The rocky point where the road turns west, near where Champlain first described the island in 1604. Parking is along the road.
September of sixteen oh four. Samuel de Champlain is sailing this shore in a small barque when a little rock, level with the water, opens a hole in his hull near the keel. He never says exactly where. People here have long liked to think it was a ledge off this point. The next day he wrote about smoke rising from a cove at the foot of the mountains, and two canoes that came out to watch him. The Wabanaki had been here for thousands of years, and they wanted a look at this stranger. Champlain looked up at these peaks, mostly bare on top, and wrote that the island had the look of seven or eight mountains. How many have you counted? He called it Isle des Monts Deserts, the island of bare mountains, sixteen years before the Pilgrims landed.
Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0