Maine Memory Network

Great Britain's sailors first set eyes on Falmouth in Casco Bay in the 1650s, at the height of the British mast trade. By 1650, Dutch commercial interests had seriously threatened the British timber supply in the Baltic Sea, where mast agents had harvested pine trees for the Royal Navy since the Middle Ages.

With the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-1654), the Royal Admiralty sent the first dispatch to New England in 1652 to begin harvesting white pine trees in the British colonies. Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was long a source of trees accessible from the Piscataqua River.

By 1727, however, the region had been overharvested and the trade moved north and east, establishing Falmouth in Casco Bay as its center.

Beginning in 1685, Great Britain supported a surveyor-general in New England to identify trees that were to be reserved for the Royal Navy. Known as the Broad Arrow, this mark comprised three slashes in a shape resembling a crow’s foot.

The symbol marked all property of the Royal Navy, from mast trees in the North American forests to naval stores on board ships, such as blankets and bottles.

The 1711 Act of Parliament reserved all pine trees suitable for masts for the Crown.

As mast agent, Tate oversaw the process of identifying trees with the Broad Arrow, cutting, hauling, and hewing the white pines that his workers harvested into masts fit for a ship in the Royal Navy.

At the mast landing in Stroudwater, a neighborhood at the head of the Fore River harbor, massive white pines were brought from the interior, prepared for shipment to England, and floated down river to Clark’s Point to be loaded onto mast ships designed to transport the giant timbers.