What is The Great Harbor?

NOAA chart showing "Southwest Harbor and Approaches." This chart shows the Cranberry Isles and the shorelines of Southwest Harbor, Northeast Harbor, and Seal Harbor. Within this area is the Great Harbor. The Great Harbor gives way to Somes Sound, the mouth of which is visible at the top left.
Nautical Chart of the Great Harbor, the body of water enclosed by the Cranberry Isles and Mount Desert Island

The Great Harbor is the term used to describe the body of water enclosed by Mount Desert Island on the north and the Cranberry Isles to the south. Writing in The Story of Mount Desert Island (1960), Samuel Eliot Morison discussed the origins of the term. Morison suggested the term originated with Antoine Laumet (later Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac), who obtained a land grant that included Mount Desert Island in 1688. Cadillac spent only a short amount of time on the coast of Maine, and is better known for his role in the founding of Detroit; but he described the body of water that has since become known as The Great Harbor. 

As Morison recounts:
Cadillac left in the French royal archives a memoir describing “The Harbor of Monts Déserts,” by which he meant the space between this island and the Cranberries, wherein, he said correctly, “vessels lie as in a box.” He mentioned four entrances, the northeastern with nine fathoms of water, and the eastern, with fourteen fathom – these are easily identified as the two parts of the Eastern Way, on each side of East Bunkers Ledge. The southeast entrance, he says, has three and a half fathom, but in the channel there’s a rock. That must be the Gut between the two Cranberries, but the depth is much less than what he described. The western entrance – the Western Way – says Cadillac, has three and a half fathom, “but to enter safely you must steer west or southwest.” The depth is correct for half tide but the direction is wrong; if you steer west inside the Western Way you run on the rocks, as happened to me once in a fog when I mistook the buoy in the channel for the gong buoy outside.

Incidentally, it is unfortunate that this name “The Harbor of Mount Desert” or “The Great Harbor of Mount Desert,” has gone out. It appears in an Act of Congress of 7 July 1838 authorizing the building of Bear Island lighthouse “at entrance of Mount Desert Harbor,” but I have never found it on any map or chart. The name ought to be revived.

A colored postcard showing Bear Island lighthouse, off Northeast Harbor, Maine. The lighthouse is visible above a rocky cliff, with a white tower and a brown gambrel-roofed keeper's house. To the right, a pyramidal structure contains a bell. There are very few trees on the island.
Postcard showing Bear Island Lighthouse, which was established in 1838. The present tower and keeper’s dwelling (seen in this postcard) were constructed in 1889.

As they considered name options in the early 1980s, the founders of the museum decided on the Great Harbor Collection as it referred to an area instead of a specific village or town. Later renamed the Great Harbor Maritime Museum, the museum focuses its attention not just on the Great Harbor, but on the other harbors, bays, and coves of Mount Desert Island as well. As our mission statement says: The Great Harbor Maritime Museum collects, preserves, and celebrates the maritime heritage of the Greater Mount Desert Island region.