The subject of the salvage of human life from the perils of the sea has attracted more or less attention ever since the days of antiquity. The unfortunate by shipwreck fared none too well in the old, old time, for as a writer said a half century ago: “The strong arm was too often the strong law, and selfishness was far more likely to make the weak ones a prey for plunder, than was compassion to make them objects for assistance.”
As time wore on, as civilization advanced, as sympathy for the distressed and for humanity became more pronounced, and as the God-like principles of self-abnegation gained on the hard, stubborn, inexorable traits of self-preservation, the march of evolution was begun. The history of this development and progress, interesting as it is, is far too embracing for more than passing notice here.
In China, centuries ago, was organized the first humane society having in view the saving of life from the perils of the sea. In Europe, no regular system for the mitigation of the suffering of the shipwrecked existed prior to the establishment of the Royal Humane Society in Great Britain in 1774. In 1785 Lionel Luken, a coach-builder of London, invented the first lifeboat, but it was not brought into general use. Although it was a success, and saved many lives, he could obtain no support from the authorities in carrying out his benevolent object. His appeals for humanity were disregarded, and he became a disappointed man, contenting himself with the hope that a time of greater enlightenment and sympathy would some day arrive. Full of the faith, it is said he devised an inscription for the stone which should mark his resting place in a quiet country churchyard, simply stating that he was the inventor of the first lifeboat. In 1789 another boat was constructed by Henry Greathead, a boatbuilder of South Shields, England, which performed no special service until about 1791, when it saved the crew of a Sunderland brig wrecked at the entrance of the Tyne. In the course of the next ten or twelve years, some thirty lifeboats were constructed, but the great work of assistance to the shipwrecked languished until 1823, when Sir William Hillary made a stirring appeal to the English public which met with sympathetic response and resulted in the formation of the “Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck.” Out of this has come the present Royal National Life Boat Institution of Great Britain, founded in 1824, which has given enduring luster to the world’s life-saving annals by its exploits on the shores of the British Isles. Other life-saving organizations successively sprang up in various other countries of the world.
To the Massachusetts Humane Society belongs the credit of the initiatory movement on this side of the Atlantic whereby rescues of the shipwrecked from the shore might be made effective. That organization was founded in 1785, and began placing houses of refuge on the coast of that state in 1789, and placing lifeboats there in 1807.
Organized effort on the part of the United States government for the rescue of the shipwrecked cast upon our shores did not begin to take form until about the middle of the nineteenth century. An appropriation of $5,000 was made by Congress in 1847 for furnishing means of rendering assistance to shipwrecked mariners, but it lay unused in the Treasury for two years, when it was permitted to be expended by the Massachusetts Humane Society. The next year Congress appropriated $10,000 to be expended on the coast of New Jersey, between Sandy Hook and Little Egg Harbor. Out of this sum eight boathouses were erected and put in working order. They were little more than rough board shanties, about 16x28 feet, and were scantily equipped. An appropriation of $20,000 made in March, 1849, proved sufficient to build and equip eight boathouses on Long Island, New York, and six on the New Jersey coast between Little Egg Harbor and Cape May. Among the appliances furnished was a life car which was destined soon to play an important part in the history of American life-saving. On January 12, 1850, the emigrant ship Ayrshire stranded about 400 yards offshore, at Squan Beach, New Jersey, in the night, during a terrific storm, having on board 201 persons, and since the surf ran so high that no boat could be launched, a line was shot out from a mortar, and the life car, with a rope attached to each end, was then drawn back and forth between shore and ship until the entire vessel’s company was saved.
At different times between 1847 and 1871, Congress appropriated small sums of money for the erection of boathouses at exposed points on our coasts. Provision also was made for equipping them, meagerly, with boats and other life-saving appliances, for the use of volunteer crews to be summoned from their homes, sometimes many miles away, when the awful necessity for their services arose. The appropriations thus made were deplorably insufficient, so that what there was of a life-saving establishment could only drift along much like a rudderless craft. Many appalling disasters occurred which served finally to arouse the public and Congress to their duty toward the mariner approaching our shores.
In England, as well as in America, it seemed to take some great, overwhelming, frightful disaster to awaken the public conscience to a sense of duty toward the navigator. This was evidenced by the wreck of the Adventurer, which was driven ashore during a tremendous gale of wind raging at Newcastle, England, when all the crew perished within the sight of thousands of horrified, terror-stricken, powerless inhabitants. A similar situation took place on our own coast in 1854, when with the suddenness of a bolt from the sky, there came out of the storm one night on the Jersey coast, the disaster of the ship Powhatan, carrying more than 300 persons, and although she lay but 200 feet offshore, every soul perished.
