The view of Star Island from Appledore Island. Photo by Gary Samson

Soon European fishermen began harvesting the rich fishing grounds nearby, pulling in 100- to 150-pound cod day after day. A fishing community of 600 to 800 men, who built crude shacks and taverns, sprang up on the isles, which were renamed the Isles of Shoals - - most likely for the bountiful schools of fish that surrounded them. Shoalers became well known for their delicious dried dunfish, a high-priced commodity among the American settlements and in European markets for most of the 17th and 18th centuries.

The early Shoalers also gained a reputation as a hard-drinking, godless and even incestuous people, who stubbornly resisted any attempts to tax, govern or redeem them. When the province of Massachusetts tried to levy taxes on the residents of Maine's Hog Island (now Appledore), some 40 families took their houses apart, rowed them across the harbor and set them up again on nearby Star Island across the New Hampshire border. Tuttle maintains that history has treated the settlers unfairly, beginning with exaggerated early reports from self-serving missionaries. "I don't think the Shoalers were any worse than anyone else," he tells his audience. "It was a very tough life."

Victorian-era tourism blossomed on the Shoals in the mid-1800s, when entrepreneurs constructed hotels both modest and grand on the largest islands of Appledore, Smuttynose and Star. The isles quickly became a popular retreat for wealthy New Englanders, who were ferried out each summer with their leather trunks and well-dressed children in tow.

Some of the 19th century's popular American artists also found their way to the Shoals, drawn there initially by the powerful imagery expressed in "Land-locked," a poem about the isles published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine and written by longtime island resident Celia Thaxter. Thaxter, who went on to gain a measure of fame, turned the parlor of her cottage on Appledore Island into a creative and intellectual refuge for writers, poets, painters and musicians, including John Greenleaf Whittier, James and Annie Fields, Sarah Orne Jewett and Childe Hassam.

UNH entered into Isles of Shoals history in 1928, when Professor C. Floyd Jackson founded the Zoological Marine Laboratory on Appledore. Students flocked to the island each summer to engage in field research until the outbreak of World War II led to the lab's closing. In the early 1970s, Cornell University professor John Kingsbury began to offer courses on Star Island, and by 1974, Cornell and UNH had jointly founded the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore, still one of the nation's largest and best programs for undergraduate field research in marine science.