MASSACHUSETTS: Last Voyage

On days when the fog lies still and heavy over the harbors, when the damp beads the dock lines and the only sound is the creak of fenders against pilings, New England’s fishermen can still strike up an argument over the loss of the steamer Portland. Her sinking, with the loss of all hands, is New England’s most famous shipwreck, and the 1898 gale in which she went down is still known, from Nantucket to Bangor, as “the Portland gale.”

Last week a handful of surviving relatives gathered, as they have regularly since 1908, to commemorate the anniversary. Sitting on upended fish boxes in the chill, barnlike steamer shed on Boston’s India Wharf, they listened as Historian Edward Rowe Snow recounted the oft-told tale of the Portland’s sinking.

Dreadful Spew. The Portland was a 291-ft. side-wheeler, trim with white and gold paint, and to Boston’s fond eye, as slick as a schoolmarm’s leg. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1898, many families were returning to Maine after holiday visits to Boston. Despite storm warnings, the skipper decided he could make Portland ahead of the blow. Shortly after dark, with 176 people aboard, he cast off. The Portland disappeared down the channel into a swirl of snow.

Just beyond Thacher Island, the gale struck. All that night, the Portland’s paddle wheels thrashed vainly as giant seas battered her superstructure, drove her southward before the raging northeast wind. Elsewhere, 141 ships foundered. In the bitter cold and driving snow, men could not see across a ship’s deck, had trouble getting their breath.

Next morning, in a slatch in the storm, surf watchers on the tip of Cape Cod saw the Portland, among the snarled and yelping seas, just off the treacherous Peaked Hill Bar. The storm closed in, and the day wore on. That night, the sea suddenly belched forth a dreadful spew of trunks, mattresses, chairs, stateroom doors and barrels on the sands near Race Point. The bodies came more slowly, rolling inertly in the surf. Explained a coast watcher: “The bodies do not float as woodwork does, but the tide and waves push and roll them along the bottom until they reach shallow water, when they get into the undertow and are tossed up on the beach.” The watches found on the dead had stopped at a quarter past nine.

Sounding Lead. For years, no one could find the sunken hull. Other wreckage was found miles away. Mooncussers, scrabbling among the jetsam, found a piece of cabin from the Pentagoet, another steamer lost without trace. Had the ships rammed each other? Or had the Portland hit the bar? Or had she clawed off shore only to break up under the terrible pounding?

In 1945, the hull was found. It was lying, sanded in, among huge boulders some four miles off shore and 145 feet down. Her superstructure swept away, she had gone down like a sounding lead in deep water.

Last week, on the chill wharf, the surviving relatives heard the roll call of the Portland’s dead for the last time. As each name was called, survivors threw flowers on the ebbing tide. A woman played Rock of Ages on a zither. It was the last meeting. The old were ailing, the young had no memories. Said Historian Snow: “After all, you’ve got to stop some time, and the 50th anniversary seemed to be a good time to stop.”