3024. Conway, J. North. Wreck of the Portland: A Doomed Ship, A Violent Storm, and New England’s Worst Maritime Disaster. Rowman & Littlefield. 2019.
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3024. Conway, J. North. Wreck of the Portland: A Doomed Ship, A Violent Storm, and New England’s Worst Maritime Disaster. Rowman & Littlefield. 2019.
3024. Conway, J. North. Wreck of the Portland: A Doomed Ship, A Violent Storm, and New England’s Worst Maritime Disaster. Rowman & Littlefield. 2019. 201p. Stiff wraps. The SS Portland was a solid and luxurious ship, and its loss in 1898 in a violent storm with some 200 people aboard was later remembered as “New England’s Titanic.” The Portland was one of New England’s largest and most luxurious paddle steamers, and after nine years’ solid performance, she had earned a reputation as a safe and dependable vessel. In November 1898, a “perfect storm” formed off the New England coast. Conditions would produce a blizzard with 100 mile per hour winds and 60-foot waves that pummeled the coast. At the time there was no radio communication between ships and shore, no sonar to navigate by, and no vastly sophisticated weather forecasting capacity. The luxurious SS Portland, a sidewheel steamer furnished with chandeliers, red velvet carpets and fine china, was carrying more than 200 passengers from Boston to Portland, Maine, over Thanksgiving weekend when it ran headlong into a monstrous, violent gale off Cade Cod. It was never seen again. All passengers and crew were lost at sea. More than half the crew on board were African Americans from Portland. Their deaths decimated the Maine African American community. Before the storm abated it became one of the worst ever recorded in New England waters. The storm, now known as “The Portland Gale,” killed 400 people along the coast and sent more than 200 ships to the bottom, including the doomed Portland. To this day it is not known exactly how many passengers were aboard or even who many of them were. The only passenger list was aboard the vessel. As a result of this tragedy, ships would thereafter leave a passenger manifest ashore. Author J. North Conway has painstakingly recreated the events, using first-hand sources and testimonies to weave a dramatic, can’t-put-it down narrative in the tradition of Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and Walter Lord’s enduring classic, A Night to Remember. He brings the tragedy to life with contemporaneous accounts the Life-Saving Service, from Boston newspapers such as the Globe, Herald, and Journal, and from The New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (M). $26.95.