On the night of August 30, 1872, the schooner Nettie Cushing collided with the much larger passenger steamer Metis. The bow of the Nettie Cushing cut deep into the Metis, inflicting a fatal wound. Eighty-five people were rescued from the sinking vessel by boats that rushed to the scene, but sixty-seven souls perished in the storm-tossed sea. The circumstances of this tragic loss of life were repeated on the night of February 11, 1907, when the three-masted schooner Harry Knowlton collided with the passenger steamer Larchmont. Captain George McVey of the Larchmont gave the following account of the incident:

    We left Providence at 7 o'clock. A brisk northwest wind was blowing, and we were off Watch Hill at about 11 o'clock. I had gone below to look over the passengers and freight, leaving a good pilot and quartermaster in the pilot house. I returned to the pilot house, passing through there on my way to my room. Everything was O. K. in the pilot house as I stepped into my room and prepared to retire for the night. Suddenly I heard the pilot blowing danger, and I hurried into the pilot house. There was a schooner on the port and her crew seemed to have lost control of her. Without warning she luffed up and before we had an opportunity to do a thing headed for us. The quartermaster and pilot put the wheel hard aport, but the schooner was sailing along under a heavy breeze, and in a moment she had crashed into our port side, directly opposite the smokestack.

The turbulent waters soon separated the two vessels, which both began taking on water. The schooner, with its crew manning her pumps, was able to stay afloat until it reached a point a few miles west of Watch Hill, where the crew abandoned ship and rowed ashore in a lifeboat. Those aboard the steamer were not as fortunate. Most passengers had retired for the evening, and so those who were able to reach the lifeboats were not properly clothed to face the freezing temperatures. Of the estimated 157 passengers and crew on the steamship, only nineteen survived, and many of these were severely frostbitten and had to have fingers, hands and even limbs amputated.