Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, as a reward for his faithfulness, was given, in 1602, by the French King Henry of Navarre, a grant of all America from the 40th to the 46th parallels of latitude. He came out and founded a colony on Passamaquoddy Bay, and finding that the Indians called the region Acadie, or the "land of plenty," he named his domain Acadia. The French afterwards extended their explorations westward along the Maine coast, claiming under this grant, and this was the source of the many subsequent conflicts. Coming into Penobscot Bay, they made their outpost and stronghold upon the peninsula of Pentagoet on its eastern shore, marking the western limit of Acadia. Their famous old Fort Pentagoet, from which the French and Indian raiders for more than a century swooped down upon the English border settlements, is now the pleasant summer resort of Castine. Originally, the English from Plymouth established a trading-post there, but the French captured it, and then in the French religious conflicts it was alternately held by the Catholic and Huguenot chieftains sent out to rule Acadia. Sometimes pirates took it, and once some bold Dutchmen came up from New York and were its captors. But the French held it for a full century, though repeatedly attacked, until just before the Revolution, when the English conquered and held it throughout that war, again seizing it in the War of 1812. This noted old fort was captured and scarred in wars resulting in no less than five different national occupations. The present name is derived from Baron Castine, who came with his French regiment to Acadia, and gave Pentagoet its great romance. He was Vincent, Baron de St. Castine, lord of Oléron in the French Pyrenees, who arrived in 1667, and inspired by a chivalrous desire to extend the Catholic religion among the Indians, went into the wilderness to live among the fierce Tarratines. As Longfellow tells it in the Student's Tale at _The Wayside Inn_:
"Baron Castine of St. Castine Has left his château in the Pyrenees And sailed across the Western seas."
Pentagoet then was a populous town ruled by the Sachem Madockawando, and the young Baron, tarrying there, soon found friends among the Indians. The sachem had a susceptible daughter, and this dusky belle, captivated by the courtly graces of the handsome Baron, fell in love: