PORTLAND, Maine — In the wee hours of a stormy New Year’s morning, 104 years ago, two Maine schooners met their watery fates on the same treacherous, sunken ledge, within spitting distance of each other.
Both merchant ships were making for the safety of a small harbor with a grim reputation in stormy weather. With the unlikely coincidence, it appeared the two captains made the exact same fatal error in judgment, missing the harbor mouth and consigning their vessels to the bottom of the sea.
But that wasn’t really the case.
Both Skippers were experienced seamen and navigators who knew their business. The real culprit was a lack of timely information in an age before shipboard radios were common and news traveled at the speed of the morning paper.
“Two Bath schooners driven ashore” read the towering front page headline on the evening edition of the Bath Daily Times on Jan. 1, 1920.
Sometime after midnight that day, the three-masted Charles H. Trickey had fetched up on the rocks in front of Goat Island Light at Cape Porpoise. The weather was thick and Capt. John M. Harford of Five Islands in Georgetown was making for the narrow harbor entrance, where he planned to sit out the storm.
The Trickey was built in Bath in 1879. It was well known from Augusta to New York City and its movements often made the papers as it sailed, or was towed, up the Kennebec River, where it was loaded with cargos including sand, coal and lumber. Homeported in Portland, the Trickey was bound for Lynn, Massachusetts, with a load of box boards the night it foundered.
A month earlier, Maine newspapers reported the Trickey had grounded in an Arrowsic mudflat while being towed from Bath to Wiscasset.
Cape Porpoise Harbor has a narrow aperture, with just 100 yards between Goat Island and Folly Island. It had a reputation for being dangerous. Just a month before the Trickey grounded, another ship had run into Folly Island.
Two decades earlier, the federal government dredged the harbor in an attempt to make it more navigable.
“The improvements made the harbor much safer as a place of refuge and commerce but in thick weather, ships coming and going continued to wreck on Goat Island at a rate of about one every two years, in spite of the improvements,” wrote the Kennebunk Historical Society in 2020.
Thus, a decade later, the lighthouse service installed additional buoys and a 60-foot wooden tripod to better mark Goat Island’s nasty, boat-eating ledges.
But all the upgrades didn’t help the Trickey that night, or the boat that wrecked right beside it a few hours later.
Like the Trickey, the three-masted Mary E. Olys was a familiar sight in Maine’s coastal waters, ferrying various cargoes up and down the east coast. It was built in Bath in 1891 and survived a hurricane a few years before, off Nantucket, losing all its masts.
On that fateful New Year’s morning, the Olys was on its way from Stonington to Ossining, New York, with a load of granite. Its skipper, Capt. Lewis Hatch of Bristol, was also making for the relative safety of Cape Porpoise Harbor while the storm raged.
Hatch didn’t judge the westward turn any better than Harford.
Soon, both ships were grinding atop the Goat Island ledge, side-by-side, taking on water.
The steam-powered Coast Guard cutter USS Ossipee, stationed in Portland, rescued both captains and their respective four-man crews without any trouble. Both sets of sailors spent the rest of the night warming up on the Cape Porpoise fishing schooner Waltham.
The next day, it was clear neither vessel was salvageable. The Olys had filled with water and sunk to the bottom with the granite in her hold — where the stone remains today. The Trickey’s crew was able to salvage most of its cargo.
A salvage firm soon bought both ships, stripping them of anything of value.
A year later, on Jan. 14, 1921, the Boston Globe reported that the Trickey and Olys were being removed from the harbor.
“Recently parts of the two wrecks that hung together have moved around in such a position as to partially obstruct the channel leading into Cape Porpoise Harbor,” the Globe reported.
Hatch went on to skipper steamships and a Long Island yacht before dying in Portland in 1936 at the age of 50.
The Bath Daily Times reported Harford’s death on Feb. 27, 1928. The report didn’t reveal his age but that he likely left seafaring life shortly after losing the Trickey.
“He gave up the sea several years ago. Bought a farm in Richmond and settled there for 10 years,” the article read.
Neither obit mentioned the captain’s same-day shipwrecks, perhaps because they were not to blame.
The key, exonerating evidence can be found in the pages of Maine’s newspapers published the day before the twin shipwrecks.
“Notice to mariners,” reads a tiny item in the Bangor Daily News’ New Year’s Eve edition. “Goat Island Ledge Gas Buoy 9 found adrift.”
The brief piece referred to a butane-powered floating light which helped mark the ledge where the Tricky and Olys ended their sailing careers.
The Bath Daily Times expanded on the report the next day, saying the buoy was bobbing an eighth of a mile northeast of where it should have been when the two ship captains likely sighted it and began their westward turns toward Cape Porpoise’s narrow harbor.
Being wooden sailing ships without radios, there was no way for the captains to have heard the warning.
On Jan. 2, Portland’s Evening Express newspaper expressed solidarity with the skippers in an un-bylinded, three-sentence statement.
“Must make the captain of each feel a little better to know he was not alone in failing to make the harbor’s entrance,” it read.
