Visit to Lubec & Campobello Island

Gull Rock in Hancock, Maine

Tidal Falls in Hancock

Wharf at Compobello Island

Campobello Island

Light house on Campobello

FDR's summer cottage on Campobello

Fishing boats in Lubec near our hotel room

MB and I have taken a week off and gone north in Maine. We first stopped for two nights at the home of dear friends Russell & Akemi Wray in Hancock. Akemi has a pottery studio called Gull Rock - a spectacular place right on the water. Russell creates amazing art work and sculpture.  

Russell took me for a long electric bike ride that led to the Tidal Falls near his home (pictured above). He and Akemi are great activists who MB and I have been working with since we moved to Maine in 2003. Russell came on many of the peace walks I organized up and down the state over the years.

We then drove to Lubec which has the eastern most point of the US at Quoddey Head State Park just outside of town.

Today we drove from Lubec over the FDR bridge to Campobello Island and the Roosevelt Campobello Int'l Park which is jointly run by the US and Canada. This beautiful location was the summer home of former US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). We took the tour of FDR's summer cottage on the island. Every year during his youth and early adulthood FDR spent summers on Campobello. 

During the tour the guide was talking about FDR's grandfather Warren Delano Jr. who made a fortune, lost it, and remade another during his life. FDR's mother inherited the fortune and used the money to help pave the way for FDR to become Governor of New York and president.  In front of the group on the tour with us I asked the guide, 'How did FDR's grandfather make his fortune'? She whispered to me 'the China opium trade'. Then she paused and repeated the same answer loud enough for everyone on the tour to hear. No one appeared to react.

I knew this story about FDR's family fortune coming from the importation of opium from India to China, and getting generations of Chinese addicted to opium, because I read a riveting book entitled The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia.  This so-called 'trade' led to the Opium Wars between China and the western powers during the mid-19th Century. 

As it turns out former US Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) maternal great-grandfather also made his Boston-based fortune via the same opium trade. The funds from this illicit drug biz funded the founding of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia universities as well as the first transcontinental railroad across the US. So it is instructive to reflect on the fact that leading American 'blue-blood' political families were crooks - drug dealers. Thus I don't have any trouble thinking of the ruling elites (including the slave traders from many of these same families) as criminals. 

This of course is a little known story in our country. This opium trade was sold to the American people 'innocently' as just the 'China trade'. (Think nice art, dishes, silk and such.)

Tomorrow we'll go for a hike at Quoddy Head State Park. We've been there once before and love this place. It's quiet here now in Lubec as autumn has come and the masses of summer tourists have returned home. It's the time of year I most enjoy visiting such places. We have to search hard for restaurants that are still open but that is part of the charm of this wonderful community.

Bruce