Fenians and Fire

1866

When the Pathfinder sailed again, it was for Havre, the French port at the mouth of the Seine and the seaward door to Paris. She carried 938 bales of cotton, a cargo that spoke plainly of the trade trying to mend itself after the war. For four years cotton had been blockaded, seized, speculated upon, and fought over. Now it was moving again, downriver to New Orleans and across the Atlantic to the mills and markets of Europe.^⁠[1] She sailed in good time arriving there on the 20th of February and after only a week in port at Havre had sailed for Cardiff where she would take on coal for Cuba.

At the end of June she was at the Port of New York discharging her cargo of sugar.

The Irish were thick along our coast—quarrymen, lime-burners, sailors, longshoremen—men who had come over during the famine,^⁠[2] finding steady work in the quarries and along the wharves. When the war broke out they enlisted at once and fought as hard as any men in Lincoln’s armies.^⁠[3] They earned their citizenship in blood and no one who saw those regiments return could deny it. Yet for all the loyalty they gave this country, their hearts still beat for the old one. The hunger back home had eased, but the English stranglehold had not—their mothers and sisters filled the linen factories of Belfast, or whole families in coal mines.

And so, the Irish veterans took matters into their own hands. The Fenian Brotherhood^⁠[4] organized years earlier among the canal workers in New York—men who swung picks by day and talked of Ireland’s freedom by night—and by ’66 it had spread up and down our coast. In our own towns they drilled in the commons and open fields, marching in step with their army rifles slung over their shoulders, preparing for a fight they meant to carry north into Canada and, in their minds, straight through to Dublin. It was a strange thing to witness—men fresh from one war steadying themselves for another that no nation had asked for and few wished to see—but their fervor was real, and it had deep, old roots.

More than one Irish veteran put it plainly to me over a pint: they had crossed the oceans to build canals and railroads, done their part to preserve the Union and free the enslaved, and now their thoughts turned homeward. ‘If we can fight for other men’s liberty,’ they’d say, ‘why not fight for our own blood in Ireland?’ And who was I to argue? They still had kin in cottages a quarter-size of our hay barns, scraping by under English occupation and law. They had done their part for the Union and meant to do the same for Ireland, especially when Washington turned a deaf ear—no politician wanting to poke Britain in the eye after four years of our own bloodletting.

Their first real try at it came that spring, up near Eastport. Word traveled along the coast faster than the mail—Irish veterans gathering by the hundreds, slipping rifles into boats, meaning to cross the channel and strike the British at New Brunswick’s Campobello Island. You could feel the tension even in our harbors. Some of the quarry hands had brothers or cousins among them, and they kept one ear cocked for news while they swung their hammers.

Then United States gunboats steamed into Passamaquoddy Bay—among them the great ironclad Miantonomoh—and put a stop to it, seizing the munitions and warning the men back from the water. No shots were fired, but for a day or two it felt as though Maine might be pulled straight into another war with Britain. After that, the Fenians kept their plans quieter, but the fire in them burned just the same.

On July 4th, flames swept through Portland, leaving the city in ruins. Ten thousand people were driven from their homes, the wharves were charred to their pilings and the great warehouses along Commercial Street burned to their stone foundations. Folks said a single firecracker had set the shavings at a waterfront boatyard alight; no one could name the hand that lit it but everyone knew a holiday spark had burned the city to the stones.^⁠[5]

In July, while the Pathfinder was making her way from New York to Boston,^⁠[6]  Mercy gave birth to another daughter. We named her Alta Pease Graves. Whatever worry the year carried in its newspapers and shipping lists, a baby in the house asked for softer speech.

The fire at Portland had been a hundred miles from our county, yet its reach was long: every quarry and kiln in our region was put to full stride, turning out granite blocks and limestone needed to rebuild a city. Men who had cut spars or hauled hay the year before now found themselves breaking rock, driving teams, or loading stone-sloops bound for Portland. We could feel the heaviness of that summer—the mix of sorrow for a major Maine city’s losses and the restless push of work that always follows destruction. It was one more reminder that the fortunes of one harbor—good or bad—could shake the whole coast.

Not long after the fire, talk turned to a different kind of marvel. That summer they finally laid the transatlantic cable for good, fastening Europe to America with a wire no thicker than a man’s thumb. Messages that had once taken weeks by ship now flew under the ocean in minutes. It was a strange feeling to stand on the shore among quarries, hayfields, and tidal mud—and know the world had been cinched tighter with a single stroke of science. Storms, wars, fires, rebellions—everything seemed to move faster after that.

