The Downeast coast

From Colin Woodward's "The Lobster Coast," p. 32:

The often-used Maine moniker "Downeast" is a sailing term that refers to direction, not location. The prevailing winds on the Maine coast blow from the southwest in the warm months, so ships from Boston were able to run downwind as they sailed along Maine's northeasterly-trending coast. ...

The Downeast coast was the last region to be settled by British subjects because it belonged to France until 1763. France never established much more than a garrison here, in large part because the region's colder climate, ferocious tides, and thin, glacially scoured soil made such undertakings difficult. The task of settlement fell to a great wave of land-hungry English and Scotch-Irish settlers who moved here from other parts of Maine and New England in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It was this movement that pushed Maine to the forefront of the American fishing industry in the first half of the nineteenth century. Most Downeast people discovered they couldn't survive by farming, and turned to the sea by necessity. There they discovered the Gulf of Maine's incredible bounty, and helped establish the maritime way of life on the coast. But the Downeast coast's harsh conditions and remote location have always minimized both settlement and economic activity, and today the region remains the poorest, least developed part of the Maine seaboard.