In 1783, the inhabitants of the three-mile-long Neck petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for permission to separate from more rural Falmouth and to become a separate town, and on the fourth of July 1786, the Town of Portland officially came into being, with a population of nearly two thousand. Over the next two decades Portland’s population grew rapidly, to just over seven thousand by the census of 1810. Portland’s maritime commerce grew rapidly as well, though the early figures are a bit dubious, as with William Willis’s assertion that "in 1787 there was not a ship owned in town." However, two years later there were about five thousand tons owned out of Portland, and a year later that had increased to just over eleven thousand, nearly all of it register tonnage. The Caribbean trade, particularly exports of lumber, barrel staves and fish and imports of molasses, was booming, though there was a brisk coasting trade with Boston.
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on waterfront Eore Street in 1807, within sight and smell of the "black wharves and the slips," and later recalled childhood memories of "Spanish sailors with bearded lips," as he wrote in My Lost Youth. Maine novelist Elijah Kellogg wrote of "lively times" on Portland’s waterfront on a January morning, with "sleds growling; surveyors running like madmen, a shingle in one hand and a rule-staff in the other; cattle white with frost, and their nostrils hung with icicles; teamsters swearing and hallooing." The bulk of the vessels in and out of Portland were small. For example, in 1793, out of a total Portland custom house tonnage of just over eleven thousand tons, there were thirteen ships, twenty-four brigs, twenty-three schooners and twenty sloops. These tied up at Union Wharf, built in 1793-1795 and Long Wharf, begun in 1793. And again, among the names of the original Union Wharf proprietors are found those of founders or early members of the Portland Marine Society, including John Thorlo, James Deering and Daniel Tucker.
Yet one incident points up the hazards these entrepreneurs and shipmasters faced. Captain Asa Clapp, not a founding but an early (1803) member of the Society, was born in Massachusetts in 1762. Shortly after France declared war on England in 1793, though the United States was neutral in the conflict, both the Royal Navy and assorted French privateers began to prey on American flag vessels on both the European and Caribbean routes.
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