Sometimes a ripping sea yarn sneaks up on you when you least expect it. One minute I was collapsed on the couch, complaining about the heat, and the next minute I was wondering what happened to the passengers and crew of the SS Romance on their trip from Provincetown to Boston on Sept. 9, 1936.
My transformation from couch slug to history detective came after reading an old letter which mentioned “the ill-fated passage” of the SS Romance. While love, relationships and romance have been known to founder during Cape Cod vacations, the toll tends to be emotional turmoil, not an actual shipwreck.
The caption provided for this Leslie Jones photo reads “The SS Romance after she was rammed and sunk by the SS New York off Boston light”.
Thus, I was filled with trepidation as I dived into the mystery, hoping that things would turn out OK.
Here’s the headline from a page one story in the Sept. 10, 1936 edition of the Provincetown Advocate newspaper: “Steamer Romance Rammed By New York-Bound Boat In Lower Boston Harbor.”
The action-packed story starts this way: “Rammed by the Eastern Steamship liner New York in a practically impenetrable fog in lower Boston harbor, the excursion steamer Romance sank 18 minutes after collision, just as the last of 153 passengers and 53 members of her crew were taken to safety aboard the outward bound New York vessel. None of the passengers, many of them women and children, were seriously hurt.”
The captain of the SS Romance, Adelbert Wickens, “was the last to leave his ship,” according to the story. “He jumped into the sea as the boat sank under him and swam to a life raft thrown overboard from the New York.”
An account from the state Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources adds this detail: “Fifteen minutes after the collision, its whistle still blowing its futile cry, Romance settled by the bow and slid beneath the waters of Massachusetts Bay, the mast head light glowing eerily beneath the waves as the steamer plunged to her final resting place.”
The publisher of the Provincetown Advocate, Guy Holliday, was aboard the Romance. Like any good newspaper person, he telephoned the home office with details as soon as he could.
Holliday told the Advocate that he was “thrown flat on his back by the impact of the sudden smash.” He managed to get into a lifeboat, but there was a close shave still to come. “Floating alongside of the Romance he saw her go down, her propeller narrowly grazing the life boat,” according to the Advocate story.
This U.S. Library of Congress public domain photo is captioned: ‘A fishing boat in front of the S.S. ‘Romance,’ a tourist boat which used to ply between Boston and Provincetown and has since sunk in Boston Harbor. Provincetown, Massachusetts’.
According to the state Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, “The Court of Inquiry into the loss of Romance found Captain Wickens partially to blame. At the time of the collision an inexperienced lookout was on duty, unfamiliar with whistle signals and the points of the compass for giving directions.”
The archaeological board’s report also contains the most poetic sentence I have ever read on a government website: “The remains of Romance lie scattered and broken on a bottom of sand and gravel.”
But a bit of Romance lived on. According to the board, the “pilot house, connecting cabins and another 40 foot section of deck house were towed to Nahant and salvaged.”
I started wondering if there might be a photo of the end of Romance. This seemed an incredible longshot, but the trap doors of history take you to unexpected places. In this case, it took me to the Boston Public Library’s Leslie Jones Collection.
Jones was a photographer for the Boston Herald-Traveler from 1917 to 1956. “Modest about his abilities as a photographer (he called himself a camera-man, not a photo-journalist), Jones quietly built an unrivaled collection of photographic negatives, almost 40,000 of which were given to the Boston Public Library by his family in the early 1970s,” reports the Boston Public Library.
I should have known Leslie Jones would be on the job when the Romance sank. His family was kind enough to let us share one of his photos. I think it might show the parts of Romance that were salvaged. The rest of the ship sleeps on the ocean floor, occasionally visited by divers.
Eric Williams, when not solving Curious Cape Cod mysteries, writes about a variety of ways to enjoy the Cape, the weather, wildlife and other subjects. Contact him at ewilliams@capecodonline.com. Follow him on X: @capecast.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Shipwrecks of Cape Cod: Collision dooms Provincetown steamer in 1936
