Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  CHAPTER 3

  Hamilton’s Legacy

  “A few armed vessels, judiciously stationed at the entrances of our ports, might at a

  small expense be made useful sentinels of the laws.”

  —ALEXANDER HAMILTON, THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, NOVEMBER 27, 1787

  “I did not think it possible for them to get to us, but somehow they did . . . I think it

  is a miracle that I am alive to tell this tale.”

  —CAPT. ISRAEL HAWKINS, AFTER HE AND HIS CREW WERE RESCUED OFF NEW JERSEY, JANUARY 20, 1903

  “One wave I thought Willie washed overboard, and then a minute later he’s up again, but I swore he was gone. I’ve never been that scared in my whole life,” the jug-eared Larry Clements confesses to me. I’m three beers and three Stolis into the wind, which is when you really have to concentrate on your note taking, like that night in that whorehouse bar in Belize with those British army spies.

  Anyway, I figure my last night in New London I’d better check out the local Coastie bars, the old Dutch Tavern with its tap beer and boiled eggs in brine where Eugene O’Neill used to hang out, and the Roadhouse with its pretty “tenders” behind the boat-shaped bar. Showing me around the foggy streets and alleys is Lt. Scott Borgerson, the six-foot-four professor. Having told me his most harrowing rescue adventure earlier in the evening, he’s gone on to take the standard demur that it probably isn’t worth putting in my book because “there are other Coasties who’ve been through worse.”

  Now we’ve run into one of his old crew from that creaky 82-footer in Grand Isle, Louisiana, on the tentlike back deck of the Roadhouse. Scott, who’s otherwise brilliant, has come out here to cadge cigarettes from whoever has them. My sister’s going to be dead of lung cancer in five days, the same thing that killed our mom, but I don’t say anything because I’m a reporter and, drunk or sober, I’m working right now.

  It’s not a setup, his old shipmate showing up tonight. You just have to remember how small their organization is. If there are six degrees of separation in the world, there are rarely more than two in the Coast Guard.

  So with Larry’s arrival, Scott Borgerson decides to repeat the tale. “We got the call to stand by. It was really rough, but these divers were lost on this oil rig, and one of them was the station CO’s cousin. So we’re going out the channel and there’s this sailboat—its sails are in tatters, and the people on board think they’re going to die. We had this M-1 [rifle] with a line, and the guy who fired it—the wind just took it, and it got tied up in the rigging. So we then got another shot over, and that worked. We got them under tow, but we’re in like thirty-foot seas, and they’ve got their anchor out and we can’t pull the hook loose. We’re on the radio saying, ‘You have to cut the line’—and he’s like, ‘It’s chain, I can’t,’ and I say, ‘Then you’ll have to get in the water and a helicopter will hoist you out.’ Finally the hook broke loose, and we were able to tow them back in. We got on the radio, and the chief’s like, ‘OK, now go back out.’ So we know we’re not going to find those divers. We know they’re already dead, but we’re out there, and we’re under way for seventy-two hours with these waves just washing over us, and no one can sleep or eat ’cause you can’t make food in these conditions, and everyone’s sick but me and this big Samoan chief and he says, ‘It’s just you and me.’ ”

  That’s when the big wave came that Larry thought washed Willie overboard, “and then a minute later he’s up again, but I swore he was gone.”

  “So finally we’re heading back in,” Scott continues, “and there’s another sailboat wallowing in the seas with no engine, no control, and you wonder what they’re doing out here, and my crew’s like, ‘We don’t see nothing, do we?’ But I have to get on the radio and say, ‘This is Coast Guard Cutter Point Sal, are you in distress?’ They’re like, ‘We’re dying here. Save us or we’ll all drown.’ The waves are so huge our props are coming out of the water, but we still manage to get a line on them and tow them in for like twelve hours more, and when we get to the dock it’s still so rough we have to kind of accelerate and whipsaw them up to the seawall, where these sailors are able to grab their lines. Happened back in 2000.”

  “What about the divers?”

  “They found one of the bodies. Don’t think they ever recovered the other one.”

