The Portland Gale Strikes New England

The fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts had suffered countless storms in its long history, but the gale of November 1898 was unlike anything in living memory. Two storm systems merged off the Virginia coast and drove northward, striking New England on the night of November 26 with hurricane-force winds and blizzard conditions. Harbor piers were destroyed, and the coastline from Maine to Cape Cod was battered for thirty hours.

The storm takes its name from the steamship Portland, which departed Boston’s India Wharf at seven that evening despite weather warnings. She was last sighted near Thacher’s Island off Cape Ann, not far from Gloucester, heading into the storm. She never arrived. Her wreck was found in 2002 on the bottom of Stellwagen Bank, just off the Gloucester coast. No one survived, and the passenger manifest went down with the ship: estimates place the dead between 192 and 245 souls. Across New England, 141 vessels were lost and 456 people died.

Gloucester poet Kitty Parsons recorded the catastrophe in verse in her 1946 collection Gloucester Sea Ballads. Her poem The Portland Gale memorializes a storm that struck the town’s fishing fleet at its heart.