Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Loss of the Hanover: Transforming a Maine Shipwreck in The Pearl of Orr’s Island

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1861–62) was shaped by a terrible marine tragedy that shook the seafaring community of Bath, Maine, to its foundations in November 1849—the loss of the Bath vessel Hanover and all her crew, many of them local men.¹ Homeward bound from a three-years’ voyage, Hanover went down in heavy seas as she attempted to enter the Kennebec River, the tidal passage from the ocean to the city of Bath’s protected wharves and shipyards. The cosmic irony of a ship lost at the moment of her homecoming, the poignance of the “unfortunate crew . . . washed ashore in all the joyous holiday rig in which they had attired themselves that morning to go to their sisters, wives, and mothers,” engrossed Stowe.² She would use the Hanover shipwreck to give her novel a dramatic opening and to drive its plot and themes.

“The story of this wreck of a home-bound ship just entering the harbor is yet told in many a family on this coast,” Stowe writes in Pearl (4). While there’s evidence that Stowe read about the shipwreck in at least one newspaper and had her own unnerving experience of entering the Kennebec in a storm, this sentence gives us her personal understanding of her sources—they formed a lasting tradition available to her through the years that elapsed between her first learning of the Hanover disaster and publishing her novel (“yet”), they were oral (“told”), numerous (“many”), domestic (“family”), and regional (“on this coast”). In transforming the story of the Hanover into the opening chapters of her novel, then, Stowe saw herself as relying heavily on conversations with Maine people.

The traditional stories of maritime Maine, passed through generations by word of mouth, cannot be precisely captured by scholarship. Yet a wealth of period materials about the Hanover tragedy available in regional archives offers rich context for the shipwreck in The Pearl of Orr’s Island. Local people told the story of the Hanover disaster not only in kitchens and parlors, but in newspapers, letters, a moving panorama, paintings, poetry, folk art, and at least one surviving sermon. This essay will not only examine Stowe’s fictional transformation of actual events and characters, but will also compare surviving vernacular responses to the Hanover shipwreck with equivalent material in her novel. Evaluating Stowe’s fictionalization against the real response of an actual nineteenth-century community helps us appreciate how thoroughly she met her audience’s need both for a sensational disaster narrative and comforting reflection on death.

Stowe’s Perilous Passage to Maine

Stowe almost certainly knew about the Hanover shipwreck before her arrival in Maine just six months after the disaster. The loss of the Hanover had received brief mentions in major city newspapers around the country. But Stowe would have found far more detailed reportage in the Christian Mirror, a Congregationalist newspaper edited by the Reverend Asa Cummings and issued in Portland, Maine. Not only Harriet’s husband Calvin, but her father Lyman Beecher and seven Beecher brothers were Congregationalist ministers, and the Mirror covered all the business of their denomination.³ The newspaper even appears in Pearl as the favorite reading material of Zephaniah and Mary Pennel—“this worthy couple never read anything but the Bible, the ‘Missionary Herald,’ and the ‘Christian Mirror’” (9). On November 15, 1849, the Mirror published a detailed article about the Hanover disaster drawn from extensive local coverage in the daily edition of Portland’s Eastern Argus.⁴

If Stowe read about the Hanover in the Christian Mirror before her departure for Maine, the knowledge must have made her anxious when, on the morning of Saturday, May 25, 1850, she found herself on board a steamboat struggling, as the Hanover had struggled, to enter the Kennebec in stormy weather. Stowe’s husband Calvin had accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, and while he remained behind completing his teaching obligations to Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Stowe had gone on...