Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

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  he year 1848 also saw the first effort to bring federal dollars to the all-volunteer lifesaving system that, at the time, consisted mainly of Humane Society rescue boats and boathouses in Massachusetts. Dr. William Newell, a congressman and physician from New Jersey who’d been witness to one of the frequent and terrible shipwrecks then taking place along the shore, added an amendment to the lighthouse appropriations bill to provide $10,000 for lifesaving stations and apparatus between Sandy Hook and Egg Harbor, New Jersey.

  Apparatus used in lifesaving included metal surfboats and 30-foot whaleboats, lanterns, rockets and mortars, heaving sticks, shooting and hawser lines, block and tackle, sand anchors, breach buoys, and life cars, as well as boat carts and big two-wheeled beach carts to carry all that gear in.

  Where shipwrecks were close enough to shore, a small line would be thrown or fired by rocket or gun to sailors on board, who would then pull a manila hawser line and tail block onto the ship and tie it as high up in the rigging as they could. Secured at the beach end by a sand anchor, the lifesavers would then rig a two-line pulley to bring the survivors ashore. They would often come in a breeches buoy, a life ring with canvas pants sewn into it, or sometimes in a life car, a small galvanized metal boat with a sealable hatch on top that could carry two to four people lying flat inside. When it was first used, in 1850 at the wreck of the Ayrshire off the coast of New Jersey, the life car saved 201 of the 202 people aboard.

  The most famous of the line-throwing devices was the Lyle gun, a short-barreled cannon designed by an Army ordnance officer named David Lyle. It could fire an eighteen-pound shot with line attached up to three hundred yards with a full charge of gunpowder.

  Of course, when a shipwreck was too far offshore, the lifesavers, in their cork vests, had to take to their surfboats to effect a rescue.

  Another regular source of rescue was lighthouse keepers, whose primary mission was maintaining aids to navigation but who also, because they lived on coastal bluffs or rocky offshore isles, were well positioned to help save the victims of tumultuous seas. The most famous lighthouse keeper/rescuer was Ida Lewis, known in her day as “the bravest woman in America” and recipient of the kind of accolades later awarded Amelia Earhart and (to a lesser degree) astronaut Sally Ride.

  She was fifteen years old in 1857 when she joined her father, Hosea, who had recently been appointed keeper of the Lime Rock Lighthouse just off Newport, Rhode Island. Within months, she had made her first rescue of four men whose boat capsized. Shortly thereafter, Hosea suffered a stroke that effectively made her the lighthouse keeper. She would be given the official appointment some years later, after her father’s death. Along with tending the light, she also helped take care of her family, including three siblings that she rowed to and from school every day. During her many years at Lime Rock, she was officially credited with saving eighteen lives but may have saved as many as twenty-five, including a friend who fell off a boat and almost drowned when Ida was sixty-three. Among her rescues was that of four young men from well-to-do families who capsized their sailboat while roughhousing. In 1867, three sheepherders went into the harbor to save their boss’s prizewinning sheep. She saved all three plus the sheep. During a fierce storm in 1869, she saved two soldiers whose sailboat had overturned. Articles about her then appeared in Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s magazine, the New York Tribune, and other periodicals. President Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Schuyler Colfax (whose sister was a light keeper in Michigan) came to visit her at Newport, as did thousands of others over time. Girls began to pin their hair in “the Ida Lewis fashion,” while “Ida Lewis” hats and scarves flew off store shelves (with no profit returned to her). Several pieces of music and poetry were penned in her honor. Still she remained an essentially private person, a valued trait for a keeper. In 1907, she wrote, “Sometimes the spray dashes against these windows so thick I can’t see out, and for days at a time the waves are so high that no boat would dare come near the rock, not even if we were starving. But I am happy. There’s peace on this rock that you don’t get on shore.”

  When she died of a stroke on October 24, 1911, all the boats in Newport Harbor tolled their bells in her honor.