  Scott thinks it’s like war, but it’s not. It’s like its own thing.

  A few minutes later, we run into the crew of the 110-foot cutter Bainbridge Island, up from Sandy Hook to escort a nuclear submarine out from the shipyard. Their engineer tells us they have an officer candidate on board doing his long cruise.

  Scott puts on his loudest command voice. “OC FEDERER, FRONT AND CENTER.” Nothing. “FEDERER, STAND UP.” Officer Candidate Jerry Federer, a muscular guy in civvies with a swooping wave of short dark hair and intense blue eyes, peeks nervously around the curtain, then saunters over to brace in front of Scott, smiling uncomfortably with a beer in one hand, not sure if this guy’s for real. Scott lightens up, offers to buy him a round, and asks if he has a cigarette. “I was thinking of jumping over the side of the deck when I heard you call out like that,” Jerry confesses. He’s worked in law enforcement until now, he tells me, but he’d like to get into marine safety, environmental stuff, oil-spill response, become one of the “duck scrubbers.”

  So what makes these guys who they are, and how did they form such a colorful cast of characters, from Ida Lewis to “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy to “Jug Ears” Larry Clements, protecting our maritime domain? Turns out it takes about two hundred years to salt them properly.

  T

  he origins of the Coast Guard can be traced back to the establishment of the federal Lighthouse Service in 1789, though the organization prefers to date itself from the establishment of the Revenue Cutter Service a year later. Both were the creation of Alexander Hamilton, America’s first secretary of the treasury and a founding Federalist. Long before his fatal duel with Aaron Burr, he and Thomas Jefferson differed over whether the new nation should be a loosely affiliated confederation of states supporting an agrarian culture of independent farmers (and slaves) or whether, as the Federalists argued, there should be a strong central government and bank to protect and nourish a growing market economy driven by urban merchants dependent on sea trade. Jefferson claimed Hamilton was supporting “a new aristocracy of monied corporations” but in the end lost his argument at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He and the other anti-federalists did force an important compromise, however, getting the convention to adapt the first ten amendments to the constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.

  Still, for a strong central government to function, it would need revenue, and during the early years of the republic the states were unwilling to share theirs. As a result, import duties accounted for 90 percent of federal revenues. To ensure navigational safety for merchant traders, Hamilton oversaw the maintenance and construction of a string of lighthouses along the eastern seaboard.

  To prevent the smuggling of untaxed goods, he got Congress to approve the construction of ten single-masted patrol vessels called revenue cutters to intercept contraband. With the disbandment of the Continental Navy in 1790 and until the U.S. Navy was created eight years later, the hundred or so revenue marines manning these ships were America’s only seagoing military force. In a June 4, 1791, letter of instruction, Hamilton cautioned the new officers that “[your] countrymen are freemen, and, as such, are impatient of everything that bears the least mark of a domineering spirit. [You] will, therefore, refrain, with the most guarded circumspection, from whatever has the semblance of haughtiness, rudeness, or insult . . . [You] will endeavor to overcome difficulties, if any are experienced, by a cool and temperate perseverance in [your] duty—by address [skill] and moderation, rather than by vehemence or violence.” Thus the Coast Guard’s forbears began to adopt an attitude of quiet professionalism that would serve them well in the coming centuries.

  Even before the Light
house and Revenue services were established, along the rugged shores of the great fishing, shipping, and whaling commonwealth in whose statehouse hung a golden cod, a voluntary organization, the Massachusetts Humane Society, was formed in 1785 to help mariners in distress. Its early members and supporters included Governor James Bowdoin, Harvard Medical School founders Drs. John Warren and Ben Waterhouse, and Revolutionary veterans Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Sam Adams. Thomas Jefferson exchanged letters with the Humane Society; George Washington called its efforts “highly estimable.” These initial efforts consisted of establishing a string of “refuge” huts for stranded sailors.

  Only much later, in 1848, would the federal government become involved in the shore-based rescue business, providing funds for volunteer lifesavers along the wild New Jersey coast.

