Steamer Potomac Goes Up In Flames Off Cape Elizabeth

Winter fire forced passengers and crews overboard

by Brian Swartz

Afew hours before a cold winter’s dawn in 1865, a steamboat captain steering along the Maine coast spotted the two familiar lights flashing from their respective towers in Cape Elizabeth. Moments later disaster engulfed the captain’s world.

On February 16, 1860, the Maine Legislature passed a bill authorizing eight investors, including Henry Cromwell from New York City, to form the New England Screw Steamship Company to conduct “the business of navigation by vessels propelled by steam or otherwise” between Portland and the

Big Apple “and from any other port in Europe or North America.”

A Brooklyn, New York native, Cromwell was well experienced in steamers, having established the namesake H.B. Cromwell & Company in the early 1850s. He bought the New York, Baltimore and Alexandria Steamship Company in 1854 and converted several small coal-hauling steamers so the ships could carry people instead.

Cromwell assigned the steamers Caledonia and Western Port to start sailing between Portland and New York City in June 1855. Within a few years his steamers also connected New York with Baltimore, Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and other coastal cities, including Washington,

D.C. Among Cromwell’s ships was the 448-ton Potomac, overhauled with new boilers and a new engine in late 1858.

After the 35-year-old Cromwell died in Brooklyn in April 1864, his widow, Sarah, was forced to dispose of his business assets. The New England Screw Steamship Company purchased Cromwell’s New York and Portland Steamship Line in early December; the new owners “have arranged to increase the [size of] the line, and two new steamers are understood to be under contract,” reported the New York Times

Under Captain Sherwood, the Potomac slipped its lines at a New York wharf at 4 p.m., Wednesday, January 4, 1865 and steamed for Portland. The ship carried five passengers, including a woman, and 18 crew members.

Dealing with normal winter weather, Sherwood made decent time on this routine run, and by 4:30 a.m., Friday, January 6, he could see the lights flashing from the Cape Elizabeth lighthous- es, nine miles to the northeast.

“Fire! Fire!” sailors shouted. Smoke swirled as flames erupted “in the after-house by the steam chimney,” the Portland Daily Press reported. Sailors deployed the fire hose. Sherwood ordered crewmen “to work the donkey pump,” but sailors venturing into the engine room to start the pump discovered a fast-spreading inferno there.

“A strong breeze” rolling from the southwest fed oxygen to the fire. Sherwood ordered “abandon ship,” and sailors “commenced clearing away the boats.” Crewmen rushing to release the starboard lifeboat found it already “enveloped in flames.”

Fire licked at the port lifeboat, which “would not contain all the passengers and crew,” but sailors released the boat, and the cold sea extinguished the flames. Sherwood sent sailors to “cut away” the ship’s foremast to make a raft.

The furiously burning Potomac poured dark smoke around Sherwood, the passengers, and 10 sailors who climbed into the port lifeboat. The seven other crewmen climbed onto the raft, which vanished in the night. Sailors took to the oars to maneuver the lifeboat away from the burning steamer.

Three eternal hours passed slowly until a schooner reached the lifeboat at 7:30 a.m. and rescued its occupants. The schooner’s skipper, Capt. Willard, steered his ship toward the Potomac, still afloat and burning, its smoke rising into the Friday morning sky off Cape Elizabeth.

Willard hailed three schooners already hovering near the Potomac. No one had seen the raft, but knowing that if intact it would move with wind and tide, “Willard then worked about five miles to windward.”

His crewmen spotted the raft, to which three men still clung. Willard reached the raft at 10 a.m. and sent a boat to rescue the frozen sailors, who (cont. on page 12)

(cont. from page 11) reported that the sea had washed their comrades overboard and drowned them. Willard then brought the Potomac’s surviving crew and passengers to Portland.

The Potomac ironically fared better than the sailors drowned in the cold Atlantic. Aware that the steamer had salvage value, the three schooners’ captains ordered their ships “fastened to the wreck,” by mid-morning more steam than flame. Two tugboats (one government-owned) sallied from Portland Harbor “to go to the assistance of the burning vessel,” but when the tugs reached the Potomac, the schooner captains prevented the tugs “from doing anything” that could affect salvage efforts.

Pulling near the Potomac, the tugs “started their pumps and succeeded in subduing the flames so that the wreck could be towed” to Portland, the PDP reported. Passing Portland Head Light in Cape Elizabeth, the strange smoky parade entered Portland Harbor, and the Revenue Service cutter Dobbin sent a boatload of sailors to help tow the Potomac to the steamboat wharf located at the foot of State Street, and a Portland fire engine arrived and poured water on the wreck until its fire went out. The steamer burned to its waterline.

Investigators determined the fire and the sea had destroyed the steamer’s cargo, ranging from “185 kegs nails” to 100 barrels containing salted beef to leather, oil cloth, “1 iron safe,” and liquor-filled barrels. Merchants as far away as Auburn, Hallowell, and northern New Hampshire lost freight.

As for the Potomac, which was worth approximately $40,000, “nothing but the iron will be saved from it,” the PDP noted. The steamer was insured for $27,000.