Digging the Isles of Shoals
Small artifacts found during an archeological dig on the Isles of Shoals tell big stories, and change history
Archaeology students arrive at Haley’s Cove on Smuttynose Island with professor Nathan Hamilton. Uninhabited Malaga Island is in the background.
Two legends have haunted the Isles of Shoals since colonial days. According to Capt. Christopher Levett, who visited from England in 1623, “Upon these islands are no savages at all.” Levett’s claim that he saw no Indigenous people as he sailed past the nine craggy little islands off the Maine and New Hampshire coast became local history.
Levett also reported seeing six ships anchored off the islands. Upward of 300 fishermen, he wrote, operated an outdoor factory. Working from floating platforms projecting into the harbor, the men sliced up massive cod with astonishing speed and precision. Split and salted, then dried on rocks and wooden racks, fish from the Shoals commanded top prices on the European market 3,000 miles away.
Did the People of the Dawnland avoid our offshore islands? Were the sleepy Isles of Shoals once among the busiest industrial sites in New England? Send in the archaeologists.
Try, try again
It’s hard to argue with an eyewitness who has been dead for 400 years. But Levett’s written observation, exaggerated by later historians, soon dominated the local narrative. This passage from an 1870 copy of the New Hampshire Gazette is typical of the times: “The Shoals were an aggravation to the brave Red Man. They were remote from the mainland, and the intermediate water could not be depended upon; so scalps were safer there than on the coast. This is one reason why the islands were early inhabited (by Europeans).”
Students focus on the largest and deepest excavation near the cove on Smuttynose, site of a small colonial tavern. The Haley Cottage, circa 1770-1800, is one of only two surviving buildings on the island.
Victorian poet Celia Thaxter, whose family ran the Appledore Island Hotel, noted that her guests frequently found “Indian arrowheads of jasper and flint” as they explored the coves at Smuttynose, Appledore and Star islands during low tides.
Modern archaeologists have proven that Indigenous people have occupied New England for at least 12,000 years. They were sophisticated hunters, skilled fishers and expert mariners. In 1980, a Cornell graduate found a piece of Native pottery while surveying Appledore Island for eroding historic sites. Archaeologist Faith Harrington’s field study group found a few rhyolite flakes on Smuttynose in 1990. These were possibly chips left behind by prehistoric people making stone tools. But the pieces were mixed in with early colonial debris and impossible to date with accuracy.
“There was always something nagging at me about the Shoals,” says archaeologist Nathan Hamilton, recently retired from the University of Southern Maine. “The Native American evidence was always there. We just hadn’t found it yet.”
But no prehistoric tools turned up in 2008 when Hamilton’s first team of archaeology students landed on Smuttynose, a privately owned island in Maine, to begin a five-year summer dig. There were exciting historical finds, but nothing, at first, proved even a single prehistoric party had arrived by dugout or birchbark canoe.
With “Rozzie” Thater’s Cottage (aka, Gull Cottage) in the distance one student searches for artifacts with a wire mesh shaker.
The problem was the island itself. Although considered the most verdant spot at the Shoals, Smuttynose is largely 27 acres of exposed rock. The soil, where it exists, is rarely 3 feet deep. The thick grassy mat on the top has the consistency of peat. There are no trees, a fact Cap. John Smith pointed out during his visit here in 1614.
That was great news, however, for archaeologists who didn’t have to contend with the ground strata being broken up by tree roots. So, while there isn’t much soil on Smuttynose, what exists there is textbook perfect. Like a time machine, the deeper you dig through largely undisturbed layers, the older the island gets.
Too often, test digs ended quickly as students and trained volunteers hit bedrock. But now and then, they discovered a thin, black, organic layer known as the “A-horizon.” This is the prehistoric surface of the island where dark clay and silt deposits have been trapped between rocks for millennia, protected from wind, weather, waves and human activity. Artifacts not preserved in these rare crags and crevices would have been washed off the exposed rock.
A group gathers to examine a new discovery.
Hamilton’s team began their work at the top of the terraced hill where the soil appeared deeper, but in year two, they branched out, moving one cluster of square test pits to within a few feet of the cove. This spot, most in danger of being eroded away, turned out to be the mother lode.
A ‘prehistoric’ hunting ground
The big moment was nothing like the opening of the Ark of the Covenant in the Indiana Jones movie. No shooting flames or blue ghosts, no screaming melting Nazi faces. Hamilton was standing by the guano-streaked picnic table at the 200-year-old Haley Cottage on a hazy afternoon in June 2009 when the first treasured flakes appeared. Two diggers, Arthur Diamon and Nick Clausnitzer Jr., each with a master’s degree in archaeology, were digging in Test Unit No. 3. Beneath a buried wooden plank, just above the bedrock, they found a precious patch of gray “A-horizon” marine clay.
