The Wreck of the Steamship Portland
Near Portland, Maine
On the evening of November twenty-seventh, eighteen ninety-eight, a large side-wheel steamship named the Portland departed Boston Harbor for her scheduled overnight run north to this city. She was carrying passengers returning home for the Thanksgiving holiday. She never arrived. The Portland went down with all hands in one of the most violent coastal storms in New England history. Because the passenger list was aboard when she sank, no one can say with certainty exactly how many people died. Note: estimates range from about one hundred seventy-six to as many as two hundred forty-five, and the precise figure cannot be established from existing records.
The storm that took the Portland became known as the Portland Gale. It lasted more than thirty hours, drove coastal wind gusts above one hundred miles per hour, buried much of New England under two feet of snow, and sank or grounded more than one hundred fifty vessels. The damage to the coast was catastrophic. In Portland alone the storm wrecked buildings along the waterfront, tore away piers, and cut off the city for days.
Warning signs had been available that evening. Weather forecasts had been issued, and captains of other vessels chose not to sail. Why Captain Hollis Blanchard made the decision to depart Boston remains one of the enduring questions of Maine maritime history. Pressure from the shipping company, a desire to reach Portland before the worst of the storm, and miscalculation about the storm's track have all been offered as explanations. None is certain.
The wreck of the Portland devastated Portland's Abyssinian congregation on Munjoy Hill, which lost about nineteen adult male members that night. The ship was first located in nineteen eighty-nine and confirmed in two thousand two by researchers using remote sensing technology in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay, in about four hundred sixty feet of water, largely intact. The disaster accelerated the maritime industry's shift from wooden hulls and paddlewheels to steel-hulled, propeller-driven vessels.
