Shipwrecks on Cape Cod

by Isaac M. Small

Among all the terrible disasters which have made the dreaded shores of Cape Cod known to mariners the world over, probably the worst of all was the loss of the steamer Portland, which sailed from her pier in Boston, on the evening of November 26th, 1898, on one of her regular trips to Portland, Maine, and before midnight of the following day her broken timbers, cabin fittings, large quantities of cargo and dead bodies lined the outer shores of Cape Cod, from Highland Light to Chatham. Not a person of her 175 passengers and crew survived the disaster.

The awful hurricane which swept the coast of New England that fateful Saturday night and Sunday was the worst in the memory of living men; the wind attained a velocity of approximately one hundred miles an hour.

When the Portland steamed out of Boston Harbor on that eventful Saturday night her captain did not anticipate that the storm would be more severe than the ordinary winter gale. She ran quickly down the smooth waters of the harbor, out by Boston Light, the gale increasing every moment. She passed Thatcher’s Island and on towards Cape Ann; she could have made Gloucester Harbor, but her master hoped the storm had reached its worst; not so, for every moment it grew more furious; the lights along the coast, one after another, were now blotted out by the ever thickening snow, the great seas ran riot in the bay. Now it was too late to turn back; the ship plunged into the wild seas that rose like mountains before her. To have attempted to turn the ship about with her high superstructure when she would have fallen off into the trough of the sea would mean her speedy destruction. On she staggered in the inky darkness of the wretched night until the fury of the gale and sea checked her further progress; then their only hope lay in being able to keep the ship’s head towards the wind. All through the long night and far into the next day, Sunday, the ship reared and plunged in the mad sea, slowly but surely every hour being carried nearer the lee shore of Cape Cod, drifting helplessly but ever with her bow to the sea. At 4 o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday the Life Savers at Race Point Station heard two distinct blasts of a steamer’s whistle, sharp and piercing; at 10 o’clock that night the patrolmen from stations south of Race Point came upon great masses of broken beams, deck-houses, furniture, boxes and barrels of freight and several dead bodies.

It is believed by men on the coast familiar with storms and tides that the whistle heard by the Race Point Life Savers at 4 o’clock was the last despairing cry sent up by the doomed ship before the sea engulfed her and those on board, and that between that hour and 7 o’clock that night the ship’s total destruction was accomplished.

It is no doubt a fact that the ship was held to her course until suddenly her steering gear was torn away by some huge sea more vicious than those before, she immediately fell off into the trough of the sea, and amid the crash of broken timbers and the thunder of the awful sea the ship went down with all on board.

There has been much speculation and prolonged search by the government and others to determine if possible approximately where this ship was swallowed up in the sea; the location of this terrible disaster has never been satisfactorily determined, but there is no question in the minds of sea coast men but that this ship went down somewhere between 8 and 12 miles north of Highland Light.

Out of the entire company of passengers and crew which went down with the ship only 60 bodies were recovered. Some of those found were fully dressed with life preservers upon them, indicating that the wearers knew that their chances for life were slight indeed. Other bodies were entirely nude when recovered, showing that some of the passengers had evidently retired to their staterooms in the earlier hours of the voyage and were made so ill by the terrible pitching and rolling that they made no exertion to dress themselves before the ship went down.

It is believed that no less than 500 human lives were the sea’s death toll in this awful hurricane that swept the shores of Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay in that frightful storm.

This disaster will pass into the annals of Cape Cod’s shipwreck history as the one which concerned the greatest loss of life from a single vessel.

The fury of such a gale can hardly be understood or appreciated by any one not having had personal experience with sea coast storms. As far as the eye could reach on that Sunday morning over the wild sea not the least bit of blue water could be seen for a distance of two miles from the shore; the whole ocean was a mass of seething foam; this driven shoreward by the gale would be caught from the beach by the wind and blown skyward high over the towering bluffs, then swept inland and break like bursting soap bubbles in the fields hundreds of yards away.