Where is the Wreckage of the "Titanic of New England"?

Where is the Wreckage of the ‘Titanic of New England’?

By Bill Russo

There is no denying that the side-wheeler, “The Portland” went to the bottom of the turbulent North Atlantic Ocean.  There’s also no doubt that all hands were lost – some fifty crewmen and as many as 200 passengers.

Further, there is no argument about the date of the tragedy.  On 27 November, 1898 the vessel fought a losing battle with a massive Northeaster that crippled most land based activities, claimed at least 400 souls, and destroyed 150 ships – the largest of which was The Portland, powered by a 1200 horse-power steam engine. The craft was capable of transporting more than 200 passengers and plied the waters between Boston and Portland for nine years from her launching in 1889 until her sinking.

The mystery of the “Titanic of New England” is that she seems to have sunk in two separate places!  According to Wikipedia, she was lost off the rocky coastline of Cape Ann in Northern Massachusetts, about 30 miles East of Boston. The premiere online news and information site further claims that divers have found the location of the wreckage, and that the site has been confirmed by the scientific agency NOAA.

I have however discovered credible accounts that say that the ship actually sunk in Nantucket Sound, off the Cape Cod village of Truro.  The town of 2,000 people has some of the nation’s finest beaches, but the water is cold and the waves are often very large.  Its waters were shark infested in 2018 resulting in the death of one man who succumbed to injuries suffered after being bitten by a Great White.

From news accounts more than 120 years old here is what I found, starting off with the newspaper headline:

1898 – ‘THE PORTLAND SUNK’; 118 LIVES LOST. STEAMER FROM BOSTON WRECKED SUNDAY OFF CAPE COD. WENT DOWN IN THE STORM.

Boston, Mass., Nov. 29. - The steamer Portland, bound from Boston to Portland, went down off Truro, on the outside of Cape Cod, Sunday morning. Every man, woman, and child on board at the time of the disaster was drowned, in all 118. 

NONE LIVES TO TELL.

“The Portland left Boston on Saturday evening and was last seen afloat by a fisherman in the vicinity of Thacher's Island several hours later. Nobody knows what happened in the awful hours on the angry sea which followed, and the lips that might tell the tale are sealed in death.

The surmise is that with the wind blowing a gale at the rate of seventy miles an hour, a rate which has never been equaled except once before in the written history of weather along this coast, with the waves running to mighty heights, the steamer became disabled and was swept by the raging seas across the entrance to Massachusetts Bay and down upon the graveyard of Cape Cod. The Portland, with its side paddlewheels and large exposure of hull, must have been smashed by the seas and rolled by the mad waves, and at last foundered in the height of the gale Sunday morning.

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It took nearly a day and a half for the news of the disaster to get from Truro to Boston, a distance of 106 miles. A courier on horseback struggled through the wreckage of downed telegraph wires and over the tracks of the railroads which were blockaded by massive snow drifts.

The newspaper report continued with a partial listing of passengers and crew that were known to be on board the doomed ship.  It further stated that as of date of publication, two days after the disaster, 34 bodies had been tossed from the sea to the soft sand of the Truro Beaches.

Bolstering the claim that the Portland met its fate off Cape Cod, is a report in a 1940s book by Edward Rose Snow that says the wreckage of the ship was found near Race Point in Provincetown, just a few miles from Truro.

Where did the Portland really sink?  Was it Cape Cod, where it was tossed like flotsam during the storm?  After the storm, did the sea push the wreckage like jetsam across the ocean bottom some 100 miles towards Gloucester?

 If I find any answers, I’ll update this post.  Thanks for reading.

 P.S. Here’s a little bit of an ironic conclusion to this article.  Note the following illustration of The Portland, which was called “The Titanic of New England”. The drawing is by Samuel Ward Stanton.  He died a few years later.  He was a passenger on the Titanic. 

Important Update

with information from the

U.S. National Archives

Confirmation that Cape Cod was the  location where 'The Portland' sank has been discovered in a report from the Independent Agency of the United States Government, The National Archives and Records Administration (known as the National Archives)

Quoting directly the document states: "There are recoreds related to the Potland in the Life Saving Service Station logs along the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  

These provide information on the aftermath of the storm, noting the bodies and artifacts washed ashore. At the Cahoon's Hollow Station, on November 28,1898, the body of George Graham, a Negro, washed ashore.  He is identified by name in the log entry and he is the only crew member whose body was identified at the time of recovery."

The Cahoon Hollow station, near the nationally known beach with the same name, operated in Cape Cod from 1872 into the 1900s.  The keeper of the Station in 1898 was Daniel Cole who served from 1879 to 1905. It was Mr. Cole who filed the first reports of the Portland victims washing ashore on the Cape Cod beaches.

The fact that the bodies washed ashore in Cape Cod certainly proves that the ship met disaster in Cape Cod waters.  It would have been virtually impossible for the ship to have been destroyed in Cape Ann waters and have the lifeless forms of the crew and passengers drift all the way to Cape Cod.

Somewhere along the line, a reporter or clerk preparing a report must have typed Cape Ann - instead of Cape Cod, into a document.  Without checking, others repeated the mistake until it 'seemingly' became a fact.

The above information  certainly seems to be correct but it does not explain the so-called 'discovery of the wreck' off Cape Ann.

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