The Bangor papers reported an unusual number of mishaps and other unfortunate events involving Penobscot Bay steamboats during the spring and summer a century ago. These events were not of the same magnitude as the atrocities occurring daily in the European war in which German U-Boats were regularly sinking allied ships. But they were likely of more concern to the thousands of folks who rode on the many coastal steamers connecting the little harbors served neither by trains nor modern highways and reliable automobiles.
Any Bangoreans dependent on the little Bon Ton Ferry to take them across the river to Brewer or who rode one of the Great White Flyers to Boston would have taken an immediate interest in the fates that year of the W.G. Butman, J.T. Morse, Pemaquid and Corinna. The imaginary fate of the famous Sappho would have brought a tear to the eye of many steamboat lovers as well.
Such events as these foreshadowed the decline and disappearance of the passenger steamboats within the next couple of decades as roads improved and automobiles and trucks took over.
“Steamer W.G. Butman Sinks Off Matinicus,” a Bangor Daily News headline announced May 28, 1915. The subhead read: “Her Ten Passengers and Crew of Four Take to Ship’s Boats and Reach Matinicus Island After a Hard Row of Seven Miles — Ship’s Mail Was Also Saved.”
The Butman was on her regular run between Rockland and Matinicus. The sea was choppy but nobody panicked. Many of the passengers were experienced at handling small boats, and they helped the crew row or bail water.
One has to wonder about the qualifications of the crew, however. The story attributed the sinking of the 53-foot vessel “to the fact that one of the deadlights was not securely closed,” and the engine room flooded. A deadlight, according to my dictionary, refers to a storm shutter over a porthole or a thick window in a ship’s side or deck.
The Butman had been making the rounds between Matinicus and Rockland for 15 years. She was famous among “Knox County lobster eaters” for her Sunday excursions, according to John M. Richardson in his book “Steamboat Lore of the Penobscot,” from which much of the background for this column has been derived.
The next calamity occurred in September when the steamers J.T. Morse and Pemaquid collided in pea soup fog near Stonington.
The Morse, which was owned by the Eastern Steamship Co., was on her regular morning trip from Rockland to Bar Harbor, carrying about 100 passengers. The Pemaquid, a Maine Central Railroad steamer, was on her way from Sargentville to Rockland with 50 passengers.
Both were running for the same black buoy when the accident occurred. The iron hull of the Pemaquid knocked a large hole in the wooden hull of the 199-foot Morse, which made it to a small dock on nearby Moose Island before sinking in water up to its freight deck. Its passengers were landed safely and taken to Stonington, the Bangor Daily News reported Sept. 9, 1915.
What could have ended in tragedy, yielded a humorous story. Ray Eaton, one of the passengers on the J.T. Morse, was in the bow after the collision. Seeing the Morse was badly damaged and might sink, he leaped over the wrecked railing onto the deck of the Pemaquid, whose bow was still buried in the Morse. The Pemaquid quickly backed away and proceeded to Rockland with its new passenger.
Later, Eaton’s friends, who were waiting for him on the dock at Stonington, returned to the wreckage where they found his luggage and topcoat. Eaton’s death was reported to officials, and it wasn’t until later that a telephone call revealed his whereabouts. Thus, Eaton became “the unsung, but thoroughly cussed hero” of the day.
The next mishap suffered by Maine’s steamboat fleet was a relatively minor affair at West Brooksville that nevertheless illustrates the perilous financial straits some smaller lines were experiencing.
The 64-foot Corinna had been “extensively overhauled and finely fitted up” the year before by the Devereaux Co. to begin a route between West Brooksville, Castine and Bucksport, making two trips a day connecting with Maine Central trains, according to a Sept. 13 Bangor Daily News report. “Considerable stock” in the project was sold in Bangor and Bucksport.
After running a few months, “she was hauled off it being understood the route was not paying, and has been tied up [in West Brooksville] ever since.” On Sept. 12, the vessel burned to the waterline in a mysterious fire. No one had been aboard of her in months, it was believed.
The next newspaper report worth noting here was not about a shipping accident. Nostalgia was the hallmark of this lengthy piece about one of Maine’s most famous passenger steamboats, the 140-foot Sappho. Its gloomy note could have been applied to many of the state’s popular steamboats, which were all slowly fading away.
Owned by the Maine Central, the luxurious Sappho had carried many eminent people to Maine’s most famous resort, Bar Harbor, and surrounding towns on Mount Desert Island. But today she was “destined for the junk heap,” the headline declared in the Bangor Daily News Sept. 20 in a story reprinted from the Portland Sunday Press.
The writer had spotted the vessel being towed through Portland harbor. He wrote, “Today the once queen of Penobscot Bay has a piece of canvas over her smokestack, her thunderous resounding whistle … has been removed, some of her cabin windows are broken, others stuffed with boards and her decks are a mass of blistered paint and broken canvas.”
The writer recalled seeing famous folks such as Maine’s legendary politician James G. Blaine, President Benjamin Harrison and U.S. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts aboard, as well as a number of other forgotten figures whose names once conjured up wealth and power. The Sappho had been replaced by better boats, but not better passengers, he concluded.
The Sappho’s career was far from over, however. Richardson tells us the rest of the story.
In fact, the Sappho took on a new life running first in New York, then during World War I carrying explosives on the Delaware River and in 1919, renamed the Pawtucket, running between Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and New York.
In 1924, she was converted into a freighter. Eventually her steam engines were replaced with Diesels and her tall stack with “a squat exhaust pipe.”
“Due to her age, the government turned thumbs down on her use in World War II, but seized her comparatively new diesel engine and installed it in a patrol vessel,” according to Richardson, the historian.
Such, of course, was the fate of the vast majority of steamboats — at least those that didn’t sink to the bottom or end up beached in a backwater cove somewhere in the next few decades. With them went most of the excitement and glamour of travel along the coast of Maine.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era, is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com