In January of 1929, a fishing vessel owned by the Portland Trawling Company vanished with her entire crew and was never heard from again.

Marine workers for the New Jersey-based company Atlantic Wreck Salvage, which searches for shipwrecks, announced this month that they have inadvertently discovered the wreck of the ST Steiner (ST standing for steam trawler), a 139-foot (42m) long, steel-hulled vessel which vanished in 1929 without a trace. In 2022, the Atlantic Wreck Salvage Company had been searching for a French ocean liner from the 1850s, SS Le Lyonnais, when they happened to come across the Steiner’s wreck in 200 feet of water in the vicinity of Georges Bank, roughly 130 miles (209km) off the coast of Cape Cod. After finding Le Lyonnais in 2024, they returned to the unidentified wreck and performed several dives this July which confirmed that the vessel they’d stumbled upon three years ago was the ST Steiner. 

The Portland Trawling Company owned the Steiner, just one of their many vessels and configured just the same. She was launched in 1921 by the Rice Brothers Corporation of Boothbay, Maine, a shipbuilding company that produced vessels like her, as well as other vessels such as private yachts, coastguard patrol boats, and shore-running boats for the US Navy. For nine years, she fished in New England waters under the Portland Company’s flag. That is, until January of 1929.  

The Steiner departed New London, Connecticut on January 9, 1929, with 20 crew under the command of Captain Thomas Miller. Every day she was required to radio her position back to shore, but the last time the Portland Trawling Company heard from her was on January 18. She was scheduled to stop in port on January 22, but she never arrived. Both the US Coast Guard and the Portland Trawling Company searched for her in the days afterward, and though they found a battered lifeboat, they did not find any of her 21 crew members. It’s not known exactly what happened, but it’s speculated that the Steiner might have encountered a storm which proved too much for her to handle.  

The Atlantic Wreck Salvage has found or worked with other vessels in Northeastern waters besides Steiner and Le Lyonnais. The WWII German submarine U-550, which sank in 1944, was discovered in Nantucket waters by the company in 2012. This July, they also retrieved a navigational instrument from the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria, which sank off the coast of Massachusetts in July of 1956 after colliding with the Swedish ocean liner Stockholm.