On the way from Concord towards Canada I stopped at Portsmouth for the purpose of seeing the Navy Yard,[8] which was the last naval establishment that I had to visit on the eastern coast, and then proceeded to the remotely situated village of Damariscotta. The shell mounds near the adjacent river far exceeded in magnitude what I had expected to find. They were placed about twelve miles from the sea within the limits of the ebb and the flow of the tides, and formed the banks of a small promontory round which the river made a sharp bend. Within these banks was a flat space of land which had been used by the Indians for their camping ground, and which is known to have been visited by small bands of them as late as the end of the last century. The heaps extend along the shores of the river and round the promontory for a length of about six hundred yards, and vary in height from fifteen to thirty-five feet. It was difficult to estimate their average width, but in many places it was not less than twenty-two yards. The mound that I chiefly examined rose directly from the beach close to the line of the present high water mark. It was thirty-three feet high, sixty feet wide and one hundred and fifty feet long. Looking from the river, it presented the appearance of a steep cliff formed of compact layers of large oyster shells. In consequence of the face of this cliff being exposed, it was possible to trace all the horizontal strata. Beginning from the top of the bank there was, in the first place, a deposit of shells closely packed about eighteen inches thick. Then there was a well-defined layer of earth or mould, averaging a thickness of half-an-inch throughout the whole length of the bank without any break or change in its width. The next layer was not so deep as that on the top, and was one foot thick. Then came another deposit of mould, half-an-inch in thickness, resting upon another layer of shells. In this manner, the alternating deposits of earth and shells succeeded each other down to the base. There were not any signs of kitchen midden refuse amongst the shells, but in the intermediate layers of earth I saw fragments of broken pottery, charred wood, several rounded stones, small quantities of bones of animals, and one bone awl which had evidently been much used. A portion of the cliff which had been undermined by the action of the river had slipped down upon the beach, consequently the interior of the mound was exposed. I made an excavation into this new face and found a stone knife, or scraper, and a small stone chisel. In another part of the bank I discovered a plank lying flat upon the third layer of mould below the surface. It was made of fir, and was four feet six inches long, six inches wide and half-an-inch thick.