Wreck of Albert L. Butler, 1898. [Posted by Ben Kettlewell / Facebook / Provincetown Diaspora, 11 May 2022]
Updated on 26 August 2026 | Among the 400 victims of the breathtaking Portland Gale of 1898 were E. H. Rothoff and Charles Hoflander, two sailors aboard the foundering Albert L. Butler whose panic doomed them just as they were about to be rescued by the crew of the Peaked Hill Bars Life-Saving Station.
Butler was a 344-ton, 120-foot-long, three-masted schooner out of Boston, built in Thomaston, Me., in 1869. Under the command of Capt. Frank A. Leland, it was bound in November 1898 from Jamaica to Boston with a load of logwood, a flowering tree that was a valued source of fabric dye. A crew of seven and a single passenger, Samuel Wedder, were aboard.
As the gale picked up force on the evening of Saturday, 26 November, Butler was about 40 miles east-southeast of Highland Light. Just after midnight, Leland ordered the sails shortened, to lessen the chance they’d be ripped to shreds by the wind. For a time, the ship was in a dead drift northward. In the early light of Sunday morning, 27 November, with Butler‘s sails furled, Leland attempted to turn the bow away from the wind. The historian Edward Rowe Snow picks up the tale (referring to Butler with female pronouns):
“The gigantic waves were running so high that she had no sooner got around than a tremendous sea boarded her, scattered the deck load, drove portions of it through the sails, carried away booms and gaffs, smashed in doors and hatches, and left her a helpless hulk … For nearly three hours the vessel drifted, little by little, into shoaler water, until at about 10 a.m. the shore breakers were under her forefoot, and she swung broadside high onto the beach.”1
Had no one on shore witnessed Butler‘s catastrophic landing, all eight souls would almost certainly have died. But surfmen of the United States Life-Saving Service (forerunner of the Coast Guard) patrolled the Back Shore daily, in four watches from sunset to sunrise. At the start of a watch, every life-saving station sent two men out, on foot patrol, in opposite directions. Each was to meet a corresponding patrolman from the next station along, at a small hut placed at a halfway point between the stations. They exchanged tags to prove that they’d completed their rounds and returned to base.
On Sunday morning, Surfman B. F. Henderson of Peaked Hill Bars and Surfman Benjamin Kelley of High Head had just met at the halfway house between their stations. “They could see nothing but the white crests of the nearest breakers,” Snow wrote, “and each turned toward his own station, proceeding only a few steps when a schooner broke through the thick clouds of sleet and spray, and tumbled upon the shore.”2
Peaked Hill Bars had jurisdiction over the stretch of beach onto which Butler crashed. Surfman Henderson managed to cover the distance back to his station in 30 minutes and soon a horse-drawn carriage arrived on the scene, with a complement of coast guards, led by Capt. William W. Cook. Their aim was to rescue whom they could by breeches buoy — essentially a life preserver fitted out with two short trouser legs. The stranded sailor would step into the breeches and be carried over the roaring surf between ship and shore suspended from a heavy hawser line. A thinner rope called a whip line, attached to a pulley fastened to a mast aboard the ship, was used to pull the buoy forward. The ropes were fired out to the ship by a small cannon called a Lyle gun.
Nothing went right that morning. The surfman successfully shot out a line, but the crew didn’t respond in any way. A second shot brought a whip line out to Butler. Rather than wait for the heavy-duty hawser, one (understandably) desperate seaman decided to cross on the whip line. It sagged badly, and at times sank into the boiling surf, but thanks to the rapid hauling by the surfmen, the sailor made it to the beach.
The difference between hawser and whip line is evident in The Life Line, by Winslow Homer (1884). Oil on canvas, 28⅝ by 44¾ inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The George W. Elkins Collection, 1924. Accession number E1924-4-15.
That improbable success, combined with the terrifying collapse of the mizzenmast, inspired Rothoff and Hoflander to try crossing on the whip line, instead of waiting to set up the breeches buoy properly with a sturdy hawser. It was a fatal mistake. “I had hold of the whip line and could feel when the sailors lost their grasp,” Captain Cook recalled. “They were washed off, and that is the last we know of them.”3 Wedder, the Jamaican passenger, climbed up into the rigging and fell as the schooner plunged, “beyond any help either from the vessel or the land,” Snow wrote.
Captain Leland’s eulogy for Rothoff and Hoflander was simultaneously captious and compassionate: “If they had worked the life-saving lines properly, they would doubtless have been saved. They were all used up and badly scared, hardly in a condition to do things in an orderly and sensible way.” As to the crew of Peaked Hill Bars, the captain said:
“They did all in their power to save the crew of the schooner. They saved the whole of us as far as I can see. After getting some off the vessel, they were the means of rescuing the rest of us from death by cold and exposure. No man living could have found his way around there.”4
1 “Sea and Shore Gleanings; Wreck of ‘Albert L. Butler’ (Part I),” by Edward Howe Snow, The [Quincy] Patriot Ledger, 18 December 1967, Page 41.
2 “Sea and Shore Gleanings; Wreck of ‘Albert L. Butler’ (Part I),” by Edward Howe Snow, The [Quincy] Patriot Ledger, 18 December 1967, Page 41.
3 “‘Albert L. Butler,'” by Edward Howe Snow, The [Quincy] Patriot Ledger, 3 January 1968, Page 33.
4 “Sea and Shore Gleanings; Wreck of ‘Albert L. Butler’ (Part II),” by Edward Howe Snow, The [Quincy] Patriot Ledger, 19 December 1967, Page 29.