Lost at Sea

Deep water, as all Seacoast natives know, is beautiful and deadly. From the first settler’s records to the latest headlines, our oceans and rivers have claimed countless souls. Seacoast annals are filled with lives lost due to sudden squalls, shipwrecks, rogue waves, boating mishaps, drownings, naval battles and sunken submarines.

Memorials to those killed and missing at sea dot the greater Portsmouth coastline. From Newburyport, Massachusetts, to York, Maine, we found 10 somber reminders of the perils of water and the horrors of war.

Our Memorial Day tour begins at “Great Island,” now New Castle, once the heart of Colonial New Hampshire. An island community dependent on fishing and the maritime trade, New Castle men were frequent victims of harsh weather on the ocean.

Just inside the gates of scenic New Castle Commons, off to the left, is a human-sized white obelisk dated 1856. A dozen lost sailors with familiar local names – Amazeen, Trefethen, Yeaton, Gerrish – are listed. Another side of the memorial, the words now faded, is marked with a fearsome biblical passage from the Book of Revelation. It reads, in part, “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.”

When historian Charles Brewster wandered New Castle during the Civil War, this marble memorial stood in the garden of the Congregational Church – “a refreshing green spot, handsomely laid out” with gravel walks and flowerbeds. By 1916, with more names added, the obelisk had been moved to Riverside Cemetery. It was cleaned and moved again to its current location near the Oceanside Cemetery in 1997, within view of three lighthouses. Sadly, a modern plaque notes, this monument lists only a portion of the residents of New Hampshire’s smallest town (comprising only one square mile) who were buried in a watery grave over the last four centuries.

Here are nine more Seacoast memorials, large and small, that recall lives lost at sea or interned in foreign lands.

Fisherman’s Memorial Anchor

An anchor and ship’s wheel located along the boardwalk in Newburyport, Massachusetts, honor the two young crewmen lost aboard the ironically named F/V Lady Luck. The 52-foot steel-hulled dragger sank somewhere off the coast of Portland, Maine, Jan. 31, 2007.

Harborside Park

A new tombstone-shaped monument in Seabrook lists 10 men lost at sea. Eight of them, the crew of the F/V Statesman, died in the infamous “Yankee Gale” that swallowed up at least 20 New England fishing vessels off Prince Edward Island in October 1851.

NH Marine Memorial

Countless thousands of Hampton Beach tourists may never notice the inscription on the sculpture of a woman staring out to sea. It reads: “Breathe soft, Ye winds, Ye waves in silence rest.” Inspired by the loss of a young sailor, the statue was carved from a 24-ton block of New Hampshire granite by artist Alice Cosgrove. Dedicated on Memorial Day in 1957, the sculpture was described as “a Gold Star Mother laying a wreath upon the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.” The names of more than 300 New Hampshire men killed in war “with no resting place” are inscribed on the monument. Created at a cost of $30,000, the “Lady of the Sea” was originally to be located in Rye. In recent years the statue has been vandalized and repaired multiple times.

Spanish Sailors Grave

An 1813 shipwreck at the Isles of Shoals left more than a dozen Spanish sailors dead on Smuttynose Island. In one of her best-known poems, Celia Thaxter imagined the heartache of those women back home who never knew the fate of their lost loved ones. Piled stones and modern signs mark the supposed burial site, but recent archaeological research has been unable to locate the actual graves.

Soldiers & Sailors Memorial

After the bloody Civil War, memorials to the dead and wounded appeared by the hundreds across the nation. This Portsmouth monument at Goodwin Park on Islington Street, assembled from features offered in a catalogue, was dedicated with a large parade on July 4, 1888. Shortened considerably by the loss of its original pedestal, it remains the largest memorial sculpture in the city. The statues, in part, honor men of the USS Kearsarge, the steam and sail-powered Portsmouth-built ship that defeated the Confederate raider Alabama. Made of zinc, a soft, low-cost metal popular in early public sculpture, the Soldiers and Sailors monument deteriorated rapidly. In 2002, the monument and the park were part of a $250,000 renovation.

USS Albacore Memorial Garden

Beyond the looming body of the preserved USS Albacore submarine and its small museum and visitor center visitors will find seven memorial plaques at Albacore Park off Market Street Extension in Portsmouth. The signs tell tales of brave mariners including the 129 crewmen of the USS Thresher, lost with all hands during deep diving tests on April 10, 1963. Two of the memorial messages read: “Still on patrol” and “Sailors, rest your oars.”

USS Sailfish Memorial

The May 23, 1939, sinking of the USS Squalus led to the bittersweet underwater rescue of 33 (of 59 crew members). The salvaged submarine was recommissioned in 1940 as the USS Sailfish. Sold for scrap in 1948, the conning tower of the Sailfish was preserved. It stands today at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as a memorial to the men “on eternal patrol” aboard the Squalus and who served on the Sailfish in World War II.

Sacrifices of War Memorial

The entire 1923 Memorial Bridge linking Portsmouth to Kittery was, technically, a monument to servicemen and women of World War I. Just beyond the new Memorial Bridge in Kittery’s John Paul Jones Memorial Park is a dramatic sculpture by Boston artist Bashka Paeff. Weighing 2,800 pounds, the bronze plate is 11 feet by 8 feet resting on a granite base. The sculpture depicts a pair of life-sized naked men, drowned in the sea. Above them a draped female figure cradles a naked child. Originally called “The Horrors of War,” the memorial was considered by some to be a blatant expression of pacifism. Paeff mollified her critics by adding low-relief military images showing a soldier firing a gun and another throwing a grenade. Still a powerful statement, the memorial reveals, not only the death of sailors and soldiers, but the resulting grief felt by mothers, wives and children.

Fisherman’s Memorial

When Hartley Mason of York, Maine, died, his will required that his house, located on a scenic seaside lot, be torn down. The surrounding land was turned into a public park. Among the features of the Hartley Mason Reservation, established in 1997, is a granite marker dedicated to Capt. Daniel A. Donnell, who died at sea at age 78 while hauling traps. Carved into the memorial are three landmarks used as navigational aids by fishermen and sailors – Boon Island lighthouse, Nubble Light and Mount Agamenticus. The inscription borrowed from a 19th-century maritime hymn reads: “O hear us when we cry to Thee for those in peril on the sea.” The monument is further dedicated “to those who lost their lives at sea and for those who work and love the ocean.”

Copyright 2018 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved. Special thanks to Jim Cerny and the New Castle Historical Society for this topic.