The present comprehensive life-saving system upon the sea and lake coasts of the United States, which since January 28, 1915, is incorporated in the Coast Guard, really had its earnest beginning in 1871. There began in that year a well-determined effort to place upon an efficient basis the straggling apologies of life-saving stations. Congress met the appeal of those in charge with increased authority and appropriations, which assistance gave impetus to the establishment and sent it forward on its journey of usefulness. An organized system was effected, regulations for the government of the service were promulgated, a coast patrol and a system of signals were established, regular drills with the boats and apparatus were prescribed, and a systematic arrangement for the central control and direction of the affairs of the service at Washington was adopted. Regular crews of skilled surfmen, in command of a keeper, were employed at stations; districts were organized in command of superintendents; old buildings were repaired; new stations were established extending the scope of the service, and all were properly manned and equipped. The result of the new organization was striking. At the end of the first year under the new order of things not one life from shipwreck had been sacrificed within the scope of the operations of the stations. Without tracing in detail the onward march of the service, suffice it to say that in the succeeding years Congress from time to time has authorized the extension of the service so that today there are 276 stations guarding the coasts from Quoddy Head, Maine, to the Rio Grande, from the Golden Gate to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the shores of our great inland seas, Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. There is also a station at Nome, Alaska, and one at the Falls of the Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky. These 276 stations, which are designated by names indicative of their geographical locations, are grouped into thirteen districts, each district being in charge of a district commander, a commissioned officer of the Coast Guard. Each station is complete in itself and is made up of the necessary buildings to comfortably and adequately house the personnel attached thereto and the boats, apparatus and equipment requisite for life-saving operations from the shore. The stations on the sea coasts generally are situated among the low sand hills common to such localities and are set sufficiently back to high-water mark to be safe from encroaching storm tides. While some of the stations on the Great Lakes are situated upon sand beaches, they are generally located at important harbors. All stations are located with reference to the natural dangers to shipping, and at points where they can be of the greatest aid to marine commerce. On some parts of the coast they are a considerable distance apart, while upon others they are comparatively close together, affording that opportunity for cooperation at shipwreck which is so often essential in the saving of life and of marine property.
This cordon of stations, primarily for the preservation of life and property from shipwreck, as indicated, serve readily, too, as military outposts or pickets, in case of national emergency. Their adaptability as such has been conclusively proved in two wars— the Spanish-American War and the World War.
The stations are equipped with such boats as are necessary—self-bailing and self- righting motor lifeboats, self-bailing motor surf boats and pulling surf boats for the heavier work, and with lesser boats for light, quick work. The character of the boat equipment at a station depends upon the needs of the locality and upon the conformation of the coast in the vicinity. The surf boats can be launched directly into the surf from the beach, while the lifeboats, on account of their bulk and weight, must be launched from ways into the quieter waters of inlets, bays, coves and other like indentations.
The stations also are fully equipped with all the gear commonly known as the breeches-buoy apparatus, for effecting line communication between the shore and a stranded vessel. This gear, at once an interesting study to the uninitiated, consists, in part, of a small bronze gun, known as the Lyle line-throwing gun, weighing with its carriage about 185 pounds and carrying a projectile, a solid elongated cylinder, which weighs 17 pounds and is 14 ½ inches in length. Into the base of the projectile an eye bolt is screwed for receiving the shot line, which is another part of the gear. When the gun is fired the weight and inertia of the line cause the projectile to reverse. The whip line, hawser, blocks, tally boards, breeches buoy, faking boxes, sand anchor, blocks and falls, signal flags, lanterns, beach lights, in the main, make up the rest of the gear. Perhaps a brief, simple description of the modus operandi of the gear at a stranded vessel would be interesting. The breeches-buoy apparatus, when in operation, might be said to be a rope suspension bridge between the shore and the ship. The gun—a piece of ordnance that shoots to save—first throws over the wreck the projectile, with the shot line attached in the manner before stated. By means of the shot line, the persons on the wrecked vessel haul out the whip line and by that the hawser. Attached to these are the tally boards, having on them printed instructions for their use, in English and French, and when the hawser is made fast on the ship, usually to the mast, the shore end is anchored and set up over a tripod. The breeches buoy, which is a ring buoy with stout breeches of duck attached, is slung to the hawser by a traveler block and attached to the whip line, by which the breeches buoy is drawn to and from the vessel, bringing to the shore with every home trip, one and, if need be, two persons. Thousands of persons have been safely landed in this ingenious way when no other means of rescue was possible. Another life-saving implement of interest is the life car, to which reference was previously made. The car is a little iron boat, covered over, and capable of taking in six or seven persons. It may be run on the hawser in the same way as the breeches buoy, or be drawn on the surface of the water. It is entered by a small hatch which may be fastened from the inside or outside. It is useful especially when women and children and sick people are among the shipwrecked.
