‘Pocket’ a glimpse into history

GOD’s POCKET, by Rachel Field, reprinted privately by the Northeast Harbor Library and the Islesford and Cranberry Isles historical societies, 1999, 163 pages, $34.

This little gem of Cranberry Isles history reads like a novel, but it is the true story of the wild adventures of an island character in the 1820s. It is a fine tale, as well as a keen appreciation of the sights, sounds and smells of Down East Maine now as well as then.

Until it was reprinted last year, only worn copies of Rachel Field’s “God’s Pocket” could be found in summer cottages and in rare book sections of some libraries. The Ellsworth Public Library has one but will not let it out of the building. The Bangor Public Library does not have it. Mr. Paperback doesn’t carry it. And on the Internet, neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble list it.

Capt. Samuel Hadlock Jr. was a sailor and whaler with a flair for show business. He sailed from Great Cranberry Island to Liverpool in 1822 with a collection of native weapons and utensils, furs, stuffed birds and seals and two Eskimos, whom he called George and Mamie Megunticook and billed as American “Injuns.”

Hadlock’s sideshow was a sensation in country fairs in England and Ireland. George thrilled crowds with his demonstrations of harpoon throwing from a canoe. Hadlock, a 6-foot giant in that era of shorties, was a show in himself with his bearskin coat and bellowing voice.

Crossing the English Channel, he took his North American Exhibition to the continent, where he quickly became a favorite of kings and queens in Austria and Germany.

Field first heard the story in her early 20s. She had been picking raspberries on Great Cranberry Island when old Samuel Sanford, whom she hardly knew, sat her down and spun the yarn about his grandfather. “Don’t be frightened,” he told her. “You’re as safe with me as if you was in God’s pocket.”

Years later, as an accomplished novelist and poet, Field managed to study two tattered copybooks — all that survived of Hadlock’s journal — and a gold snuffbox, a silhouette of Hadlock cut in London in 1824, an old compass, a chart and a marriage certificate in German script. (The relics are now on display in the Islesford Historical Museum on Little Cranberry Island.) She pieced the story together from the yellowed pages of the journal and from recollections of a few older island residents.

The captain’s love affair provides the climax of the book. Hadlock, in his early 30s, and 20-year-old Dorethea Albertina Wilhelmina Celeste Russ, met by chance in a Berlin suburb, and it was a classic love at first sight. He asked her father for her hand that very day, and they were married three months later.

Field writes that the love affair changed Hadlock’s life — “took him like a Bay of Fundy tide.” It reminded her of “the sudden vehemence of spring in northern Maine” and “how arbutus and violets spring from melting snow, and a green, fiercer than flame, runs over brown pastures and hedges.”

He brought her back in 1826 to Great Cranberry, where she learned island ways and lived to the age of 80, long after Hadlock’s untimely and tragic death in yet another adventure. She was always known there as “the Prussian woman.”

Bob Pyle, the Northeast Harbor librarian, read “God’s Pocket” as a child and always dreamed of seeing it reprinted. He succeeded last year, with the help of Hugh L. Dwelley, president of the Islesford Historical Society, and an anonymous grant of $20,000. The result is an “heirloom edition” book, a replica of the original, with a sewn binding and printed with an enhanced photocopy of the original type, on 70-pound, low-acid stock.

Fifteen hundred copies were printed. Seven hundred have been sold so far, almost entirely through the historical societies and two Mount Desert Island bookstores, Sherman’s Book & Stationary Shop in Bar Harbor and Port In A Storm Book Store in Somesville. “God’s Pocket” is also available at Borders Books Music & Cafe in Bangor.

Richard Dudman, a retired Washington bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, lives in Ellsworth and on Islesford in the summer.