Ameriscoggin, around Brunswick

Took more hours than I'd care to discuss:

Islands and lakes smaller than 2 miles in diameter are not included; those between 2 mi. and 2.67 mi. are included on an arbitrary basis, depending on whether or not I felt the map needed it.  A zoomed-in map could include much more detail.

I wonder how long it takes locals to grasp the complexity of the islands, as obviously there are hundreds not included above that are yet a quarter mile in diameter.  In any case, the coast looks less complex above than it did tracing the lines from GoogleEarth.

Pejepscot was an incredibly lucky find.  Making the map for Sterling, I'm against a wall in finding native names for places, because for one thing I have zero personal relationship with the area and for another, the internet is notoriously devoid of natives carefully recording their own history for other natives.  I'm rather stunned that I can't just locate an extensive wiki for every native tribe everywhere in the world ... but of all the things that people think are important, this doesn't seem high on the roster.  A wiki would be incredible for this kind of work.  Every native family and place of origin could be carefully tabulated and managed by hundreds of focused, careful Abenaki natives ... but instead what we have are some scrubby generalised texts that list Abenaki bands or random Abenaki words with no context whatsoever.  It's staggeringly unhelpful.  And yet there's more information about Abenakis than there is about Odawa, that I searched for earlier this week.

Real headshaking stuff.  So everytime I have to "come up" with an Abenaki name for a place, it's pick a random word and use it.  Yesterday, Sterling corrected my use of "Damiriscotta" for the place just east of Brunswick.  Well, I'll admit it.  That was a totally random word found in on Abenaki webpage that I used because it was at least Abenaki in origin.  Most of the time, this is the best I can do here.  So if someone would like to correct some name I'm picking for these parts of the world, please do.

London tomorrow.

Lower Androscoggin Valley

This proved more intriging than I'd originally expected:

As with the Michigan example, this is a bare-bones 20-mile map of the area requested by Sterling.  It's a collection of European incursions established on the edges of Abenaki native lands, so that in calculating the infrastructure it's a mash of both cultures hex-by-hex.

Each "patent" here is a grant made by the monarch of England to an individual or company, in exchange for a service rendered each year.  In this case, most likely a set amount of timber to be cut and provided into the hands of the sovereign.  The patent grants the specific right to trade with the Abenaki or Penobscot natives.  I haven't gone deep enough into the subject to determine exactly what was granted or what specifically the trade desired ... that's going to need my going into old books on the net, because wikipedia is notably scant in its information.  The patents all failed as it happened, though not at once.  And they did help establish a foothold on the shoreline, which is more important than their intention.

'Course, in Earth's actual history, this was done with the natives as the loser.  The Abenaki here, whose settlements can be understood by their unfamiliar non-English names, have been given benefits by elves in America that the real natives did not have.  These benefits are based on things that existed in North America, that might have been exploited if the natives had known to do so.

First, the wheel.  This gives the natives a better pottery and the potential for taking advantage of moving rivers.  And since the elves came to North America first, and brought horses with them, they've been here since long before the Europeans came in the 15th century.  Thus there are carts, and with carts, roads.

Second, metal forging.  The natives therefore have swords, axes, spears and so on with metal parts.  Thus they're able to take a firm stand in war, and the use of metals enables a lot more in the way of tools and farm implements.  This allows better planting of crops ... though existing staples are beans and squash rather than cereals, which were never established in the New World prior to the Europeans.

This creates a whole new dynamic, turning history on it's head.  The Europeans cannot simply bully their way into America; there are several well-established groups who could fight them to a standstill, and several scattered Elven kingdoms within the large deciduous forests east of the Missouri.  For those who may wonder how to predict what the natives have compared to the Europeans, it's best to assume they have everything.  After all, what they didn't have prior to 1600 has been since traded by Europeans who began to arrive.  There are likely some individual natives planting grain crops, since those too were brought across the Atlantic.

One thing: it paints the Europeans clearly as the invaders, who in this history must give respect to the native tribes or find themselves quickly wiped out.  On the map above, the Europeans number about 2,000 persons.  There are more than 16,000 Abenaki, as skilled and able, with comparable magic, as the non-gun-toting Europeans here.  There are no guns in my game world.