  Today the Coast Guard is rightfully proud of having a higher proportion of active-duty women than any of the other armed services and of having no position in which a woman can’t serve. Still, the Lighthouse Service was exceptional in that it had over four hundred women serving as keepers and assistant keepers throughout the nineteenth century, a time during which few women worked outside the home other than as clericals, maids, field hands, school teachers, or factory workers, and none could vote. Yet Ida Lewis said she was not comfortable being made a hero and exemplar by the nineteenth-century feminist movement that grew up alongside an increasingly militant abolitionist movement. She was too reclusive for that.

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  he abolitionists argued there was a basic contradiction between America’s claim that all men are created equal and the holding of human beings as chattel slaves. That contradiction also played out in the economy between the labor-dependent, manufacturing-oriented industrial North and slave-dependent, cotton-exporting South, leading to increasing violence, political division, or “sectionalism,” and finally to war.

  In 1858, seven months after being launched, the Revenue Cutter Harriet Lane seized a suspected slave ship, the Wanderer, outside New York Harbor. The fact the schooner had been outfitted with tanks designed to hold fifteen thousand gallons of fresh water was one indication of its intended use. Even so, federal officials released the ship for lack of evidence. A few months later, it picked up five hundred captives on the Congo River in Africa during a yellow fever epidemic and was briefly chased by a U.S. Navy ship at the river mouth before escaping. Eighty of its prisoners died before the Wanderer’s “cargo” was delivered to Jekyll Island, Georgia, in November of 1858. This was one of the last smuggling runs of “black gold” before John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Abraham Lincoln’s election, and the outbreak of the Civil War.

  In April 1861, the Harriet Lane steamed into Charleston Harbor along with other warships to help relieve the siege of Fort Sumter, which followed on South Carolina’s secession from the Union. On April 12, they were witness to Confederate batteries opening fire on the fort, in a bold act of treason and rebellion against the United States of America.

  While the bombardment continued, the Harriet Lane observed a sail steamer like itself approaching the harbor. It signaled the unknown vessel to hoist a flag. When the ship failed to respond, the Harriet Lane fired a shot across its bow, the first maritime shot fired in the Civil War. The target ship then raised the Stars and Stripes to identify itself as American and was allowed to pass. That ship, the Nashville, would quickly reveal its true allegiance, taking action as a blockade-runner under Confederate colors. The Harriet Lane would go on to join the August attack on Confederate forts at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, lending fire support to ground troops in the war’s first Union victory. In 1862, the Navy sent the Harriet Lane to blockade the coast of Texas until Confederates captured it a year later and converted it to a blockade-runner.

  Of the twenty-eight revenue cutters at the start of the war, six were seized by or defected to the Confederacy, while the others came under Navy control. Some of these, including six built in 1863, continued patrolling the nation’s shipping lanes looking for Confederate privateers, assisting sailors in distress, and protecting federal income derived from tariffs and customs.

  The American Civil War stimulated an industrial and technological expansion that included large-scale steel production, the growth of railroads, and the introduction of steam power, gun turrets, and metal armor on American ships of war, including the Revenue Cutter E. A. Stevens.

  The “Hoboken Ironclad,” built in New Jersey, was a prototype warship, a 110-foot semisubmersible twin-screw gunboat with a large forward-facing gun and two boat howitzers on pivots. Unfortunately, it arrived in the
waters off Hampton Roads, Virginia, too late to participate in the deafening but inconclusive battle between two other ironclads, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, on March 9, 1862. It did get to fire on the Virginia a month later, before spending much of the rest of the war guarding New York Harbor.

  The Lighthouse Service also provided help to the Revenue Marine and Union cause, assisting in the capture and control of more than a hundred Southern lighthouses and destruction of Southern lightships, some of which were then used as harbor obstructions by blockading Union forces.

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  he end of the Civil War saw rapid economic growth for the United States as railroads opened up not only the West but the seashore to vast numbers of day-trippers and families from all classes. Areas such as Coney Island, Cape Cod, Atlantic City, and the Jersey Shore became holiday destinations for growing numbers of beachgoers and recreational boat owners, thousands of whom would later come to depend on the U.S. Coast Guard when they got into trouble.

