A bronze memorial outside St. Ignatius Church in
Northeast Harbor, ME summarizes an event whose 400th anniversary on Mount
Desert Island occurs this summer.*1 It
states:
FIRST RECORDED LANDING OF WHITE
PERSONS ON MT. DESERT ISLAND, MAINE 1613
FRENCH EXPEDITION, UNDER SIEUR DE
LA SAUSSAYE, INCLUDING THREE JESUIT PRIESTS, FATHERS PIERRE BIARD, ENNAMOND
MASSA, JACQUES QUENTIN AND JESUIT BROTHER GILBERT DU THET, LANDED ON WEST SIDE
OF SOMES SOUND AT WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS FERNALD’S POINT. THEY NAMED THEIR
SETTLEMENT SAINT SAUVEUR. SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, A BRITISH FORCE ATTACKED THE
COLONY, KILLED BROTHER DU THET AND DISPERSED THE COLONY. BROTHER DU THET’S BODY
IS BURIED SOMEWHERE ON THE SHORE OF WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE JESUIT MEADOW.
This event and its
location have been recorded by many historians, among them Francis Parkman,
William Otis Sawtelle, Samuel Eliot Morison and David Hackett Fischer. My
intent here is to verify the location of the Saint Sauveur settlement on
Fernald Point based on Father Biard's own description.*2
With
regard to their landing on MDI after departing Port Royal, Nova Scotia, some 150 miles eastward, Biard
records, "… by morning the fog had all disappeared. We
recognized that we were opposite Mount desert, an Island, which the Savages
call Pemetiq. The pilot turned to the Eastern shore of the Island, and there
located us in a large and beautiful port,…"Indians arrived and told Biard, "'It is necessary that thou comest, since Asticou, our Sagamore, is sick unto death; and if thou dost not come he will die without baptism, and will not go to heaven. Thou wilt be the cause of it, for he himself wishes very much to be baptized.' This argument, so naively deduced, astonished Father Biard, and fully persuaded him to go there, especially as it was only three leagues away, and in all there would result no greater loss of time than one afternoon; so he got into one of their canoes with Sieur de La Mote, lieutenant, and Simon the interpreter, and went off."
Biard met with Asticou, who
was not dying but suffering from a cold, at his summer camp on Manchester Point, in Northeast Harbor, opposite Fernald Point. The Indians convinced Biard to
settle nearby.
Biard's description of the settlement site: "This place is a beautiful hill, rising gently from the sea, its sides bathed by two springs; the land is cleared for twenty or twenty-five acres, and in some places is covered with grass almost as high as a man. It faces the South and East ..."
 |
| Saint Sauveur/Fernald Point from Flying Mountain |
 |
| West spring or "Jesuit Spring" |
The
west side spring is well known and has been marked on maps as "Jesuit
Spring" from at least 1896. It still flows strongly into Fernald Cove.
 |
| East spring |
The east side spring has not been marked on maps and its flow is weak into Somes Sound, just as DeCosta described in 1869.
Both springs are below the high tide line.
Their locations are noted on
the attached aerial photograph.*7
As to the acreage: Biard described the land
as being 20 or 25 acres. Using GPS software and U.S. Geological Survey aerial
photography I measured Fernald Point along its current shore and tree lines. It
encompasses 25 acres.
 |
| Aerial view of Saint Sauveur or "Jesuit Field" now Fernald Point |
While the
exact location of Biard's landing on MDI is not known, his many references to league
distances while he was in the Port Royal/Bay of Fundy area equate a league to about three
miles. Back plotting three leagues or nine miles from Asticou's summer camp at
Manchester Point indicates Biard's ship landed at or near Sand Beach in Newport
Cove on MDI's eastern shore.
The English ship Treasurer, sailing from Virginia and under the command of Samuel Argall, destroyed the settlement within a few months of its establishment. This event effectively started an English-French war of colonization that would last 150 years.
No known artifacts of the settlement have been found, nor is it known if any attempt has ever been made to recover them. Yet Biard states that the three individuals killed in Argall's attack, including Brother du Thet, were buried there. On a return visit to completely destroy the settlement, Argall executed one of his own men. Perhaps then there was a fourth body buried on Fernald Point. The question begs, Would a serious archaeological search to locate their remains, and any other remains of the settlement, still be feasible?
Footnotes:
1 GPS location of
memorial: N44° 17.643'
W068° 17.619' For this memorial's
information see my blog post of September 27, 2012 titled J.J. O'Brien and His Jesuit Settlement Memorial.
2 The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents - Travels and Explorations of
the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, multiple volumes ed. by Reuben
Gold Thwaites and published from1896.
3 My
Eighty Years by Charles F. Dole. E. P. Dutton &
Co., New York. 1927, p.290.4 Father Biard's Relation of 1616 and Saint Sauveur by Rev. E.C. Cummings. Read before the Maine Historical Society, December 7, 1893.
5 Mount Desert
on the Coast of Maine by Clara Barnes Martin, 4th ed. 1877, p.50.
6 Sketches of
the Coast of Maine and the Isle of Shoals by B. F. De Costa. 1869, p.49.
7 GPS location of springs:
West spring: N44° 17.858' W068° 18.809'East spring: N44° 18.049' W068° 18.641'
