Skip to main content

Item of the Week: The Orion, Wrecked Off Montauk, 1815

Thu, 09/28/2023 - 08:50

From the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection

On Sept. 24, 1815, Abraham M. Smith of East Hampton wrote Henry Packer Dering (1762-1822), Sag Harbor's customs collector, with news of a shipwreck the day before at Montauk. The "brig from Petersburg," Russia, carried cargo including "hemp and iron," and Smith writes that it "is entirely lost, and some of the cargo, they expect to save only a small portion of the iron."

While the ship is not identified in this letter, the date, cargo, and location match perfectly with the shipwreck of the Orion, which was lost at Montauk on Sept. 23, 1815, according to Jeannette Edwards Rattray's book "Ship Ashore!"

The Orion was captained by Seth Talbot (1779-1858) and bound for Providence, R.I. Talbot hailed from Dighton, just over the Massachusetts border from Providence. Mrs. Rattray claims the hemp was lost but the entire crew and 200 tons of iron were saved.

The letter refers only to Petersburg, but Mrs. Rattray notes that the ship came from "St. Petersburg and Cronstadt," or Kronstadt, which served as a major shipping and commerce center just outside St. Petersburg under Peter the Great.

What this letter neglects to mention is that this shipwreck coincided with a major New England hurricane. On Sept. 23, 1815, the storm hit Long Island and Connecticut as what is generally agreed to have been at least a Category 3 hurricane, with winds well over 111 miles per hour. While we don't have much record of storm conditions in Montauk, we do know the storm made landfall in Center Moriches before continuing on to hit Saybrook, Conn.

Reports from New England indicated catastrophic flooding. New Bedford, Mass., saw tides rise 12 to 14 feet beyond the high-water mark, and Stonington, Conn., reported tides rising 17 feet. Both Providence and New Bedford lost nearly their entire shipping fleets. 

Yet somehow, the crew of the Orion survived this storm off Montauk, and salvaged tons of iron. 


Andrea Meyer, a librarian and archivist, is head of collection for the East Hampton Library's Long Island Collection.
 

Villages

Springs Food Pantry Sees the Need, Addresses It

The last few years have presented challenges the Springs Food Pantry’s founders could not have anticipated when it was first established. More than 600 families are now registered to receive the assistance it provides, and an average of 355 families are served each week.

Jun 26, 2025

A Newsletter on Being a Jew in Today’s America

One of the essential roles of religion, Rabbi Jan Uhrbach of the Bridge Shul in Bridgehampton said this week, is to “help us hold onto our humanity, and remind us of the higher values that go beyond money and power and position and all of those things, in a time when the values that I hold dear are not only being violated, they’re being rejected as values.”

Jun 26, 2025

Item of the Week: The Hemerocallis Garden, 1962

Hemerocallis may be an unfamiliar term, but the garden adjacent to Clinton Academy once bore the name. This photo shows the gate to the garden some two decades after its establishment in 1941.

Jun 26, 2025

 

Your support for The East Hampton Star helps us deliver the news, arts, and community information you need. Whether you are an online subscriber, get the paper in the mail, delivered to your door in Manhattan, or are just passing through, every reader counts. We value you for being part of The Star family.

Your subscription to The Star does more than get you great arts, news, sports, and outdoors stories. It makes everything we do possible.