  The United States also grew geographically. In 1867, it purchased Alaska from Russia for just over $7 million. While some condemned the deal as Secretary of State William Seward’s Folly and President Andrew Johnson’s Polar Bear Garden, most were supportive of American expansionism.

  The story of the Revenue Cutter Service and the Coast Guard in Alaska is an epic tale in its own right. Until World War II, they were the major representatives of federal authority in the territory. As such they did law enforcement, search and rescue, oceanographic research, fisheries and wildlife protection, dispute resolution, and a host of other essential jobs, many of which the Coast Guard continues to carry on today.

  For close to forty years, two revenue cutters named Rush patrolled the Bering Sea chasing outlaw hunters who threatened to wipe out the fur seal population of the Pribilof Islands. The poachers, trying to maintain their black market in skins, coined what would become a popular phrase, warning each other to “get there early to avoid the Rush.”

  More famous than the Rush was the cutter Bear under the command of Capt. “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy, long a heroic figure and symbol of rough justice in territorial Alaska. The New York Sun wrote, “Captain Mike Healy is a good deal more distinguished person in the waters of the far Northwest than any President of the United States or any potentate of Europe has yet become . . . and if you should ask in the Arctic Sea, ‘Who is the greatest man in America?’ the instant answer would be, ‘Why, Mike Healy.’ ”

  Healy was a master sailor, and he and his crew created navigational charts, tracked ice, and rescued hundreds of mariners in distress including, in 1888, 160 whalers after their ships were smashed against massive sea rocks during a violent gale at Point Barrow, Alaska, three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Several years later, noting how commercial hunting of seals, whales, and caribou was threatening Native Alaskans’ food sources, Healy sailed the Bear to Siberia. There he negotiated the purchase of seventeen reindeer from a local Chukchi village chief, then had his crew row them out to the Bear, where they were hoisted aboard by sling. Back in Alaska, he then helped introduce reindeer herding to the native people.

  The Coast Guard identifies Healy, the son of an Irish immigrant father and slave mother, as one of its heroes of African American descent, though clearly, at the time, he and his more illustrious brothers, the president of Georgetown University and the bishop of Portland, Maine, were “passing,” for white.

  “If they [the Revenue Service] had known he was African American, there’s no way they’d have let him be in command of white officers,” says Dennis Noble, a retired Coast Guard senior chief, professor, and author working on a Healy biography.

  Healy got his “Hell Roaring” reputation in saloons up and down the West Coast and was twice court-martialed for abusing his crew. Reviled by both outlaw sealers and temperance crusaders, he would lose command of the Bear before having an Alaskan cutter command returned to him only to lose it again. Arguing in his own defense, he insisted that “I take all the responsibility, all the risks, all the hardships that my office would call upon me to take. I do not steer by any man’s compass but my own.” Restored to honor and retired as number three in the Revenue Cutter Service in 1903, he died of a heart attack less than a year later.

  Healy’s introduced reindeer, a mobile source of food, would prove fortuitous when, in 1897, 273 whalers in eight ships were trapped by early ice near Point Barrow. With the threat of mass starvation growing, President William McKinley ordered the Revenue Cutter Service to take action. The Bear sailed north to within fifteen hundred miles of the stranded men. From there a relief party consisting of Lt. David Jarvis, Lt. Ellsworth “Bully” Bertholf, Dr. Samuel Call, a Russian guide named Koltchoff, seven dogs, and two sleds began the Overland Relief Expedition. Three and a half months later, in March 1898, having hired more dogs and Native Alaskan drivers and purchased and herded 448 meaty reindeer along the way, having fought through blinding snowstorms, fallen down dangerous crevasses, and endured temperatures of forty-eight degrees below zero, they reached the whalers, fed and treated them, and protected some native villagers they’d been harassing.