Among other articles of equipment furnished the stations are roller skids, boat wagons, launching carriages, and in some cases trucks, tractors, and draft animals, life preservers, pyrotechnic signals, all recognized code and signal flags, medical supplies, libraries, and clothing for the shipwrecked furnished by benevolent societies, tools for effecting repairs, household and office furniture, kitchen utensils, pumps, fire-fighting apparatus, etc.
All stations are provided with the necessary outfit and furniture for housekeeping, for the men must cook, eat, and sleep at their stations.
The typical station-house, or main building, of today is a frame two-story and basement structure comprising boat and apparatus rooms, mess room, kitchen, storm- clothes room, office for the officer in charge, storeroom, dormitories, bathrooms, toilet facilities, heating system, sanitary and water supply systems, and electric-lighting system, together with the necessary outbuildings for various station purposes. In a number of cases the boats are kept in specially provided outlying boathouses, with marine railways for handling and launching the boats. A small lookout tower surmounts the roof of the main building. In some cases where vision is obstructed from the station building by natural or other objects, a specially built lookout tower is provided on the premises.
The launching ways, or marine railways, are of timber, concrete, and steel construction, as the necessities of the service require. They are single or double tracked. The boats are launched over these tracks on launching carriages, the lower end of the launchway being sufficiently submerged to permit the boat to leave its carriage and go afloat. For the larger boats hoisting engines are provided for hauling them out of the water into the boathouse.
A seventy-five-foot steel signal tower is provided on the station premises for the display of the colors and signals.
A system of coastal communication is maintained in the Coast Guard which provides all the stations with telephone service. By means of this service the stations are enabled instantly to transmit intelligence of marine casualties to the maritime centers of the country, and to summon the aid of the cutters, and of tugs and other agencies. This utilitarian adjunct of the Coast Guard, starting on our coast nearly half a century ago, gradually growing to its present state of perfection and efficiency, has been of inestimable value to the service, to marine commerce, to those interested in shipping, to the country as a protective agency in time of war, and to the public living on the outlying, desolate beaches skirting our seaboard.
The number of men normally at a station varies from eight to ten, according to local requirements, including the officer in charge, who is in command. The officer in charge is a boatswain or chief boatswain’s mate (life-saving). He is selected from the enlisted personnel of the stations. These men must be professionally, physically, and morally fit for the strenuous, serious duties and obligations of their calling. Their prime duty is performing wreck, rescue, and assistance work. They must be expert surfmen, expert boatmen, expert oarsmen, and trained to the treacheries of the broken waters of the beaches, and capable as well of taking their lifeboats to sea on long journeys of rescue. They must be skilled in the strategies and vicissitudes and eventualities which are a part of their hazardous occupation, for it is impossible to imagine the awful circumstances attending a shipwreck. In addition to their prime duties, they have their daily routine duties in the upkeep and care of the station buildings and premises, and in the service drills, such as boat drills, beach-apparatus drill, fire drill, practice in the various methods of signaling employed in the Coast Guard, drill for the resuscitation of the apparently drowned and so forth. The men must keep proficient in all these drills. Then there are the watches and patrols always religiously maintained at every station, every minute of the day and night. The coasts of the United States, Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific, and Great Lakes, where there are stations, are picketed every night, while the world lies comfortably in bed, in fair weather or foul, in storm, sleet, fog, rain, snow, or flood, by a corps of alert, sharp-eyed watchmen and patrolmen scanning the sea intently for the hapless victims of marine disaster ready on the instant to flash the torch—that signal of hope to the shipwrecked, that promise of aid if human hands can encompass it.
The beach patrol is an institution of distinctly American origin. It was devised by the former Life-Saving Service, and inaugurated in that service in the early seventies.
Thus generally is this important branch of the Coast Guard discussed. These stations constituted the Life-Saving Service of the United States, which long ago won its supremacy over all kindred institutions of the world. Its achievements and successes at shipwreck, many of them as brilliant as human effort can make them, have earned the praise of the civilized world. It brought to the Coast Guard in 1915 a record of 177,286 lives saved from the perils of the sea, from 1871 to 1914, inclusive.
