Strangers in the Land

European Contact 1500 – 1675

The Wabanaki were some of the earliest Native communities to encounter Europeans. Contact involved the exchange of ideas and knowledge, as well as material goods. Within decades, European diseases, warfare, alcohol and conversion to Christianity dramatically altered Wabanaki societies.

Detail from an etched birchbark container.
Abbe Museum Collections

A Jesuit Mission is built at the Wabanaki village of Norridgewock on the Kennebec River.

Jesuit missionaries established the first French missions in North America in Maine between 1611 and 1613. The French missionaries wanted to convert the Wabanaki people to Catholicism. To do that, they established mission villages where the Natives could settle, grow crops and attend mass. Some of the mission villages became places of refuge for the Wabanaki when they were forced to flee their homelands.
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Jesuit Cross found at Norridgewock.
Maine Historical Society

French capture the English trading post at present day Castine in Penobscot Bay and begin Fort Pentagoet.

Sixteenth century European culture and society contained very different ideas from today about civilization, humankind and the social order. Early European explorers wrote descriptions and accounts of Native people based on their accepted cultural belief that Natives were uncivilized, inhuman and at the bottom of social order. In most accounts, they used the biased and damaging word “savages” to represent Native people.

The French Jesuit Mission of St. Sauveur is established in Frenchman Bay. Father Pierre Biard writes of the people in the Jesuit Relations:

...I confess we often see in these Savages natural and graceful qualities which will make anyone but a shameless person blush, when they compare them to the greater part of the French ...we were very glad to be in a country of safety; for among the Etchemins, as these.

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Popham Colony (in present day Maine) is founded as the first English settlement in North America but lasts only five months. The English fail to gain the trust of the Wabanaki after the kidnapping of their people in 1605.

Henry Hudson steals Native hides
...we manned our Boat & Scute with twelve men and Muskets, and two stone Pieces or Murderers, and drave the Salvages from their houses, and tooke the spoyle of them, as they would have done of us. Then we set sayle.
Robert Juet, Henry Hudson’s log keeper, 1609, Penobscot Bay

Jamestown Colony (in present day Virginia) is the first permanent English settlement in North America.

...the maids and women do make [ornaments] with the quills or bristles of the porcupine, which they dye black, white and red colours, as lively as possibly may be..."
Marc Lescarbot, French explorer, 1606

Traditionally, porcupine quills were worked into armbands, necklaces and other jewelry and applied to leather clothing for ornamentation.

Top: Porcupine quills
Right: Quill decorated birchbark box about 1850
Abbe Museum Collections

In the first encounter between the English and Native Americans in present day Maine, explorer George Waymouth kidnaps five Wabanaki men from present-day Pemaquid, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine.

Champlain describes Mount Desert Island

The island is high and notched in places so that from the sea it gives the appearance of a range of seven or eight mountains.
The summits are all bare and rocky. The slopes are covered with pines, firs, and birches. I named it Isle des Monts Desert. Two canoes with savages in them came within musket range to observe us. I sent out our two savages in a boat to assure them of our good-will, but their fear of us made them turn back. On the morning of the next day they came alongside and talked with our savages. I ordered biscuit, tobacco, and other trifles to be given to them. These savages had come to hunt beavers and catch fish.
Samuel de Champlain, September 1604 off Mount Desert Island

If we wanted to trade with them for some of their things, they would come to the sea shore on some rocks where the breakers were most violent, while we remained in the little boat, and they sent us what they wanted to give on a rope, continually shouting to us not to approach the land; they gave us the barter quickly, and would take in exchange only knives, hooks for fishing, and sharp metal. 
Giovanni da Verrazzano, north of Cape Cod.