If you were as rich as J.P. Morgan or Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr., or even Bangor’s own Fred W. Ayer, president of the Eastern Manufacturing Co., you could cruise the Maine coast in one of the big luxury yachts in vogue a century ago. If you were of more modest means, however, you would have to be contented to join the mosquito fleet that chugged up and down the Penobscot River.

“Motor-boating on the Penobscot has come to be a sport that is getting more converts every day,” declared the Bangor Daily Commercial on Aug. 17, 1907. It held “more fascination for many people than sailing a boat.” The first “gasolene boats” had appeared on the river about seven or eight years earlier. By the summer of 1907, there were about 40 of them in the Bangor area. They came in all shapes and sizes from sleek speedsters with lots of mahogany trim to fishing boats. They were powered by inboard motors. The first commercially successful outboard was still being perfected by a man named Ole Evinrude.

Speed and power were the dominant themes, although expectations were considerably lower than they are today. What was apparently the first big motorboat race on the river was chronicled in the Bangor Daily News on July 17, 1907. Five hundred or more spectators lined the banks to see W. McCrillis Sawyer’s sleek 20-foot craft soundly trounce Fred W. Ayer’s 22-foot luxury tender to his newly remodeled yacht Helena. Ayer’s bigger Tuttle 15 hp engine couldn’t beat Sawyer’s Buffalo 10 hp. Sawyer’s boat was like “a razor forward, with a clean, fine run and doesn’t draw much more water than a canoe.”

“Word had spread quickly that the two boats were having it out, and everybody who could hobble struck out for the wharves,” said the newspaper. It was “the first time that racing boats have gone their fastest around Bangor …” and the crowd’s efforts were rewarded. “[A] twenty-foot boat traveling at a twenty mile clip is quite a sight to see,” wrote the awed reporter.

Speed and power were not the only goals of the early mosquito boaters. Fred Thomas, the fishing rod manufacturer, planned to use his new 22-foot boat to travel back and forth to work from the bungalow he was building for his family at Point of Pines in Orrington. “Mr. Thomas is looking for comfort and utility rather than speed and will have a six horse power engine which should drive his boat seven or eight miles an hour,” the Commercial reported on May 10.

Luxury was yet another goal. “The queen of the mosquito fleet on the Penobscot” was W.C. Bryant’s 50-foot Natawa, launched the summer before by the Bangor jeweler. “The trimmings are all mahogany which, with the white hull, gives the boat a decidedly smart appearance,” wrote a Commercial reporter on Aug. 18, 1906. Among the features were “a dainty little stateroom finished in white enamel” and a galley with a copper sink and a refrigerator. The boat had accommodations for six.

What impressed the reporter the most was the engine room where a powerful 27 hp Wolverine engine was located. It was connected to a dynamo that furnished electricity for a lighting system that included a 1,500 candlepower searchlight. On its trial run from Belfast, this mosquito-size luxury liner sped along at 12 mph.

Powerboating wasn’t just for men. Miss Jessie Twaddle was the first woman to successfully run a motorboat on the river, said the Commercial in its Aug. 17, 1907, feature. She had a 20-foot Swampscott dory with a 2.5 hp Stanley engine. She took care of the engine and the boat herself. “She rather likes rough weather and is out in all kinds of weather, with the result that she has a coat of tan equal to any old salt,” the newspaper reported.

Inevitably, the mix of engines and small boats in the hands of novices led to trouble. “A HARD EXPERIENCE” said the headline in the Commercial on May 15. “Three Bangor Men Almost Perished in Motor Boat Saturday.” The three, whose names were left out of the story, nearly capsized off Cape Rosier in their 20-foot dory when seawater stalled their engine. On June 23, well-known Bangor lawyer Lewis A. Barker was badly burned on a lake in Newport when his “naphtha launch” caught fire after the gas tank was overfilled.

Despite such incidents, enthusiasm for small gasoline-powered boats hardly dimmed. Before long there was talk of starting a motorboat club, just as there were clubs for canoeists, cyclists and horsemen, where owners could gather and “discuss the merits of their respective crafts and possibly arrange some races or cruises down the bay,” wrote the reporter for the Commercial on July 29.

He continued, “There was a time, and it doesn’t seem a great while ago, when a motor boat was sort of a novelty. They are a novelty no more though, for now they outnumber the [sail] boats and canoes on the river on a pleasant day and the silence of the Penobscot’s grand old shores is now broken by the chug-chugging of the motor boats’ exhausts from morning until night.”

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net Dick Shaw contributed information for this column.