Schooner Annie Perry in Provincetown Harbor. [Lisa King Collection]
Updated on 8 September 2026 | By Lisa King and David W. Dunlap | Until 9/11, most Americans probably comforted themselves with the mistaken notion that foreign wars would never physically touch the continental United States. The people of Cape Cod knew better. World War I came to them on Sunday morning, 21 July 1918, when the German submarine S.M. U-156 opened fire on a tow of four barges, hitting the Orleans shoreline as it did.
“No moving picture manager could have staged a sea battle more effectively for the summer visitors in this vicinity,” The New York Times reported the next day. “Bathers taking their morning dip scurried ashore when shells splashed within a few hundred yards of them, and many of them watched the German exhibition of frightfulness from the beach. Automobilists stopped their machines on the brow of the sandhills, and scores of the cottagers did not have to leave their piazza chairs to see every detail of the fight.”1
U-156 was not finished with its predations. Its snaking path along the edge of the Atlantic was soon to cross with that of Annie Perry.
Built at the Tarr & James shipyard in Essex in 1903, the schooner Annie Perry was commissioned by Capt. Marion Perry and named in honor of his mother, Annie (Teves) Perry. Provincetown was the vessel’s home port. It measured 97 feet in length and 24 feet across, with a depth of 11 feet and a
capacity of 116 gross tons.
Annie Perry and Mary C. Santos were highliners of Provincetown’s fishing fleet in 1905 and developed a spirited rivalry. Both vessels were highly successful on the fishing grounds, and their crews raced one another back to market because the first boat to arrive usually received the best price for its catch. “The Annie Perry was accounted one of the fastest, if not the fastest, of all the crack sailing trawlers plying between New England ports and the fishing bank,” the Provincetown Advocate declared. “In a whole sail wind and windward thrashing she was acknowledged ‘Queen of the Fleet.'”2
Annie Perry sailed for the South Channel, between Nantucket Shoals and Georges Bank, on 11 October 1914. During the following nine days, its crew caught approximately 30,000 pounds of groundfish. At about 1 o’clock on the morning of 20 October, Capt. Manuel Enos was guiding the schooner toward the Boston Fish Pier to unload when it collided with the steam trawler Surf, commanded by a Capt. Doyle, about a mile south of Boston Light. Visibility had been poor for several days, and a dense fog still covered the harbor when the two vessels collided.
With nearly everyone aboard Annie Perry asleep in their bunks, the warning came from the watchmen on deck, whose shouts in Portuguese awakened the crew. The men rushed into the dories as the schooner settled rapidly into the water. Only moments after the final fisherman pulled away, Annie Perry slipped beneath the surface. All 23 men escaped, but everything left on board — including their clothing, equipment, and 30,000-pound catch — went down with the vessel. Rush later brought the survivors to the State Fish Pier in South Boston.
The wreck of Annie Perry rested dangerously close to the main channel used by ships entering Boston. To mark the hazard, the tender Mayflower remained nearby with warning lights raised high in its rigging. Captain Perry and the insurers initially abandoned the wreck, but the T. A. Scott Company later raised it. The schooner was sold to G. F. Rio for the U.S. Engineers Office and eventually returned to fishing service, in the hands of Philip P. Manta as owner and Capt. James Goodman as master.
Annie Perry was about 200 miles from home in August 1918 when it was sunk off Seal Island by the German submarine U-156. [Google Earth]
Nova Scotians made up a large part of the crew in Annie Perry‘s final years, and Captain Goodman deliberately steered the vessel to the coast off Nova Scotia annually to allow those men to visit their families. On Saturday, 3 August 1918, Annie Perry was about 35 miles off Seal Island, as were the schooners Rob Roy and Muriel of Gloucester.
As was U-156.
An eyewitness account was furnished by Nemiah Worthen of Boston, a member of Annie Perry‘s crew and paraphrased by the Telegraph-Journal of St. John, New Brunswick, where Worthen and about two dozen of his companions wound up in the days after the attack:
“As the [U-156] approached the [Annie Perry] it fired a single shell across her bow as a signal for her to heave to and it then came up alongside and some of the Germans climbed on board. Most of the submarine’s crew could speak very little English but the second lieutenant had a perfect mastery of the language and he at once demanded that all the Annie Perry‘s papers and all the flags which she had on board should be handed over. He then ordered her crew to get together their belongings.”
“He said that the Germans wanted neither their lives nor their clothing nor their money but they wished to destroy their vessel. The boats of the Annie Perry were lowered according to the orders issued by the Germans and her crew were commanded to get into them and make the best of their chances of reaching the shore some 35 miles distant.”
“There was a heavy sea running at the time and the little boats had a hard time to keep their course, but the German lieutenant informed the crew that they were lucky to be so near the shore. Many vessels, he said, had been sunk by this submarine and their crews abandoned as much as 400 miles from shore.”
“When the crew had left the vessel the Germans placed two bombs one at either end of her and the explosion which took place soon after completely destroyed the Annie Perry.”3
The Rose Dorothea and the Annie Perry, by A. Agores (Undated). Watercolor, 19½ by 27½ inches. [Town Art Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 1340] Sharpened and color-corrected by A.I.
Rob Roy and Muriel were also destroyed. The story was front-page news in The New York Times.4 The crews of all three vessels survived and reached shore in the dories that the schooners carried. It is worth noting that the next schooner tailor-made at Tarr & James for Captain Perry was the celebrated Rose Dorothea, commemorated at half-scale in the Provincetown Public Library. It was ferrying cargo to Portugal in February 1917 when it was sunk by a German U-boat, presaging the fate of Annie Perry.
In memoriam
• Manuel Enos (1870-1955)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 31067418.
• Annie (Teves) Perry (±1829-1904)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 227135839.
• Marion Perry (1864-1937)
Find a Grave Memorial No. 242943286.
1 “U-Boat Sinks Barges Off Cape Cod Coast,” The New York Times, 22 July 1918, p. 1.
2 Untitled editorial, Provincetown Advocate, 8 August 1918, p. 2.
3 “U-Boat, Active Off Coast, Has Companion; Story of Captured Schooner’s Crew,” [St. John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal, 8 August 1918, p. 10.
4 “U-Boats Sink Three American Schooners; Germans Say Mine Sank Cruiser San Diego,” The New York Times, 5 August 1918, p. 1.
Additional sources, from Lisa King
“American Ship Casualties of the World War,” United States Naval History and Heritage Command.
The Boston Globe, 2 March 1905, p. 4.
“Fiftieth Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, with Official Numbers and Signal Letters, for the Year Ended June 30, 1918,” United States Bureau of Navigation, 1919, p. 7.
“Fifty-First Annual List of Merchant Vessels of the United States, with Official Numbers and Signal Letters, for the Year Ended June 30, 1919,” United States Bureau of Navigation, 1920, p. 447.
“German Submarine Activities on the Atlantic Coast of the United States and Canada,” United States Office of Naval Records and Library, Historical Section, 1920, pp. 57–59.
“Papers re. the Fishing Schooner Annie Perry of Provincetown, MA, Oct. 21, 1914–Feb. 27, 1915.” Box 10, Folder 18 (K4a). Records of the T. A. Scott Company, Inc., MSS-Coll-001. Manuscripts Repository, G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum.