It’s often called discovering, but there was nothing to be discovered: native peoples had known the place for millennia. Europeans were latecomers. Did the Vikings get as far South as Maine? They described a temperate climate, but hailing from Scandinavia and traveling via Greenland, their standard of comparison was problematic.

More recently, Italian, French, and English explorers sought what the Spaniards had found to the South: gold. (They invented a mythological golden place, Norumbega, believed to be in what is now Maine.) And the thing the Spaniards hadn’t found: a convenient route to the Orient, the fabulous Northwest Passage.

Deliberate exploration was only a part of the process. The Maine coast is complex: bays and peninsulas, the mouths of rivers… Seafaring Europeans, English, Portuguese, Basque, etc. came for the fish that abounded offshore; the islands were convenient refuges, places to dry and salt cod, and just to step ashore.

Touching the mainland, fishermen found the Indians willing to trade for furs, also highly saleable in Europe. Trading, processing, trying to grow supplies in the short summers led to permanent, or at least year-round, settlements.

How should you explore? Morison’s The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages is brilliant if a bit dated. Read about adventure in lively prose from a scholar who took the trouble to fly along the coast at masthead height to see what the sailors saw.

For more about the shore, and more specifically Maine, try the opening chapters of Barry’s and of Judd, Churchill and Eastman’s Maine surveys. Several scholars dig deeper in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega. White’s A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter With North America makes the difficulty of exploring and settling obvious.

Maps were explorers’ tools. They’re still useful. John Smith’s New England Observed (https://oshermaps.org/map/12548.0001) reveals Smith as a salesman for settlement, as well as a mapmaker, explorer, and egotist. The Osher Map Library’s great collection is readily available in Portland and online.

Perhaps the greatest explorer and colonist was not concerned primarily with what became Maine. But Champlain mapped (Osher URL 370.0001) and described much of its coast before settling further North. Enjoy Fischer, Champlain’s Dream, for what was and might have been.

To channel the explorers, head Downeast off-season.