletons formed the structure by which Euroamericans understood the entire region. Indeed, as documents in the Barclay collection reveal, they were ultimately the basis on which the modern US-Canada border was determined.
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.
Nova Scotia was re-created as an independent British colony following the British “conquest” of Acadia in 1710 and removed from direct Massachusetts control. But the situation in the Sagadahock became increasingly unclear. In 1729, as part of a scheme to settle a number of Irish families near the Kennebec River, the British briefly flirted with the idea of transforming the Sagadahock into its own colony, Georgia, under the governorship of the Surveyor of the King’s Woods, David Dunbar. While the idea of a separate colony quickly lost favor and was rejected by March of 1730, the Privy Council determined that political control of the area was rightfully in the hands of the governor of Nova Scotia, not Massachusetts, and approved the scheme under these terms.
The Maine land companies which had been organized in the wake of the fall of Acadia—in particular the Pejepscot Proprietors—were immediately alarmed by what they correctly saw as a threat to their land claims. By absorbing everything east of the Kennebec into Nova Scotia, where land could be granted and organized by Royal decree, Dunbar’s settlement efforts threatened most of the land claimed by the new companies. This struggle over who had the right to develop the Eastward led to a formal petition in 1731 by Massachusetts to the King’s attorney and solicitor general in England, asking them to intervene.
The lawyers ultimately found in favor of the proprietors, effectively ending Dunbar’s career as a land agent. However, despite what the proprietors and some Massachusetts officials would claim later, the decision did not confirm Massachusetts’ rights to settle and govern the region. Instead, the lawyers emphasized the Royal confirmation provisio from the charter. The proprietary grants, they argued, stood only because they all claimed an origin predating the 1691 charter. In practice, the outcome was to silently annex the proprietary lands around the Kennebec to the Province of Maine and Massachusetts, while leaving the question of jurisdiction over the Sagadahock frustratingly open.
Unsurprisingly, jurisdictional questions continued to plague would-be land speculators and even governmental officials looking to bring White settlers into the region to bolster British control. A handful of land schemes in Passamaquoddy Bay sprang up under the jurisdiction of Nova Scotia in the late 1760s and 1770s, but they were small, and control of land was contested both by Passamaquoddy people and the itinerant New England fisherman who remained the region’s primary European population.
In Massachusetts, all efforts to have land grants east of the Penobscot River confirmed by the Crown, as the charter required, were stymied. Even Governor Francis Bernard, who received a grant of Mount Desert Island from the General Court in 1762, was unable to get his grant confirmed until he had already been run out of the colony by the Stamp Act unrest, and only then as a pointed rebuke to Massachusetts’ increasingly unruly politicians. Indeed, the same year he received his grant, Bernard received an angry letter from the Board of Trade brusquely (and inaccurately) informing him that “the River Penobscot has always been deem'd and declared to be the Western boundary of Accadia or Nova Scotia.”
By 1783, then, the question of where exactly Massachusetts stopped and Nova Scotia (soon New Brunswick) began was still an open question, one that was not even solved by identifying the Saint Croix River as the boundary. The fundamental issue was that, in the years since Champlain’s voyage, the precise location of the river had been lost. Twin surveys undertaken by Nova Scotia and Massachusetts in the early 1760s had produced contradictory results, and maps of the area—when they even managed to accurately portray the geography—labeled any and all of the rivers, streams, and harbors flowing into Passamaquoddy Bay as, possibly, the Saint Croix.
This lack of consensus highlighted a fundamental truth about the region which was as accurate in the late eighteenth century as it had been in the seventeenth: these borderlands remained primarily Wabanaki country at the very fringes of European control. The documents produced by the border commission, particular early on, consistently highlight Passamaquoddy and wider Wabanaki Nations’ deep knowledge of the land with European confusion, ignorance, and uncertainty.
Ultimately, however, it would be the arcane deeds and failed colonies which had so long defined European—and especially British—activities in the region which would determine its modern contours. Evidence of the location of Champlain’s original camp ultimately won the day over Passamaquoddy testimony, and future commissions on the political fate of the islands in the bay would similarly focus on the correct interpretations of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century legal documents over the lived experiences which had actually shaped life in the borderlands. Ironically, the ultimate legacy of the jurisdictional confusion which for so long acted as a block to European expansion would be a false sense of continuity and precedent which would be used to erase Wabanaki understandings in the centuries to follow.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Bassett Moore, John, ed. "International Adjudications: Ancient and Modern History and Documents, Together With Mediatorial Reports, Advisory Opinions, and the Decisions of Domestic Commissions, on International Claims," vol. 2, Modern Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 1930.
Bilodeau, Christopher. “The Paradox of Sagadahoc: The Popham Colony, 1607-1608.” Early American Studies 12, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 1-35.
Champlain, Samuel de. "Les Voyages de La Nouvelle-France Occidentale," Dicte Canada. Paris, 1632.
Fischer, David Hackett. "Champlain’s Dream." New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Morris, Charles. “A Report of a Survey of the River St. Johns and of the Coast from thence to Passamaquoddy,” enclosed in Michael Francklin to the Board of Trade, 22 Nov 1766, CO 217, LAC.