They
coasted the strangely indented shores of Maine, with its reefs and
surf-washed islands, rocky headlands, and deep embosomed bays, passed
Mount Desert and the Penobscot, explored the mouths of the Kennebec,
crossed Casco Bay, and descried the distant peaks of the White
Mountains. The ninth of July brought them to Saco Bay. They were now
within the limits of a group of tribes who were called by the French the
Armouchiquois, and who included those whom the English afterwards called
the Massachusetts. They differed in habits as well as in language from
the Etechemins and Miemacs of Acadia, for they were tillers of the soil,
and around their wigwams were fields of maize, beans, pumpkins,
squashes, tobacco, and the so-called Jerusalem artichoke. Near Pront's
Neck, more than eighty of them ran down to the shore to meet the
strangers, dancing and yelping to show their joy. They had a fort of
palisades on a rising ground by the Saco, for they were at deadly war
with their neighbors towards the east.
On the twelfth, the French resumed their voyage, and, like some
adventurous party of pleasure, held their course by the beaches of York
and Wells, Portsmouth Harbor, the Isles of Shoals, Rye Beach, and
Hampton Beach, till, on the fifteenth, they descried the dim outline of
Cape Ann.
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