Maine USA
Destination Travel Guides & Hotel Reservations
As big as the other five New England states combined, MAINE barely has the
population of tiny Rhode Island. In theory, therefore, there's plenty of room for its
massive summer influx of visitors; in reality, the majority of these make for the southern
stretches of the extravagantly corrugated coast . You only really begin to
appreciate the size and space of the state further north, or inland , where vast
tracts of mountainous forest are dotted with lakes, and barely pierced by roads - more
like the Alaskan interior than the RV-cluttered roads of the Vermont and New Hampshire
mountains, and ideal territory for hiking and canoeing (and moose spotting).
Although Maine is in many ways inhospitable - the Algonquin called it "Land
of the Frozen Ground" - it has been in contact with Europe ever since the arrival of
the Vikings , around 1000 AD. For the navigator Verrazano, in 1524, the
"crudity and evil manners" of the Indians made this the "Land of Bad
People," but before long European fishermen were setting up camps each summer to dry
their catch. Francis Bacon in turn said that the English were "worse than the very
Savages, impudently lying with their Women, teaching their men to drink drunke, and ? to
fall together by the eares."
North America's first agricultural colonies were in Maine: de Champlain's French
Protestants near Mount Desert Island in 1604, and an English group that survived
one winter at the mouth of the Kennebec three years later. In the face of the
unwillingness of subsequent English settlers to let them farm in peace, the local Indians
formed a long-term alliance with the French, and until as late as 1700 regularly drove out
streams of impoverished English refugees. By 1764, however, the official census could
claim that even Maine's black popu lation was more numerous than its Native Americans.
Originally part of Massachusetts, Maine became a separate entity only in 1820, when the
Missouri Compromise made Maine a free, and Missouri a slave, state. In the nineteenth
century, its people had a reputation for conservatism and resistance to immigration,
manifested in anti-Irish riots. The state's economy has always been heavily based
on the sea, although many of those who fish also farm, and long expeditions are now rare.
Recently they have been selling their catch direct to Russian factory ships anchored just
offshore. Lobster fishing in particular has defied gloomy predictions and has boomed again
as evidenced by the many thriving lobster pounds.
Maine's climate is famously harsh. In winter, most of Maine is under ice; summer is
short and usually heralded in early June by an infestation of tiny black flies. Fall
colors begin to spread from the north in late September - when, unlike elsewhere in
New England, off-season prices apply - but temperatures drop sharply, becoming quite
frosty by mid-October.
Reserve a Hotel Room in Maine USA
|
