CAPE ELIZABETH, Maine — A man pushing a stroller pointed to a mostly unreadable sign, printed in peeling paint on the rocks in front of Portland Head Light on Monday afternoon.
“It’s almost the anniversary of the Annie C. Maguire,” he proclaimed to two children and a woman accompanying him. “It happened on Christmas Eve.”
It’s true.
The sailing ship Annie C. Maguire foundered on the rocks in front of the famous lighthouse on the night before Christmas, 1886.
It’s a well-told holiday tale recounted every year around Portland Harbor, thanks mostly to the oft-repainted sign bearing the ship’s name, the date and the simple statement, “wrecked Christmas Eve,” visible to remind people.
The rest of the details are often omitted from the yearly telling, however, including rumors of insurance fraud and how the ship was probably filled to the brim with bird poop.
That Christmas Eve, 138 years ago, was a rainy affair, though the sea was nearly calm. Then, around 11 p.m., an impenetrable snow squall whipped up out of nowhere, enveloping both the harbor and the lighthouse built to warn ships of the nearby rocky dangers.
That sudden, blinding weather is the only explanation for what happened next.
Shortly before midnight, the once-proud Yankee clipper ship Annie C. Maguire ran head on into the ledge at the base of the fully lit lighthouse, under full sail.
At the time of the wreck, the barque-rigged ship was working out of Quebec. However, she started life as the famed China tea-trade clipper ship Golden State. After launching in New York City in January 1853, the 188-foot vessel logged more than a million miles in her 30 years at sea, circling the globe many times in the process, bringing untold wealth home to her owners.
But Golden State’s glory days and original name were long gone by the time she foundered at Portland Head Light.
A shaky Canadian company called D&J Maguire had bought the ship and renamed her three years earlier. When disaster struck in December 1886, Annie C. Maguire was making regular voyages from Montreal to Buenos Aires and back, hauling guano — bird poop for fertilizer — with an overworked, underfed and unhappy crew.
That Christmas Eve, lighthouse keeper Joshua Strout was keeping watch in the lighthouse’s white stone tower. Strout’s lamp was burning bright. He was later described, in a 1929 magazine article, as “a bronzed, hardy little man, comfortably inclined to corpulence.”
Joseph Strout, his son and assistant keeper, was getting ready for bed and had just gotten his socks off when his father burst through the door.
“All hands turn out,” the older Strout shouted. “There’s a ship ashore in the dooryard!”
When the younger Strout stumbled out the door into the darkness and snow, he could see the ship, fewer than 100 yards from the tower. Its masts reached into the sky, taller than the lighthouse. Somehow, the Maguire had managed to smash into the very beacon meant to warn it of danger.
The ship’s captain, Daniel O’Neil, had already ordered the crew to drop anchor and take down the sails. Then, the captain, his family and all nine crewmen simply stepped off the boat, onto the ledge. All the Strouts had to do to rescue them was flop a ladder between the shore and the ledge. The sea being calm, everyone made it to safety.
Mary Strout, the lighthouse keeper’s wife, burned bits of kerosene-soaked blankets to provide light for the minimal rescue operation. Then she fed everyone coffee and dinner. The crew was starving. On their long voyage from South America, they’d only had salt beef and a bit of macaroni to eat. The meager rations were supplemented by Vitamin C-rich lime juice to stave off scurvy.
Fortunately, there was enough to go around. The Strouts had killed eight chickens the day before for a Christmas feast.
“Ma made all eight into the best pie you ever tasted,” Joseph Strout recalled in the 1920s. “But it didn’t make no impression on that crew of three-quarter starved blotters though. I only got one plateful.”
But he didn’t seem to hold it against the rescued sailors, even though they may have overstayed their welcome.
“A feller doesn’t get wrecked often, and when it happens where he can eat after starving for weeks, you can’t blame him for passing his plate until it’s all gone,” Strout said. “Once they got that chicken pie into them, the whole gang wanted to stay. They loafed around for three days and ate most of the food we had.”
The crew weren’t total freeloaders, though. Some of them scampered back onto their ship and produced two cases of Scotch whiskey. Annie C. Maguire’s crew eventually moved to a sailor’s boarding house on Fore Street in Portland and the captain stayed with nearby friends.
Meanwhile, it came to light that the company that owned the ship had gone belly up while she was at sea.
Rumors then went around that the captain grounded Annie C. Maguire on purpose, for the insurance money. But it later turned out the ship wasn’t insured very well. Instead, she was auctioned off on Dec. 28 for scrap. The high bid was $178. For the next three days, salvagers stripped the ship of anything worth a penny — her metal sheathing, spars, hardware, anchors, chains and all.
Then, heavy swells came up on New Year’s Eve. By daybreak, she was scattered along the coast in a countless wash of bits and pieces. Nothing remains today except her name, in weathered paint, on the rocks in front of the lighthouse.