The Pathfinder arrived at the harbor on August 10^th, with Captain Stahl as her new master. She took on 4,000 barrels of lime and was soon spoken of in the Gulf. Once a vessel had worked past the Dry Tortugas islands—the last ragged edge before the Gulf opened wide and vessels bound for the Southern States turned North West, and she was in New Orleans the middle of September.^⁠[7]

The fair, the harvest parties came and went. Thee first edge of the changing season had reached us with no intention of leaving for the next five months, but we were well prepared. The fields and Mercy’s garden beds were resting, our baby thriving and the house happy if noisy. I found a quiet corner to scan the shipping news columns glad to see that the Pathfinder had made Boston the first day of November.^⁠[8]   

The Pathfinder sailed home before the month was out taking on a full cargo of lime and potatoes and sailed again on the ninth of December, steady as she’d ever been.^⁠[9] She had been a prize, noted for her speed and more profitable than all the ships I had a hand in building. For more than ten years, through the eyes of shipping news, an atlas and yellowed maps she had seen me through parts of the world I would likely never see.

Then the word came north. Disaster.

When the news made the shipping list it was brief enough to fit in a few lines.

The Pathfinder, Captain Stahl, bound from Rockland to New Orleans with lime aboard, had been destroyed by fire. Part of her cargo had been saved. She was named by tonnage, place, and year of building, as if that were enough to sum up a life: 420 tons, built in Thomaston in 1854.^⁠[10] 

More particulars followed. She had been driven eastward by severe gales, and Captain Stahl had taken no observation that day. Near Bermuda, he made a light, but believing himself at least a hundred miles west of the islands, he thought it might be another vessel in distress and kept his course. Instead of a ship, the Pathfinder struck the reef westward of North Rock.

There was the whole misery of it. A light seen in bad weather. A position misjudged. A good ship, after all her years of crossing oceans, brought hard upon the rocks because the sea had shifted her under a man’s feet and hidden the truth from him.

Assistance reached her the next morning. Some of her cargo and materials were saved and carried into St. George’s on the isle of Bermuda. The steam tug Reliance tried to tow her off, but the rocks held her fast. Captain Stahl and the crew abandoned her, wisely, the papers said. Soon after, she took fire and was consumed^⁠[11].

Consumed. That was the word that caught in me.

A man may tell himself a vessel is only timber, copper, iron, canvas, rope, and account books. But I had followed that bark too long to believe it. She had been new when my own hopes were still new. She had carried Maine lime and potatoes, Gulf cotton, Baltic cargoes, sugar, coal, guano, fruit, and whatever else the world had to share. She had crossed warm seas and cold, known strange harbors, foul holds, fair winds, and bad captains’ weather. She had gone farther than I ever would, and still she had belonged in some part to South Thomaston.

1867

Even her ending would not end cleanly. In January we learned that the Italian barque Anastasin had put into Liverpool, Nova Scotia, in distress, with the crew of the wrecked Pathfinder aboard.^⁠[12] Those men had escaped the reef and the fire only to be carried into fresh trouble. Later still, the British Katie, bound from Liverpool, Nova Scotia, to Boston, landed six of them at Gloucester, from where they were to make their way home to Rockland.^⁠[13]

That was the mercy in the story. The men reached firm ground.

In February, the last notice was colder still. The wreck of the Pathfinder had been sold in Bermuda on the twenty-sixth of December for twenty-five pounds.^⁠[14]  Twenty-five pounds for what remained of her. After all those years, all those voyages, all those risks taken and survived, that was the figure set down beside her name.

I read it and had no answer for it. There are losses a man can enter in a ledger, and there are losses that refuse the column. The Pathfinder had earned her keep many times over. She had done what we asked of her and more. But when I thought of her at the last, I did not think first of profit. I thought of her burning on Bermuda’s North reef, after having crossed so much water, as if the sea itself could not quite finish her and had called in fire to do the work.

Ayuh, she was a good ship.

NOTES

¹ The Daily Star (New Orleans), January 1, 1866: In Port. Barks. Pathfinder, Am (American), Ellems 25 3d dist.;Times Picayune, January 5, 1866: Advertisement: FOR HAVRE-The first-class American bark PATHFINDER, Ellems, master having most of her cargo engaged, will meet with dispatch. For remainder of freight apply to W. R. Buddendorff; January 9th, Ibid.;Portland Press Herald, January 10, 1866: New Orleans—Advertised, 30th, barque Pathfinder, Ellems, for Havre; New Orleans Crescent, January 15, 1866: Exports. (Jan 13) HAVRE—Bark Pathfinder—938 bales cotton; Portland Daily Press, January 24, 1866: New Orleans—Cld 13th, Pathfinder, Ellems, Havre; Portland Daily Press, March 12, 1866: Ar at Havre 20th ult (Feb), barque Pathfinder, Ellems, New Orleans

² The Irish Great Famine (1845–1852), also called the Great Hunger, was caused by repeated failures of the potato crop due to the plant disease Phytophthora infestans. By the mid-nineteenth century much of Ireland’s rural population depended almost entirely on potatoes for subsistence. A laboring man might consume eight to fourteen pounds of potatoes in a day, often with little more than buttermilk to accompany them. This reliance developed because most Irish farmers were tenants under British landholding systems that divided land into increasingly small plots; potatoes were one of the few crops capable of producing enough calories on such limited ground to sustain a family. When the blight destroyed successive harvests, starvation and disease followed. Approximately one million people died and another one to two million emigrated, many settling in northeastern American port towns where labor was available. Along the Maine coast they found work in lime quarries, shipyards, railroads, and harbor trades.

