Seated by the Sea: The Maritime History of Portland, Maine, and Its Irish Longshoremen (review)

For the sons of Ireland, crossing the Atlantic in mid-19th century often meant entering a world of hard and hazardous labour. Landing in New Orleans, New York City, Boston, St. John (New Brunswick), Halifax (Nova Scotia) or Quebec City, scores of them found a living among the coasts and wharfs of these thriving port cities. Mainly Catholics, these Irish reacted strongly to exploitation by building local longshoremen’s benevolent societies, which, by the turn of the century, began to reach out to the International Longshoremen Association’s coast-wide unionism. Portland dockers followed a similar route.

In this book, Michael C. Connolly goes beyond his 1988 PhD dissertation on Portland longshoremen by weaving together the dockers’ history and Portland’s strenuous but unfortunate quest for commercial prosperity. The city rose “on a sheltered, ice-free, deep-water port nearer to Europe than any other major American port.” (24) Not surprisingly, port activities grew by leaps and bounds. Yet, at the end of World War I, commerce started to shrink, driving down longshoremen’s job opportunities and their union’s fortune, till nowadays the labour’s body is only a shadow of its former self.

Connolly’s investigation makes use of an abundance of primary and secondary sources. Yet, the reader will rapidly notice that the core data is based on Portland Longshoremen’s Benevolent Society’s records and minutes (1880 to 1980s), oral interviews with ten dockers (realized by the author between 1982 and 1986) and some research in local newspapers. Precious data on Portland’s imports and exports, on wharfs improvements and on the ethnic and racial structures of its population, are also derived from publications of the port authorities, the City of Portland and the American Census Office. The final product is a long term analysis of Portland’s port and freight handling starting in 1633, that is to say the arrival of the first Europeans, until 2009, with a special emphasis “on the critical years of 1880–1923.” (3)

The first of this six-chapters book paints an overall picture of the port of Portland until the Civil War. The city became a major exporting centre for its rapidly developing hinterland. The completion of a narrow-gauge rail link with Montréal in 1853, under the authority of the Grand Trunk Railway, resulted in a major boost and Portland became the metropolis winter port. There is not much emphasis on longshoremen in this section, but we learn that the Irish, in the famine and post famine years, rapidly replaced African Americans, dominating the longshoremen trade. The regular steamship service between Portland and Liverpool, via Queenstown (Cork County, Ireland) accelerated this process by shipping Canadian grain east and, on the return passage, bringing Irish immigrants on affordable passage.

Under the title “Black Fades to Green on the Waterfront: Nineteenth-Century Social, Racial, and Ethnic Change,” the second chapter looks at the impact of this racial and ethnic upheaval. Strengthened by their numbers, the Irish established a Longshoremen’s Benevolent Association in the mid-1860s, thus following the example of their brothers in New York, Boston and New Orleans. Not much is known about this organization except that its members struck for a pay increase in May and July 1864, and that the body had a permanent meeting place two years later. In 1880, the Portland longshoremen cemented their alliance by incorporating as the Portland Longshoremen’s Benevolent Society (plsbs). Connolly rightly argues that because African Americans constituted such a tiny fraction of the city’s global population, the plsbs members were able to officially exclude them, in 1881, by adopting a bylaw to that effect. Until the end of the century, the plsbs increased its membership (868 members in 1900) and felt strong enough to maintain its independence from larger long-shore organizations.

In the third chapter, on the turn of the 20th century, the author mainly addresses commercial problems that haunt...