Descendants of Steamer Portland Disaster Relive Memories at Portland Harbor Museum Lecture

A narrative and slide presentation of vintage photos by Peter Dow Batchelder and Mason Philip Smith, authors of "Four Short Blasts," rekindled a PHM History Lecture audience's family ties to the century old tragedy.

Batchelder and Smith recounted the last hours of the sidewheeler Boston-Portland ferry caught in the collision of two violent storm centers. Hours after her 7 PM departure from Boston, the ship was sighted off Cape Ann, Mass. by the storm tossed skipper of the fishing vessel Grayling. She was about a third of the way toward her destination. Subsequent sightings off Cape Cod are evidence of the ship's tortured last hours of helpless southerly drift in mountainous seas.

None of the doomed vessel's 192 passengers and crew lived to tell the tale.
Following the lecture, Donald Bray of Newfield shared his collection of artifacts found in a leather purse on the body of family member, Louis Metcalf, which washed onto the beach at Race Point on Cape Cod days after the tragic sinking. The collection contains two paper dollars, a Mexican silver dollar and a US silver dollar. A picture of Metcalf's young wife, who identified her husband by recognizing stichery that she had done on his clothing, added a poignant personal touch to Bray's collection.

Leonard Cummings, Chair of the Abyssinian Church Restoration Project building committee, reflected on the fate of the "Steamer Portland's" 30 crew members from the city's African American community. Unlike other footloose sailors of the period, Portland's African American seamen were rooted to their homes and families in the city. Their history stretches at least as far back as an 1830 city directory listing of 37 African Americans employed as seamen.

The loss of most of the 1898 roster dealt a cruel setback to the local African American community and the Abyssinian Church. Cummings and members of the restoration project have hired an engineer-architict and plan to start restoring the Newbury St. Abyssinian Church in the Spring.

Co-author, Mason Smith, admitted to more than a historian's interest in his researching and writing of the tragedy. He noted that his family lost the greatest number of people in the "Steamer Portland" sinking. His ancestor, Jes Jesson Schmidt, wife Jessine, and sons Anton and Jorgan arrived in Boston from Denmark on the Steamer Dominion with just enough time to connect with the ill fated Steamer Portland. A letter to his Portland address from the Boston office of the US Immigration Service, ended Schmidt's brother Jorgen's long vigil with the message "the family boarded the Steamer Portland and probably went down with the ship."