³ Large numbers of Irish immigrants served in the Union Army during the Civil War. An estimated 150,000 soldiers of Irish birth fought for the Union, including units such as the famed Irish Brigade. Maine regiments also included many Irish-born laborers from the state’s quarry and shipping communities.

⁴ The Fenian Brotherhood was an Irish nationalist organization founded in the United States in 1858. Composed largely of Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, its members sought to pressure Britain by launching attacks on British North America (Canada) in hopes of securing independence for Ireland.

⁵ The Great Portland Fire of 1866 was widely attributed to Independence Day fireworks landing in a Commercial Street boatyard, though no single spark was ever officially identified. It was the largest fire to burn a city until the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

⁶ Portland Press Herald, June 12, 1866: At Nuevitas 30th ult (May), barque Pathfinder, for New York ldg. (loading); Portland Daily Press, June 30, 1866: New York—Ar 28th, Pathfinder, Ellems, Nuevitas; New York Times, July 13, 1866: New York ... July 12, Cleared. Bark Pathfinder, Ellems, Boston

⁷ Portland Press Herald August 18, 1866: ROCKLAND—Ar 10th, barque Pathfinder, Stahl, New Orleans; September 13, 1866: SPOKEN. Sept 4, 50 miles North of Tortugas, was seen barque Pathfinder, steering NW; The New Orleans Crescent, September 14, 1866: At Quarantine. Bark Pathfinder, Stahl, from Rockland, Me. to Thorndyke & Norton—cargo 4000 bbls lime;“At Quarantine” referred to the quarantine station below New Orleans, not necessarily to sickness aboard the vessel. Incoming ships from sea could pause there for inspection before proceeding upriver; Portland Press Herald, September 21, 1866: New Orleans—Below 13th, coming up, barque Pathfinder, Stahl, from Rockland; September 22, 1866: New Orleans—Ar 14th, bark Pathfinder, Stahl, Rockland; October 9, 1866: NEW ORLEANS—Cld 1st, barque Pathfinder, Stahl, Boston, bulk of cargo engaged. Commercial Bulletin, Price-Current and Shipping List, October 3, 1866: Cleared. October 1. Bark Pathfinder, Stahl, for Boston by Thorndike & Newton. Cargo 761 bales cotton 278 bbls flour 181 bbls horse shoes 55 pkgs glass; Portland Press Herald, October 20, 1866: NEW ORLEANS—Towed to sea 2nd inst, Pathfinder

⁸ Portland Press Herald, November 1, 1866: PORT OF BOSTON. Below, barque Pathfinder from New Orleans: at anchor in the roads; Portland Daily Press,  November 2, 1866: Boston—Ar 1st, Pathfinder, Stahl, New Orleans]

⁹ Portland Press Herald, December 14, 1866: ROCKLAND—Sld 9th, barque Pathfinder, Stahl, New Orleans

¹⁰ Portland Daily Press, December 27, 1866: The bark Pathfinder, Capt. Stahl, from Rockland, Me. bound to this port, with a cargo of lime, was entirely destroyed by fire. Part of her cargo was saved. The P was 420 tons, was built in Thomaston, Me, in 1854]

¹¹ Portland Press Herald, December 29, 1866: Bark Pathfinder, Stahl, of and from Rockland for New Orleans, (before reported,) with a cargo of potatoes and lime, ran on the reef to the westward of the North Rock on Bermuda, the 13th ult. The captain states that he made the light a short time before she struck, but judging himself to be at least 100 miles west of the Bermudas, and imagining the light seen to be that of a vessel in distress, he continued his course, and ran upon the reef, as before stated. He had no observation on that day, and having encountered severe gales, had been driven to the eastward of his course. Assistance reached the vessel early on the following morning, when a portion of her cargo and materials were saved and taken to St. George. The steam tug Reliance made an effort to tow the vessel off the rocks, but without success, and the captain and crew very wisely abandoned her, and shortly after she took fire and was soon consumed.

¹² Portland Daily Press, January 22, 1867: Italian barque Anastasin put into Liverpool, NS on the 14th inst, in distress. She has the crew of the barque Pathfinder, wrecked at Bermuda

¹³ Rockland Gazette, February 15, 1867: The British Katie arrived at this port yesterday, on her way from Liverpool, N.S., to Boston, and landed six men, who were part of the crew of a bark wrecked at Bermuda, and were forwarded to Liverpool, and from thence furnished a passage on board the Katie. Their destination was Rockland, Me. The above men belonged to the bark Pathfinder, wrecked at Bermuda.

¹⁴ Portland Daily Press, February 7, 1867