From its earliest beginnings, the land that became Maine produced adventurous inhabitants who went outside its boundaries to do interesting things that sometimes made them famous or even infamous. The inspiration for this book came from the tiny Pacific island of Kosrae in Micronesia, where Brewer native and Bangor Theological Seminary graduate the Reverend Galen Snow converted all of the natives to Christianity, and Portlander Harry Skillins left a record as a vicious pirate and who sired a line of descendants by native women. Others in these twenty chapters are far better known, such as poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay, opera singer Lillian Nordica, and Hollywood movie director John Ford.