Appledore 2 (Van Damme queued)! This week we have ten hours of uninterrupted small-island ocean vibes from off the coast of northern New England. Distant calm waves, birds, and buoys. Whether you're studying, working, reading, sleeping, or unwinding after a long day, this immersive ambient soundscape provides the perfect background soundtrack. No talking, no interruptions—just pure island isolation. Ignore the World.
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Special thanks to my twin for capturing this audio. The recording took place on a June afternoon earlier this year. And a note to the kids out there: if you do science stuff, you get to go to cool places. My sister has parlayed her marine ecology career into research trips overseas—to a ton of Europe, Central and South America, and Appledore.
Appledore is a tiny Maine island off the coast of New Hampshire. It’s Maine because the state line follows the Piscataqua River into the ocean and splits the island group between the two states. So New Hampshire has Star Island and White Island. And Maine has Cedar, Appledore, and (grizzly axe murders) Smuttynose.
It’s difficult to separate Smuttynose from its history. So I would suggest getting the history from J. Dennis Robinson’s book Mystery on the Isle of Shoals. It's a Smuttynose historian’s view of the island. (The book begins hundreds of millions of years ago and quickly leads to the events of March 5, 1873.)
The motivation of Robinson's book feels less like, "Here is some history of an island and its terrible events," and more like someone needs to correct the record after a novelist flipped the history to exonerate the axe murderer and blame the woman who survived the attack (in the fictional book—and later film—The Weight of Water).
Interestingly, John Wilkes Booth’s brother, Edwin Booth, has a cameo in Isle of Shoals history. He showed up on Star Island a few years after the Smuttynose murders (and after his brother murdered Lincoln) to stay at the (then) new Oceanic Hotel. Edwin had nothing to do with the Smuttynose murders—but if I wrote The Weight of Water 2, I’d pin the **** on that dude.