Ingrid Brack prepares an excavation site that dramatically shows the layers of time visible in the soil stratigraphy from bedrock to the surface. Courtesy/ Nathan Hamilton
Clausnitzer filled a plastic bucket with dirt from the test pit as Diamon sifted the soil through a fine mesh wire screen. Like a miner panning for gold, Diamon washed the muddy debris left in the screen, rinsing it in the cool salt water in the cove. Untrained eyes would have missed what the students saw.
“We think they’re rhyolite flakes,” the diggers told Hamilton, as a group of students gathered to peer at the tray.
“Jesus, they do,” the teacher said. He held the sparkling pieces flat in his hand. “Show them to Ingrid.”
Ingrid Brack, a teaching assistant with years of fieldwork and a master’s degree in geoarchaeology, popped her head out of a deep pit and studied the artifacts.
“Look at the gray rhyolite flakes,” she said.
At the conclusion of each annual dig, students gathered at the Shoals Marine Lab on Appledore Island to review their discoveries with professor Nate Hamilton.
At that moment, Smuttynose Island became a prehistoric site. “It’s like smoke and fire,” Hamilton told his students. “Where there are flakes, there are artifacts.”
Days later, test pits No. 8 and No. 9 yielded more telltale flakes. Then came a stone scraper, once used to process animal hides, and the broken tip of a projectile point or arrowhead. In test unit No. 10, they unearthed 30 more flakes. Over the next two summers, the diggers found 50 prehistoric stone tools or fragments, about 100 pieces of prehistoric pottery, a few rare samples of burned bone, and 1,800 stone flakes. Indigenous people, Smuttynose proved, visited the Isles of Shoals during at least six distinct periods, ranging from 1,000 to 6,000 years ago.
“Archaeology is the most destructive science there is. We destroy as we search,” Hamilton said. “This challenges us to record as accurately as we can and to recover as much as possible.”
At the Shoals Marine Lab, professor Nate Hamilton examined an artifact under extreme magnification.
A total of 300,000 artifacts found their way from Smuttynose Island to the lab at South Maine University. Each piece was carefully bagged, tagged and mapped via satellite to within centimeters of its original location. And while we usually picture archaeologists in the field, fully 90% of their work takes place back in the lab. At times, as with the discovery of Indigenous artifacts on the Shoals, the analysis rewrites history. Other times, the artifacts prove the legends are true.
Fishing for facts
Commercial fishers are hunters. They go where the game is plentiful, catch what their ships can carry, and transport their perishable goods to market. If a fishing site is profitable, the hunters return. If not, they move on, leaving little or no record of their travels.
Fishing the Gulf of Maine is a tough and dangerous vocation today and was much more so in the age of wooden ships with canvas sails. But for 17th-century shipbuilders, merchants, captains and investors, fishing could be as profitable as mining for gold.
Artifacts collected on Smuttynose included (clockwise from top) a lead “bale seal,” giant fish hook, projectile point and ceramic fragments.Courtesy/ Nathan Hamilton
After four centuries, the truth about the founding of New England is finally slipping out. Books like “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World” offer an alternative to the traditional claim that our region began as a search for religious freedom. In fact, hundreds of ships carrying thousands of adventurous crew members were already making the risky transatlantic voyage here as the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts. Protein-rich Atlantic cod weighing over 100 pounds were abundant and easy to catch.
“The myth-makers of American origins,” according to archaeologist and historian Brian Fagan, wrote the fishers out of the region’s history. “New England was settled, not by Pilgrims escaping persecution in a land peopled by Native Americans,” Fagan wrote in “Fish on Friday,” “but by roistering cod fishermen schooled in the rough-and-ready world of the migrant fishery.”
A fisherman’s day was long and arduous, but a successful catch could mean 200 to 300 fish per man. Workers kept count by impaling the fish’s tongue onto a metal spike. On Smuttynose, skilled “dressers” passed the catch from man to man in factory style. The “throater” cut the cod from belly to anus. The “header,” after ripping out the entrails, tossed the liver into one basket and the roe into another. Then he sliced off the head and kicked it into the sea through a hole in the staging platform. Wielding a knife, the “splitter” separated the fish flesh from the backbone.
Atlantic cod from the Isles of Shoals, known locally as “dunfish,” had special appeal to European buyers. The dunning system required more drying time and less salt than fish dried elsewhere. That improved the flavor, increased the longevity and boosted the value of the product. Celia Thaxter described the fading craft in her classic 1873 book, “Among the Isles of Shoals.”
“The process of dunning, which made the Shoals fish so famous a century ago, is almost a lost art, though the chief fisherman at Star Island still ‘duns’ a few yearly. A real dunfish is handsome, cut in transparent strips, the color of brown sherry wine. The process is a tedious one: the fish are piled in the storehouse and undergo a period of ‘sweating’ after the first drying, then are carried out into sun and wind, dried again slightly, and again piled in the warehouse, and so on till the process is complete.”
