This latter, who had published his History of the District of Maine the year before, would end his political career as Governor of Massachusetts. Thorlo retired from the sea around 1798, then in his sixties, and went into the shipping business at Long Wharf. He died in 1805 at the age of sixty-seven.
Holder of Certificate Number Three was Captain Lemuel Moody, born in what was then the Town of Falmouth in 1767. At age thirteen he enlisted in George Washington’s Continental Navy as a water boy under Joseph Pride, and by the 1 790s commanded his own vessel, the Betsy. Like Asa Clapp, he was captured during the "quasi-war," but in his case by the French. Moody "swallowed the anchor" after his release and came ashore to head the Portland Monument Association which floated Portland’s first stock offering—at a hefty $50 per share—to build the sixty-five-foot high Portland Observatory on Munjoy Hill in 1807, at the eastern end of The Neck. From the Observatory Captain Moody kept track of shipping through a long brass telescope and devised a system of signal flags to alert shipowners of their incoming vessels or summon aid to vessels in distress. Moody manned the Observatory until the day before his death in 1846.
Moody was bustling early-nineteenth-century Portland personified. Apart from running the Observatory, which was in use for over a century, though now in a perilous state of disrepair due to neglect, he built a dance hail and bowling alley on the grounds, taught navigation, and in 1825 produced a remarkably accurate chart of Casco Bay, which he published and offered for sale. When he died, on the day of his funeral the flags of all shipping in the harbor "were displayed at half-mast, in respect to his memory." He served as Treasurer of the Society from 1837 to 1846, of which more later.
Though not a founding member, Captain Enoch (or Enock) Preble was admitted in December 1796. His older brother was Commodore Edward Preble of the United States Navy, the naval hero for whom Fort Preble was named in 1808. Enoch was in his early thirties when he became a member and lived to be nearly eighty. His business activities aside, he was enthusiastically civic-minded. In the eighteen thirties he was Portland’s City Marshall, Health Officer and Constable, all simultaneously. He became President of the Portland Marine Society in 1810 and held that post, with a few interruptions, until 1841, the year before his death.
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