A new mainsail is seen being raised on the ship Carrie Winslow before she embarked on a run from Portland, Maine, to Buenos Aires in 1903. The mast is silhouetted, with the lower mizzen barely visible in the bright light. The photo, by Ruth Montgomery, was taken from the port rail with wind coming over the starboard side. A half dozen men on the yard hang on while they work to unfurl the new sail. The photo is remarkable because the technology of that time—bulky cameras on tripods, fragile glass plates and slow shutter speeds—did not lend itself to action photography, especially on the deck of a rolling tall ship.
Born in 1880 in East Boothbay, Maine, to Captain Adelbert Montgomery, Ruth Montgomery went to sea for the first time at five-years-old. At 15, when her father took over the Carrie Winslow and its routes, Ruth returned to sea. She subsequently accompanied her father on every voyage and began getting into photography around the same age. She took over five hundred glass plate negatives while aboard the 173-foot bark.
Her work is primarily from three voyages in 1899, 1901 and 1903 on the Portland to Buenos Aires runs and are now part of the collection of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine. Her images are sophisticated, working with the light, shadows, and shapes of the ship. Much of her work captured her family, dog Topsey, and life aboard Carrie Winslow and also documented her journeys around Buenos Aires and Rosario, Argentina. She took photos until her father retired from the sea around 1903. After his retirement, the family moved to Boston. She lived and worked in Boston until she moved back to East Boothbay where she died in 1967 at the age of 87.
In January 1913, the Carrie Winslow was lost in a storm off Cape Hatteras. While all her crew were rescued, Montgomery’s images serve as a memory of the seafaring bark.
This article was originally published in the August 2023 issue.