  After the ice broke in June, the three surviving whale ships sailed free. In July, the Bear arrived, and the last ninety-seven whalers sailed with it for Seattle. Seventeen years later, relief-party member Ellsworth Bertholf would become the first commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard.

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  n 1871, the Revenue Cutter Service was put under the newly created Revenue Marine Bureau, headed by treasury official Sumner Increase Kimball. Kimball was a highly competent lawyer and public servant with a receding hairline, a steady gaze, and a mustache that would shame a walrus. Along with professionalizing the officer corps and upgrading the fleet, he also began to take control of the Life-Saving Service, sending Capt. John Faunce (former CO of the Harriet Lane) on an inspection tour of the lifesaving network. Among other things, Faunce found “apparatus rusty for want of care and some of it ruined.”

  Neglected during the Civil War, the volunteer system was now rife with politics and patronage, its stations decayed and far too few, too isolated, and too undermanned to work in a coordinated manner. Kimball began to campaign for a paid, professional service as increased U.S. migration and shipborne trade also led to an increase in the number of lives lost and cargoes sunk.

  With congressional support, he instituted the stationing of paid six-man boat crews at the stations, set standards and regulations for “surfmen,” introduced new equipment like the Lyle gun, and rapidly expanded the number of stations from the rocky coast of his home state of Maine to the sandy Outer Banks of North Carolina. Still it was too little.

  On a stormy night in November 1877, the Navy ship Huron ran aground off Nag’s Head, North Carolina. Although they were only two hundred yards from shore, the crew stayed aboard hoping for help that never came. Due to a lack of funding, local lifesaving stations were closed until December. By the next morning, ninety-eight men had lost their lives to the freezing cold waves that roared across their battered decks. Two months later and twenty-three miles to the north, the steamship Metropolis ran aground with the loss of eighty-five lives. Congress, under pressure from an outraged public, the insurance industry, and shipping companies, soon authorized construction of new lifesaving stations and the establishment of the U.S. Life-Saving Service as an agency within the Treasury Department.

  Sumner Kimball became its first and only superintendent. Soon he was overseeing 189 lifesaving stations: 139 on the eastern seaboard, 38 on the Great Lakes and Ohio River, 5 along the Gulf, and 7 on the Pacific coast. As eastern stations were set closer together, the service initiated a system of overlapping beach patrols during which surfmen from adjacent stations exchanged “checks,” small metal badges, to prove their patrol had been completed.

  In his commitment to honesty, professional standards, and effective execution of mission, Kimball would both foreshadow and live to become a part of the Progressive Era that marked the op
ening years of the new century. At the same time, he reflected many of the prejudices of his time, once telling Mike Healy he had no business being a revenue cutter officer because he was a Catholic (it’s no wonder Healy forgot to mention he was also black).

  Nonetheless, records show the Life-Saving Service did employ a number of “colored surfmen” along the Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina coasts. In 1880, African American Richard Etheridge, a former slave, a Civil War combat veteran, and “as good a surfman as there is on this coast, black or white,” according to one of Kimball’s inspectors, was appointed keeper of the Pea Island, North Carolina, lifesaving station on the Outer Banks. Pea Island was the only all-black station in the service and carried out numerous heroic rescues. Etheridge’s constant military-like drills assured that the Pea Island men were among the best trained in the service.

  One of their most renowned rescues took place on a storm-wracked night in October of 1896 when the schooner E. S. Newman, having survived a savage hurricane and drifted almost a hundred miles without sail, managed to ground two miles north of the station. When Etheridge and his crew arrived on the scene with their beach cart, they found the water too high and the sand too wet to mount their Lyle gun. With nine survivors, including the captain, his wife, and their three-year-old child, clinging to the wreckage, Etheridge directed two of his strongest men to tie heavy line around themselves and move into the crashing surf while the rest of his crew secured the beach end of the rope. The two made it to the ship, where, amid mountainous breakers, they managed to tie on to one of the crew. The three of them were then hauled back through the raging surf to the beach. Switching off the two lead swimmers on each turn, this operation was repeated nine more times until all, including the child, were saved.