Pembroke Bay

Penobscot Bay is both a working harbor and a contested landscape in the novel: its river mouth and coastal position support a growing timber economy, while settlement and forest clearing steadily alter the lives of Indigenous communities. Charles Duke makes the bay a center of family power, establishing a fortified-looking log house and a business room organized around an enormous pine table. The place’s history therefore joins commercial ambition to colonial transformation: timber moves outward toward distant markets as access to forests and customary lands narrows for those who already lived there.

Setting and early settlement

The bay is introduced within a coast made insecure by war and raids. Settlements in Maine cluster along the tidewater margins, where small shipyards can be reached by water. Charles Duke discovers the bay at the point where a great river empties into the Atlantic and builds his large house there. He imagines himself the first white man in the area, dismissing the French-speaking métis who had lived there before him. The narration also recalls competing associations attached to the place: an unknown explorer called it Norumbega, credulous people imagined a fabulous city rich in gold and gems, and Henry Hudson was said to have cut the New World’s first mast pine there. Duke’s attraction to the bay is tied less to these legends than to its association with timber and the prospect of commercial use.

Duke’s log house makes that ambition visible in its form and arrangement. More fort than dwelling, it devotes half its ground floor to business. At its center stands a table made from one slab of pine, four feet wide. The house is not simply a family residence: it is where land, labor, and trade are planned and directed. Its timber construction makes the forest both the source of Duke’s wealth and the material presence around which his enterprise is organized.

The bay as a timber and shipping center

The commercial logic attached to the region has roots in a wider colonial economy. Charles Duquet, earlier in the novel, rejects animals and other living resources as foundations for lasting wealth because they may vanish through overuse, disease, or unstable demand. He instead regards the forest as an apparently enduring commodity and considers timber for ships, houses, and fuel a business that could expand. That belief helps explain the later importance of the bay: its forests are treated as a supply, and its waterways as routes by which that supply can reach markets.

Duke builds his enterprise around the bay’s access to rivers and the coast. He plans to acquire extensive tracts, arrange for woodsmen and sawmills on important rivers, and develop the business through his sons. Jan and Nicolaus handle merchants, contracts, and shipping; Bernard is assigned naval-store production. The sons initially lodge in Boston but travel to the bay house monthly, where they spread papers and books across the pine table and discuss plans with their father. Their proposal to enter shipbuilding would reduce the need to transport lumber, masts, bowsprits, and yards to European ports. The bay thus links forest extraction to shipyards, shipping, and the larger commercial network rather than functioning as an isolated settlement.

That network later reaches across oceans. After Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia, a prospective buyer seeks a decade-long supply contract and raises the possibility of a New Zealand logging partnership. The episode extends the bay’s significance beyond its immediate coastline: the company’s timber operations belong to a system in which forests in one region are assessed in relation to demand and opportunities elsewhere.

Settlement, land, and Indigenous loss

The growth of farms and woodcutting around the bay and its settlements is presented as a process of clearing and displacement, not as neutral improvement. When Duquet asks why settlers cut forest rather than build in existing meadows, Monsieur Trépagny defends the practice by invoking the New France system of long strips running from river to forest. Such parcels offer river access, fertile soil, higher ground, and woodland for timber and fuel. His argument makes land allocation and forest clearing appear orderly and equitable to settlers, but it also assumes that the land is theirs to divide and transform.

The consequences are visible in the report about René Sel’s household near Wobik. René is described as a woodcutter who keeps some cows and sheep, cuts firewood, and makes potash; several farms have appeared nearby. Trépagny praises the settlement’s progress in clearing the wilderness. Mari, however, grieves the loss of woodland places where medicinal plants once grew and speaks increasingly against the settlers. The contrast exposes what the language of progress leaves out: settlement changes the plant life and resource access on which Indigenous knowledge and healing depend.

The novel places that local transformation within a larger dispute about sovereignty. Père Crème tells a French official that the Mi’kmaq love their country and their children, and that France is taking the land while imposing goods and forceful ways. The official treats the territory as a strategic possession important to France’s North American position; Crème insists that generations of people have lived there and that the Mi’kmaq suffer from the loss. Later, Sosep challenges the premise that a French king could give the land to the British: it was not the French king’s to give. These claims directly unsettle the colonial map through which ownership and transfer are made to seem settled.

Sosep also describes how newcomers’ animals, boats, nets, and introduced plants compete with Mi’kmaw food sources and displace local plants. He recalls a time when his people could travel freely through the woods and warns that this freedom has passed. His call to preserve Mi’kmaw ways in thought and life frames cultural continuity as a response to encroachment, not as a rejection of every new object or practice. The bay’s expanding settlement therefore carries an ecological and political cost that accumulates alongside its commercial growth.

Historical reach and narrative significance

The bay’s importance persists beyond Charles Duke’s founding enterprise. At Catawamkeag on its western shore, timber is loaded onto ships for export; shipyards and white settlers’ houses stand alongside a small settlement of surviving Penobscots. For Kuntaw, recently returned from months in the woods, even this modest settlement appears almost urban. The scene shows how the coast has become a workplace and shipping point, while also registering the narrowed presence of Indigenous people within a landscape transformed by lumber commerce.

Across the novel, Penobscot Bay gathers several strands of the history of forests: the belief that timber offers durable wealth, the organization of family businesses around land and shipping, and the gradual conversion of woodland into farms, camps, and commercial supply. The great pine table in Duke’s business room condenses that relationship between forest and enterprise, while the stories of lost plant habitats and restricted movement expose its uneven consequences. The bay is not merely a scenic setting or a point on a trade route; it is where the promise of inexhaustible timber meets the lived costs of colonial possession and ecological change.