Novel shows grit of Maine pioneers

RAFTING TO THE INDIES, by Carl Osgood, Vista House, 230 pages, $19, soft cover.

It’s true: You can’t judge a book by its cover. Nor, for that matter, by its title.

At first glance, one might assume that this book was some sort of Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn adventure about a bunch of wild and crazy Maine guys heading for the West Indies on a homemade raft, for no better reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time. But one would be wrong.

The “raft” turns out to be a framed sailing vessel planked only at the bow and the stern to facilitate steering, but open in the middle, its cargo of lumber forming the sides.

And although Mainers are involved in this piece of historical fiction set in the late 18th century by an engineer-turned-writer, they are anything but wild and crazy. Sober and serious, they have come to the District of Maine in 1785 from Massachusetts proper to carve a town out of the wilderness on the western bank of the Kennebec River. Their priorities, after settling the town of New Bowdoin, include constructing a saw mill to transform Maine’s most abundant natural resource — trees — into lumber, and building a “raft” to ship the lumber to the outside world.

On their first venture south, the young pioneer-loggers sail the raft from the Kennebec River to Cuba — taking care to time the voyage so they don’t get caught in the hurricane season and wind up shipwrecked off Cape Hatteras. In Havana, they easily sell their cargo, Maine lumber being much in demand in that part of the hemisphere.

While waiting to unload, they discover a beached and abandoned schooner. Being practical Yankees and handy with tools, they purchase the vessel for a pittance, repair it, and sail it back home to New Bowdoin. Things are looking up for the young entrepreneurs.

Another voyage takes them to Haiti in the middle of the Haitian slave revolt, where they lose one crew member in a daring rescue of one of their wealthy French hosts, the rest of the man’s family having been slaughtered in the uprising. The man pays for his freedom with a fortune in coins and valuable artifacts. This puts the young bucks and their new town on the 18th century version of Easy Street, although not without some lingering guilt that it comes at the cost of the life of one of their own.

As the young men marry and the new town grows, operations expand. The men build a bridge across a major tributary using the “inverse obelisk method” favored by the ancient Egyptians, which the author is compelled by his engineering background to describe in great detail. The engineering feat becomes the talk of the District of Maine, gives easy access to inland timber stands and generally increases traffic along the riverbank.

Soon the men are besieged to erect a bridge for settlers in another new community in the Androscoggin Valley to the west. Prosperity reigns, but not without its headaches, as the the New Bowdoinites are pulled in several directions at once. What will they be: bridge builders, loggers, shipbuilders, land speculators or all of the above?

Osgood bases his tale on actual financial accounts recorded at a time when Maine was a part of Massachusetts. Although his characters tend to be excessively verbose, they seem genuine. With the possible exception of a lengthy side excursion into the Middle East to introduce the basis for the aforementioned “inverse obelisk method” of bridge building, this story of the days when communities were established by independent action, lots of hard work and a little luck holds together well. It is an appealing narrative for readers interested in our early history. Tighter editing might have made it even more so.