May 29, 2018 — Deep water, as all Seacoast natives know, is beautiful and deadly. From the first settler’s records to the latest headlines, our oceans and rivers have claimed countless souls. Seacoast annals are filled with lives lost due to sudden squalls, shipwrecks, rogue waves, boating mishaps, drownings, naval battles and sunken submarines.

Memorials to those killed and missing at sea dot the greater Portsmouth coastline. From Newburyport, Massachusetts, to York, Maine, we found 10 somber reminders of the perils of water and the horrors of war. Our Memorial Day tour begins at “Great Island,” now New Castle, once the heart of Colonial New Hampshire. An island community dependent on fishing and the maritime trade, New Castle men were frequent victims of harsh weather on the ocean.

Just inside the gates of scenic New Castle Commons, off to the left, is a human-sized white obelisk dated 1856. A dozen lost sailors with familiar local names – Amazeen, Trefethen, Yeaton, Gerrish – are listed. Another side of the memorial, the words now faded, is marked with a fearsome biblical passage from the Book of Revelation. It reads, in part, “And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.”

When historian Charles Brewster wandered New Castle during the Civil War, this marble memorial stood in the garden of the Congregational Church – “a refreshing green spot, handsomely laid out” with gravel walks and flowerbeds. By 1916, with more names added, the obelisk had been moved to Riverside Cemetery. It was cleaned and moved again to its current location near the Oceanside Cemetery in 1997, within view of three lighthouses. Sadly, a modern plaque notes, this monument lists only a portion of the residents of New Hampshire’s smallest town (comprising only one square mile) who were buried in a watery grave over the last four centuries.

Here are nine more Seacoast memorials, large and small, that recall lives lost at sea or interned in foreign lands.

Read the full story at the Portsmouth Herald