SOUTH PORTLAND (AP) – A fishing boat captain’s offhand comment decades ago kicked off a long search that led to the final resting place of a passenger ship that sank in 1898 in the worst maritime disaster in New England history.

Researcher Arnold Carr, speaking at a two-day symposium, detailed the effort that ended last year when scientists used sonar and video cameras mounted on an undersea robot to confirm the wreckage of the steamship Portland.

The ship was sailing from Boston to Portland when it went down off Massachusetts in a fierce November gale. None of the 192 passengers and crew members survived.

Carr said he got interested in the wreck as a diver in the 1970s when he went out into waters off Provincetown, Mass., to help a fisherman retrieve a lost net.

Once the job was completed, Carr went into the wheelhouse to talk with the captain. The captain pointed to a chart, Carr said, and mentioned, “Over here, that’s where the Portland is.”

“I tried to be as casual as possible,” Carr recalled, to much laughter from the symposium audience at Southern Maine Community College.

Carr, of American Underwater Search & Survey Ltd. in Cataumet, Mass., and his colleague John Fish later shared the location with federal scientists, who produced the first dramatic images of the 281-foot steamship on the ocean floor.

The conference, “After the Storm,” was sponsored by the Portland Harbor Museum and the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, where the wreck of the Portland is located.

Carr described how his team, using sidescan sonar, methodically explored several areas rumored to be the location of the wreck, including the site mentioned by the fisherman. They reviewed 120 copies of newspapers, and pored over historical records.

Carr and his colleagues began wondering if they could use currents and principles of oceanography to connect the location of debris with the wreck site. They enlisted the help of a scientist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who used information from the weather bureau and other sources to determine the drift track and project the path of debris as far back as 10 hours.

Carr said he knew they had probably found the Portland when he saw the size and length of the wreck, as well as some of its structure.

Years later, federal scientists used high-tech equipment to measure the dimensions of the wreck more precisely, and what they found matched the Portland. They announced the discovery in August 2002.

The exact location of the wreck has not been publicly disclosed, for fear it would be plundered.

Scientists returned to the Portland in September this year to do the first photographic and acoustic surveys of the steamship. They’ll use the information they gathered to monitor the condition of the Portland and develop a plan to protect the site.

Also on the conference agenda was a program on the meteorology behind the fierce storm and whether the captain of the Portland was to blame for its sinking, as well as a panel discussion on the human cost of the storm.

AP-ES-11-08-03 1628EST

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