Illustrating the work of the life-savers at shipwreck the following instance is related:
The sea—insatiable, with its angry, engulfing, all-devouring waters—-from time beyond reckoning swallowing up property and life exceeding human estimate. Fire—insidious, stealthful, creeping, licking and lapping with its red-flamed tongue, bursting into a spectacle of savage grandeur. A sea on fire—an inferno which the mind refuses to comprehend.
The skies, the earth, the seas and underseas were witnessing the invasion of terrible engines of destruction. Commerce, that mighty messenger of mutuality among nations, was halting at the ports of the world looking out upon the forbidden seas. The peoples of the world were in the throes of the mightiest conflict history had ever known. The ploughshare had been beaten into the sword. The energies of men and nations had turned from the pursuits of peace and production and were being sacrificed in the thralldom of war. War, War, the language of the sword!
Such was the situation in the world when the British steamship Mirlo, an oil tanker of nearly 7,000 tons burden, from New Orleans, Louisiana, bound to Norfolk, Virginia, with a cargo of gasoline and refined oil and a crew of fifty-two men, met her fate off Wimble Shoal Buoy, on August 16, 1918. The Mirlo was six days out and, barring mishaps, would have been in port in less than another twelve hours, but the edict of war had decreed otherwise.
At 4:30 in the afternoon of the date mentioned, the lookout of the Chicamacomico Coast Guard Station, North Carolina, situated about twenty-five miles north of the dreaded Hatteras, observed a huge volume of water suddenly spout into the air just at the stern of a passing steamer which was heading in a northerly direction, about seven miles east by south of the station, and apparently crash down on the steamer’s after deck. Following this, great clouds of dense, black smoke were seen to issue from that part of the vessel. The steamer continued on her way for a few minutes, when she swung around for the beach and then, as if uncertain as to her course, headed staggeringly offshore. Flames were now observed to be breaking through the smoke and the cannonading of heavy explosions was heard. At the first sign of trouble, the lookout reported the circumstance to the keeper in command of the station, who instantly summoned his crew and started for the beach with the power surf boat. The wind was blowing about twenty-five miles from the northeast, and a rough, strong sea was running onshore. The little craft was shoved into the surf and six hardy, fearless life- savers vaulted into her and started for the burning steamer, pushing the engine for all she was worth. When about five miles offshore, they met one of the steamer’s boats which had put off with the master and sixteen men. The master stated that his vessel was the Mirlo; that she carried a cargo of oil and gasoline and a crew of fifty-two men all told; that she had been torpedoed by a submarine; that the explosions which followed had set his ship on fire and that two other boats, one of which had capsized, had also put off with the remaining members of his crew and were then somewhere in the neighborhood of the stricken vessel. After directing the master what position to take and hold at sea, and cautioning him, by no means, except as a last resort, to attempt a landing through the surf—always full of peril to the untrained in the broken waters—but to await their return, the Coast Guard men sped on to the scene of trouble. Reaching the neighborhood of the steamer a terrifying spectacle calculated to daunt the stoutest hearts spread out before their eyes.
No mortal tongue could hope convey
The fury of the fearful fray.
