STEAMBOAT LORE OF THE PENOBSCOT by John M. Richardson, privately republished by Sally Richardson Rice, Stonington, 2001, 208 pages, $20.

For a couple of real treats, turn to the dramatic tales of the wreck of the Portland and the loss of the Pentagoet. Both steamers were lost on the same day in the November hurricane of 1898. It claimed more than 100 ships along the coast from New York to Maine, but the disaster to the Portland overshadowed all the rest. The hurricane is still remembered as “the Portland storm.”

A strange yellow light spread across the sky and the wind began picking up on the afternoon of Nov. 26, as the Portland lay at Boston’s India Wharf, taking on freight for an overnight run to Portland. She was a wooden paddle-wheel steamer 280 feet long, regarded as one of the finest vessels of her kind. Her shallow, 10-foot-8-inch draft and rather light construction fitted her to navigate the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers as well as her Portland-Boston service of the Portland Steam Packet Co.

Many Maine people who had been spending Thanksgiving in the Boston area began coming aboard.

As the weather thickened, the company’s general manager telephoned from Boston and left a message for the Portland’s new captain, Hollis H. Blanchard. The instructions were to hold the Portland at the pier until at least 9 p.m. and, if the weather was threatening, not to start.

Whether the captain got the message or not is unclear. The fact is that he cast off at 7 p.m. and steamed down the harbor to the open sea. Several other ships, racing for shelter from the approaching storm, watched for the Portland to turn back, but she kept right on. At 9:30 p.m., as snow was falling and the wind was rising, the Bucksport schooner Maude S., running for Gloucester, spotted “the dim white form of the Portland emerging from the snowy darkness.”

After another two hours, the wind and snow had increased and the temperature had dropped. A wind gauge on Cape Cod registered 90 mph before the blast carried it away. Three other schooners saw the Portland, or thought they saw her, through the chaotic murk.

The last of these, the Edgar Randall, was 14 miles southeast of Eastern Point, Gloucester, at 11:45 p.m. It reported seeing a large vessel without lights and with a badly damaged superstructure that seemed to be heading west toward Gloucester.

From then on, all has been conjecture. All night long, the Portland must have battled the big rollers and the mighty gale.

“To landsmen in their berths,” related Thomas Harrison Eames in “Steamboat Lore,” “the experience must have been terrifying – the unfamiliar sounds of a wooden ship in a heavy seaway, timbers groaning under unusual strains and stresses, creaking and snapping as the ship worked and twisted, the shivering blows of the huge seas as they crashed up under the guards or crashed down on the deck, and now and then the wrenching screech of wood and metal as some article of equipment was torn away by their force.”

Early Sunday morning, during a brief lull in the storm, the schooner Ruth M. Martin got a glimpse of both the Portland and the Pentagoet a few miles off the tip of Cape Cod. The weather closed in again and the storm worsened. The Portland evidently broke up and sank with all her passengers and crew, a total of 176 persons. Bodies and wreckage washed up along the Cape Cod shore.

The Pentagoet vanished, and no wreckage was ever found. The little known wooden-hulled steamer, an elderly 34 years old at the time, had been bound from New York to Rockland and Eastport with a crew of 16 including a Rockland master and a Christmas cargo largely consigned to Rockland merchants.

The owners and relatives of the crew kept hoping for a month that the Pentagoet would show up in some distant port like, say, Bermuda. She carried two sails and provisions that could have lasted many months. But the owners eventually concluded that she was pooped by a huge sea and plunged almost intact to the bottom.

Those are only two of the yarns to be found in this reprint of “Steamboat Lore of The Penobscot,” a book first published 60 years ago. In it, you will find pictures of 184 steamers that plied the waters of northern Maine, as well as their lengths, beams and drafts and their numerous collisions, groundings, fires and often sinkings.

It was a great era, lasting a century and ending with World War II, when the government commandeered many of the steamers, when the automobile craze caught on, and when new bridges and highways made land travel easier, if not as much fun and adventure as taking a steamer.