  From 1798 to 1800, the United States and France carried out a “Quasi-War” from the waters of New Jersey to the tropical West Indies inspired by Revolutionary France’s unhappiness over increased U.S.-British trade. French seizures of U.S. ships convinced President John Adams to reestablish the U.S. Navy, with the Revenue Marine (as the service was known early on) coming under the Navy’s command during times of war, a pattern later followed by the Coast Guard. During the Quasi-War, which included dozens of real casualties, the U.S. Navy captured eighty-five French ships, twenty of these seized by the Revenue Marine, ten by the Revenue Cutter Pickering alone. The Pickering sailed under the command of Lt. (later Navy Commodore) Edward Preble. In a brilliant nine-hour engagement, he led his ship with its crew of seventy and fourteen four-pounder guns against the much larger French privateer L’Egypte Conquise, with a crew of 250 and eighteen six- and nine-pounders. In the end, the Conquise was forced to surrender. The Pickering was later lost at sea with its entire crew after being transferred to the Navy.

  The U.S. Congress prohibited U.S. vessels from engaging in the slave trade beginning in 1794 and by 1807 had banned the importation of any new slaves into the United States. Unfortunately, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made expansion of slavery in the cotton-growing South economically beneficial to that region’s economic elite. The Revenue Service began seizing slave ships and freeing their captives, but the owners and crews were rarely convicted in U.S. courts, and the illegal trade continued. In a cruel irony, until the 1840s, U.S. slaves served as cooks, stewards, and seamen on board a number of revenue cutters chasing down the slavers.

  From 1807 to 1809, the Revenue Service also enforced the Embargo Act that froze almost all commerce with Europe. It was President Jefferson’s attempt to influence Britain’s restrictive trade policies and impressment (forced recruitment) of thousands of U.S. sailors at sea, short of war. The Embargo Act and the service’s attempts to enforce it proved hugely unpopular, particularly in maritime New England, where a mob in Gloucester, Massachusetts, destroyed a cutter. America’s Rescue Warriors would not see their reputation fall so low again until the Prohibition era of the twentieth century, when the U.S. Coast Guard was tasked with stopping the illegal importation of alcohol.

  With the outbreak of the War of 1812, the Revenue Marine saw additional military action. The most dramatic encounter was that of the Eagle and the British brigantine Dispatch off Long Island on the morning of October 11, 1814. The Eagle was badly outgunned in the initial encounter, its flag three times shot away and replaced by volunteers. Capt. Frederick Lee finally beached the ship to prevent it from sinking. He and his crew then dragged their four-pounder cannons up a 160-foot bluff under fire. From their new position, they continued fighting the Dispatch. When they ran out of cannonballs, they retrieved balls that had been fired at them and lodged in the ground, tearing up their ship’s logbook for wadding. Finally, in late afternoon, they were forced to surrender.

  After the war, the Revenue Marine would go on to battle pirates from New Orleans to the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. In late August 1819, in the Gulf of Mexico, the cutters Alabama and Louisiana captured the pirate ship Bravo and its master, Jean LaFarge, a lieutenant of Jean Lafitte. In 1820 the cutters attacked and burned the notorious pirate enclave on Breton Island, off southeast Louisiana; 185 years later, 80 percent of Breton Island would be washed away by Hurricane Katrina.

  The Revenue Cutter Service (its official name as of 1863) would see additional action in the Seminole Wars of Florida (1817–58), the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the Civil War (1861–65), and the Spanish-American War of 1898 before being incorporated into the modern Coast Guard just in time for the maritime horrors of World War I.

  A

  merica’s other sentinels of the coast were its lighthouses and, where there were no islands or promontories of land available on which to build a warning beacon, lightships. America’s first lightship, actually a small boat, was anchored in the lower Chesapeake in 1820. By the end of that summer, it was so battered it had to be relocated. Three years later, the first “outside” light-ship was anchored off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Between 1820 and 1983, 119 lightships would stand duty off America’s shores before being replaced by automated platforms and buoys.