It was a picture of hell broken loose belching the infernal elements of its pent-up wrath onto the bosom of God’s green, eternal sea. The Prince of Darkness rode the wave, flanked by all his diabolic myrmidons. The explosions had ripped open the steamer’s compartments, converted her into a veritable roaring furnace and sent her cargo of oil and gasoline over the sides in tumbling cataracts of fire, to be spread over the neighboring waters in an archipelago of flame and smoke. These islands of terror were scattered over a wide area. One of them was an acre of solid fire, with the flames rising five hundred feet high. Added to the turmoil of this concourse of fire and water, was the wreckage from the steamer which had now gone down. Here was a job, as Joe Lincoln would say, that “a common chap would shirk.” Duty with a Coast Guard man knows no fear. Somewhere in that pandemonium there are thirty-five men and they must be saved if it be humanly possible to save them. This was the single thought of the life-savers. It is no part of a Coast Guard man’s job to halt at the danger line. Fighting the sea in all its moods is an everyday occurrence with Coast Guard men but fighting a sea on fire is another kind of business. We are wont, the eye is pleased, to look upon the wave, watching it rise to its crest afar and speed on like a phalanx of sportful, fluttering, white-winged gulls, but when the great slick of the sea spreads out into a lake of fire and the feather-plumed crest is transformed into darting, staggered tongues of flame, with helpless human beings amidst it all, crying and moaning with pain and fear, the scene is translated into one of horror and revulsion from which the eye and mind recoil. Nothing daunted, unafraid, unconquerable, not wincing in the “fell clutch of circumstance,” these pleiads of the beach set out in this inferno of fire, blazing oil, and thrashing wreck stuff to the rescue of the sailors not yet accounted for. Cruising on the outer fringe of the fire they sighted, as the smoke cleared away for an instant, an overturned boat with six men clinging to it, listening to the voice of death. The moment called for action and speedy, determined action at that. By the utmost alertness and skill the Coast Guard men ran their boat through the floating wreckage and fire and wave, and were soon alongside the unfortunate sailors, who were lifted into the rescuing boat. “Safe in the lifeboat, sailor”—music, whose sweet cadences put the troubled soul at peace. Had the rescuers’ arrival been delayed many moments, the sailors must certainly have perished, for they had just about reached the limit of human endurance. They told the Coast Guard men that they had to dive under the water time after time to save themselves from being burned to death. They also stated that they had been forced to witness ten of their shipmates, who put off from the steamer in the boat with them, loosen their hold, one by one, on the upturned boat, sink and disappear forever in the burning sea. Victims of these conspiring gods —fire and water. What a death! The work of the Coast Guard men was not yet finished. There were still nineteen men unaccounted for and they must be found. Cruising around in the search, a greater distance from the locality of the wreck, the boat with the nineteen men was finally overhauled. It was drifting aimlessly with wind and sea, totally unmanageable, burdened dangerously low by its human freight and likely to go into the trough of the sea and capsize at any moment. Getting a line to this boat and taking it in tow, the Coast Guard men turned shoreward, seeking the place whither they had directed the master’s boat to proceed and await their return. They found the master’s boat at anchor in the quieter water outside the shore surf. Peril, however, still lay between the rescuers and sailors before their objective, the land, might be reached. Night had come on and it was black. The clouds spread their vast curtain over the scene, shutting out “the sentinel stars that set their watch in the sky”. The wind had freshened, kicking up a rough sea and turning the water inshore into a turbine of breaking waves. The job was by no means finished, for the ugly surf, always a menace, had to be reckoned with. But there was no such thing as waiting for more favorable conditions. The sailors were burned and bleeding and the Coast Guard men as well were suffering from the injuries they had incurred. The entire company was a sorry looking lot of men, blackened almost beyond recognition. The two ship’s boats were anchored about 600 yards off the beach and as many men as could be carried with safety were taken into the station surf boat for the first trip shoreward. She ran for the beach and superior surfmanship carried her safely over the breakers to her goal. The crew of a neighboring station, the Gull Shoal Station, were on hand to lend assistance. They rushed into the water, grasped the gunwales of the rescuing boat and with a mighty pull fetched her up on the sandy beach beyond the danger of the pursuing waves. This done, the surf boat put off for another load. Four times this venture was repeated and all the survivors of the steamer’s crew, forty-two men, were landed, happily without accident. What glory shines grander than this? As fast as the sailors were brought ashore they were carried by service teams to the Chicamacomico and Gull Shoal Stations, where they were given succor, shelter, clothing, and such first-aid attention as their condition required. The following day they were taken to Norfolk on a naval vessel. The ship’s boats which remained at anchor outside the surf while the transfer of the sailors to the shore was being made were then safely beached.
Hundreds of the inhabitants of the region gathered on the shore and intently, prayerfully, and tearfully watched the unfolding of this frightful drama. Among them were mothers, wives, and children of the Coast Guard men. They could see but little hope for the return of their loved ones out there on the sea battling with flame and wave; but calm resignation prevailed, for the families of Coast Guard men, like the men themselved, are inured to the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the hazardous work of the service and leap beyond, by some divine instinct, all selfish possession when human life is in the balance.
The British government, through its ambassador at Washington, forwarded to the government of the United States, to be delivered to the Coast Guard men participating in this rescue, gold medals for gallantry and humanity in saving life at sea, awarded by the King, together with a silver cup awarded by the Board of Trade of London to the officer in charge of the boat’s crew.
The Secretary of the Treasury awarded to each of the six Coast Guard men the gold life-saving medal of honor—the highest testimonial bestowed by the government of the United States for saving life from the perils of the sea. These medals were presented by the Commandant of the Coast Guard at a notable public gathering at Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the families, comrades, and friends of the men coming from all sections of that storm-swept country.