“It’s going to end up being a big party,” said Nico Walsh, a lawyer with a specialty in maritime issues who is representing one of the claimants, World Fuel Services, which said it was owed nearly $500,000. Another company, the Portland Pilots, said it was owed nearly $200,000. A lawyer for the City of Portland said that the city was owed about $85,000 in berthing and landing fees, and that its local development entity was owed $151,000.

“Everybody and their uncle is owed money,” said Mark Usinger, the owner of A. L. Griffin, a ship supplier, who said he was waiting on about $13,000 from Nova Star. “Our business is extremely competitive these days. The profits are way down. Everybody’s watching their nickels and dimes. The last thing you need is something like this.”

The government of Nova Scotia, which put up 41.5 million Canadian dollars (about $31.2 million at today’s exchange rate) to support the ferry, nevertheless remains committed to ferry service, although it announced in October that it would not use Nova Star next year. Instead, it is negotiating with a company called Bay Ferries, which ran a ferry here that went out of service in 2009.

“We believe there is economic value, as well as a historic and cultural value, in having the service,” Geoff MacLellan, the minister of Nova Scotia’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, said in a statement. He added that it is “a 700-year-old historic link with New England.”

This Nova Star, then, is in the eyes of many an awkward chapter in the long history of travel — fueled by trade, trucking and vacations — between Maine and Nova Scotia. Regular ferry service between the two emerged in the middle of the last century, partly as a way to avoid the interminable drive along rough roads — first in 1955 in Bar Harbor, with the Bluenose, and then in Portland in 1970. A cruise ferry called the Scotia Prince took over that route in 1982.

“They used to refer to it as the two-nation vacation,” said Steve Hewins, a former travel agent in Portland who briefly worked for Nova Scotia’s tourism office here in the late 1970s. “I remember us marketing that back in the ’80s.”

For many travelers, a major part of the appeal was the ferry itself. “It had a buffet, a little bit of a show and, of course, a casino,” Mr. Hewins said. “I think they viewed it as sort of a festive party atmosphere, because cruises really were not that well known.”