  Life aboard lightships often involved seasickness, boredom, dreary meals of “scouse” (salt beef, potatoes, and onions), endless card games, and occasional terror. Some were sunk in storms, including Buffalo’s Light Vessel 82 and its six-man crew on Lake Erie in November 1913. A few days later, a board washed ashore with a message from the captain to his wife. “Good-bye, Nellie, ship is breaking up fast—Williams.”

  A number were also lost to collisions, like the Nantucket lightship that was run down in the fog by Titanic’s sister ship Olympic in 1934 with seven of its eleven crew killed.

  I

  n 1832, the revenue cutters expanded their mission to search and rescue when the treasury secretary ordered them to begin winter cruises to provide aid to sailors in distress.

  However, nineteenth-century sailors faced danger not only from shoals and storms but also from a new maritime propulsion system, the steam engine. Once American inventor Robert Fulton built the first commercial steamship, the Clermont, running it up the Hudson from New York City to Albany in 1807, the age of steam bubbled forward with breathtaking speed, expanding from Mississippi paddlewheelers to oceangoing steamships carrying the first great wave of Irish, German, Italian, and other postcolonial immigrants in the 1840s, many of them riding below deck in low-cost “steerage,” by the stern rudder that steered the ship.

  Unfortunately, when too much steam pressure built up in their boilers, these ships tended to explode, often with horrendous loss of life. From 1811 to 1851, over 20 percent of U.S. river accidents were caused by boiler explosions. In 1832, 14 percent of all steamships exploded, resulting in more than a thousand deaths. In 1838, with an appalled public demanding action, Congress enacted a steamship safety act that would lead to the eventual creation of the Steamship Inspection Service.

  Today, when the Coast Guard establishes safety standards for recreational or commercial vessels, licenses mariners, inspects oil tankers or cruise ships, formulates rules for hazardous waste and petroleum transport, or carries out its many other efforts to improve maritime safety and prevent disaster at sea, these efforts can be traced back to that first navigational law of 1838.

  Later, in 1884, the government would establish the Bureau of Navigation to oversee construction, operation, and documentation of all U.S. merchant vessels and those who crew them. It would combine the two as the Bureau of Navigation and Steamship Inspection in 1932 and then, following the Lighthouse Service in 1939, would be incorporated into the Coast Guard in 1942.

  B

  y 1839, the British navy was targeting the pirate slave trade from its African ports of embarkation to its New World destinations with a vigor unmatched by its American counterparts. That summer, the British navy delivered four American-flagged slave ships to New York Harbor in an attempt to embarrass U.S. courts into enforcing their own anti-slave-trading laws.

  On August 27, the Revenue Cutter W
ashington seized a slave ship named Amistad off Long Island, but only after its African captives had rebelled and taken control of the vessel. They would be brought into New London, Connecticut, and put through a series of trials leading to an 1841 Supreme Court ruling upholding their freedom to return to their homeland (a story retold in the 1997 Steven Spielberg movie Amistad).

  I

  n 1843, the Revenue Marine gained an inspirational new leader in the person of Capt. Alexander Fraser. During his five years in command he oversaw the construction of the first steam cutters, standardized operations, abolished shipboard slavery and flogging, raised salaries, established a merit system for promotion, and advocated unifying the cutter service with the Lighthouse and Life-Saving services, envisioning a multimission maritime Coast Guard that would not come into existence for another ninety years.

  In 1848, with the end of the Mexican War and the U.S. annexation of California, Fraser was ordered to sail a revenue brig around Cape Horn to San Francisco, arriving eleven months later, after many adventures along the way, just in time for the gold rush, at which point most of his crew deserted him to join in the digging. In San Francisco he became a key enforcer of civic order, trying to secure revenues, enforce shipping laws, and suppress mutinies amid some five hundred gold rush vessels filled with thousands of rowdy, violent ’49ers anxious to make their fortunes no matter what. Later he’d sail down to San Diego and on to Hawaii, a true adventurer. Unfortunately, with his absence from Washington the Revenue Marine fell back under the influence of the patronage-ridden Customs Service.