Proof positive
Thousands of clay pipe fragments attest to the presence of large numbers of seasonal fishers who processed valuable dried cod for the European marketplace in the 17th century. Courtesy/ Nathan Hamilton
In his “Description of New England” (1616), Captain John Smith advised investors to cash in on two lucrative cod seasons in spring and fall. But it wasn’t long before migrant fishers began to overwinter on the mainland. On 2 acres of land at Smuttynose, in 50 cubic meters of excavated soil, over 10,000 fragments of clay pipes dating to the 1620s have been found, preserved and cataloged. The European settlers were here to stay. Members of the Cutt family from Wales used their Shoals’ fishing profits to buy up riverfront land in what would become Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Another Shoals fishery run by the Pepperell family provided the funds to buy land in what would become Kittery, York and Berwick, Maine.
Legend says Smuttynose was once a key staging area for colonial commerce. The evidence was right below the surface. Nate Hamilton’s young diggers unearthed thousdands of clay pipe fragments and ceramic shards, each bearing a clue to its age and manufacture. Giant iron fishing hooks testify to the enormous species of the era. Well-preserved cod premaxilla bones proved that, due to overfishing by early English settlers, the size of local codfish shrank with each decade.
Shoals’ artifacts included a brass button depicting a ship, a pea-sized glass bead, a gambling die carved from bone, lead “bale seals” used in shipping cotton, handmade lead bullets, gun flints and a metal thimble embossed with the figure of a lion. Just above the cove, archaeologists found evidence of an early tavern that may also have functioned as a school, a church and a courthouse.
Layers of time
A key discovery, this fragment of a Bellarmine or Bartmann jug indicates the presence of European fishers on the island during the early colonial period. The Oceanic Hotel on Star Island in New Hampshire can be seen across Gosport Harbor.
The five scientific summer digs changed the way we see the Isles of Shoals. In June of the final year, a student unearthed the neck of a Bellarmine or “Bartmann” jug. Hamilton likes to call them “the Coke can of the 17th century.” Hard-drinking English fishermen all carried them full of brandy, rum or ale. Originally crafted in Germany in the 1500s, these stoneware jugs were decorated with the face of a bearded man.
The students were ecstatic, one sunny day, to find the entire neck of the bottle with the face intact — a rare discovery. Barely an hour later, they found a perfect ancient arrowhead in the deepest strata of marine clay. The Indigenous hunter and the colonial fisher may have stood on the same speck of land, separated by thousands of years.
Further toward the surface, a cache of pig, goat, great auk and cow bones demonstrate that hardy pioneers were living on the Isles year-round. Broken dishes, nails, buttons and even a few lost coins define the era when the Haley family dominated the island, roughly from the American Revolution to beyond the War of 1812. Besides fishing, the Haleys manufactured their own boats, rope, barrels and lobster traps. They operated a windmill to grind grain. The family established a
Back in the classroom at Southern Maine University, Hamilton and his students organized and analyzed over 300,000 Smuttynose Island artifacts. Courtesy/ Nathan Hamilton
cherry orchard, built a bakery, a brewery and a blacksmith shop. Generations of Haleys constructed the breakwater, a stone pier and a hotel named The Mid-Ocean House of Entertainment.
In 1839, a Portsmouth grocer, printer and politician named Thomas Laighton bought four of the five islands on the Maine side of the ancient archipelago, Laighton, and later his now-famous daughter Celia Thaxter, turned the Isles of Shoals into a must-see tourist destination. Their Appledore Hotel survived from 1847 until it disappeared in a spectacular blaze in 1914. Appledore is now home to the Shoals Marine Lab. Across Gosport Harbor, the Oceanic Hotel, built from 1873-75, is active today on Star Island. The vintage hotel welcomes you to discover the sprawling history of nine tiny islands lost in the mists of time.
ABOUT THE ISLES OF SHOALS
Of the nine tiny offshore Islands, the four in New Hampshire include Star, White, Lunging and Seavey. The other five — Cedar, Appledore (home of the Shoals Marine Lab), Duck, Malaga and Smuttynose — are within the boundary of Maine. Gosport Harbor in the center is divided between the two states. In-season ferries to Star (site of the historic Oceanic Hotel) include the Uncle Oscar out of Rye Harbor and the Thomas Laighton out of Portsmouth. Narrated tours are also offered by Portsmouth Harbor Cruises and Granite State Whale Watch. All the islands are privately owned except for White and Seavey, which are managed by the state of New Hampshire.
HELPFUL LINKS:
J. Dennis Robinson has been a Smuttynose Island steward for over two decades. His illustrated history book, “Under the Isles of Shoals: Archaeology & Discovery on Smuttynose Island,” has sold out its first edition. Robinson is currently seeking sponsors to support an updated second printing. For more on his books and articles, visit jdennisrobinson.com.
