Before looking into some of the early history of the Society—and some of its more colorful members—it is worth putting the Portland Marine Society into two contexts, those of the rise of that unique institution, the American marine society of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the Portland waterfront from which this particular society arose.
The oldest American marine society is Boston’s. Initially founded in 1742 as The Fellowship Club, primarily for charitable purposes, it was incorporated as the Boston Marine Society when it received its charter from the state in 1754. It was followed by the Salem Marine Society in 1766, New York in 1769, Newburyport in 1772, Portland in 1796, and Portsmouth in 1808. Newburyport divided its funds among its surviving members and surrendered its charter in 1920. Portsmouth, which had ceased operations in 1905, has been revived to publish books on local maritime history, an ongoing project which began in 1982.
The Marine Society was the brainchild of one Jonas Hanway (1712-1786), a bachelor eccentric who among his other exploits, introduced the now-ubiquitous umbrella to England. Hanway saw the Marine Society as a means of training London’s street urchins—who he saw, probably correctly, as headed for criminal careers—as seamen for the Royal Navy instead. As the British poet-historian John Masefield described it in his Sea Life in Nelson’s Time, once these youngsters had received some basic training aboard a training ship in the River Thames, they were sent to sea aboard men-of-war, paid "L7 or 8 a year, which kept them in clothing till they were strong enough to rank as seamen." It was a brutal life, not that the lot of the average sailor was all that much better. "These wretched creatures lived the lives of dogs....Those who survived the brutality of their shipmates, and failed to desert from the service, in time became ordinary seamen, drawing 25s. a month."
The dual purpose of these societies reflects the uncertainties of the age which produced them. Accustomed as we are today to satellite-assisted navigation and accurate charts and coast pilots, it is nearly inconceivable how little the mariners of circa 1800 had in the way of accurate information and how few soundings there were on the charts. For example, British captain and cartographer Cyprian Southack had partially charted Boston Harbor in the late seventeenth century, but the pioneering series of charts of the Atlantic coast, The Atlantic Neptune, now highly prized more for their decorative value than accuracy, did not begin until about 1777.
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