Bangor had a bustling port a century ago, something hard to imagine today walking along its bare expanse of waterfront. Shipping reports appeared nearly daily in the newspapers and reporters had to know the difference between a bark and a barkentine.

Among the typical arrivals during the first week of October 1903 was the schooner Sedgwick from Philadelphia, with coal for the Bangor Gas Light Co. A typical departure was the Scotia of Bridgeport, Nova Scotia, with ice in its hold and a deckload of lumber. Occasionally, a foreign carrier like the Norwegian steamer Salerno came up the river. It departed loaded with spool bars manufactured locally, heading for Glasgow via Halifax.

But most of the traffic was domestic or Canadian, and coastal. So the arrival in the fall of 1903 of 16 shipwrecked French fishermen on a large Italian barkentine created quite a stir.

On Sept 14, on the southern tip of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, the two-masted schooner Vengeur was buffeted about in a terrible storm and sprung a leak. The pumps were overwhelmed by daybreak.

Had the Ero, a 260-foot, four-masted affair owned in Genoa, Italy, not spotted the smaller craft’s flag at half-mast, things would not have gone well for the French fishermen. After they rowed away from their foundering vessel in dories, the Ero made the difficult rescue late in the afternoon.

Then the Vengeur was set afire so it would not endanger other shipping. The men had lost everything except the clothes on their backs and “a few boxes of biscuit,” according to a newspaper story.

The Frenchmen hailed from mainland France as well as from Saint Pierre and Miquelon, French-owned islands off the coast of Newfoundland, where the Vengeur had its homeport.

They cut a picturesque swath to the newspaper reporter for the Bangor Daily Commercial who watched them marching down Main Street one morning wearing tam-o’-shanter-like hats, blue blouses and large full trousers. Several wore wooden shoes or sabots, while others wore leather boots, “which came above the knees and were as stiff as an inch plank, the soles being studded with big brass nails.”

The Italian ship that had rescued them also attracted attention. A barkentine converted from a British steamer made of iron, she was “a queer-looking craft,” said the reporter, it sitting high in the water with a short spike bowsprit. She would be in Bangor for several weeks loading shooks, used for making barrels or boxes, for some faraway port.

After Dr. G. M. Woodcock, port physician, declared the newcomers healthy, Rowland W. Stewart, the Ero’s broker, had to figure out what to do with them. The result was a comedy of bureaucratic confusion.

First, Stewart wired the French consul in Boston, who referred him to the consul in New York. After discovering there was a French consul in Portland, Stewart applied to him for help and was sent to another consul in Saint John, New Brunswick.

On Oct. 3, the men boarded the City of Rockland on their way to Boston and New York, where they would be heading for France – whether to Europe or to the islands off the coast of Canada was unclear in the newspaper report.

A week or so later, five of the Italian seamen deserted the Ero in search of better paying jobs, leaving their captain with only half his crew.

It “should not be hard to find them as none of them speaks English and they had but a dollar apiece,” the reporter for the Bangor Daily Commercial remarked.

Wayne Reilly writes a history column each Monday in the Style section. During his 28 years at the Bangor Daily News, he worked as a reporter, editorial page writer and assignment editor. He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net