SAILING THE COAST OF MAINE - NYTimes.com
Sailing Down East in Maine for the first time is like traveling backward in time. The rocky headlands and islands composed of granite, sculptured, scoured out, chiseled by glaciers, bear few marks of civilization. The place names remind us that it was the French who first explored and settled there, that it was the home of the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indians. SUSAN BUTLER is a writer who lives on Martha's Vineyard. Samuel de Champlain first explored the Maine coast in 1604, establishing a colony that he planned as the first settlement of the Acadian territory, claiming it for France. When he saw Mount Desert Island, it appeared as a line of seven or eight treeless peaks and so he called it Isle des Mont Desert. One of the most spectacular sights Down East, the island's Cadillac Mountain, is, at 1,532 feet, the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard, and it boasts the only natural fjord in the United States, Somes Sound. There are towns on the Maine coast, of course, tourist towns, but they differ in degree and size from those in more populous, gentler climes; fishing villages are more the norm. Even the charming but busy (by Maine standards) town of Camden, for instance, with its antiques stores, restaurants, inns, windjammer cruises, is looked at askance by many of its neighbors.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/18/travel/sailing-the-coast-of-maine.html?pagewanted=all
