Fortunately, Articles X, XI and XII of the Society’s ByLaws specified that a member who had met with any of the disasters outlined above: "shipwreck, capture, or other misfortune," might "have his monthly assessment remitted." Furthermore, relief could be granted to "indigent members or widows," and funeral expenses paid if need be. At the time of Portland’s 250th Anniversary in 1882, it was estimated that in the not quite ninety years of the Society’s existence, it had disbursed some thirty-two thousand dollars to "worthy men who have brought to our shores the cargoes which have enriched others, while in their declining years the shadow of need was crossing their path." The essayist added that "to many a widow and to the fatherless children has [the Society’s] bounty been like an angel from heaven." This, then, is the background of the Portland Marine Society’s early period. We shall examine several of its more prominent members later.
The setting from which the Society arose had several painful moments over the years. In 1796 Portland was still more a hamlet than a city, with a 1790 population of just over two thousand and an 1800 population of about thirty-six hundred. In the next decade, this "boom town" would nearly double in size. Although 1632 is the official date for its founding, based on John Winter’s arrival at Richmond Island, just south of present-day Portland, in 1623 John Christopher Levett had established an apparently short-lived settlement on "an island lyeing before Casco River...," though there is still debate over just where the island was. Levett returned to England, leaving a small garrison at his stone house. But Levett never returned, and the fate of his garrison remains a mystery. At this early stage relations with Casco Bay’s aboriginal inhabitants were still apparently good.
It is difficult to say just when the history of the Port of Portland began Credit for the first Portland more lasting area settlement must probably g to a rascal named Walter Bagnall, who set up a trading post on Richmon Island in Scarborough in 1628. Bagnall, like his friend, Thomas Mortor had been banished from the Plymouth Colony by Puritans who had had enough of shady dealing and carousing, particularly when it involved dealing with New England’s Native Americans, with whom good relations were critical for maintaining the new colony’s fragile coastal foothold. Evidently Bagnall was too much for Casco Bay’s Abnakis as well. "Great Walt," as he was called, apparently was a very imposing man physically, but one night in 1631 his unwilling neighbors and clients murdered him and disappeared into the forest with his trade goods as his building went up in flames.
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