THE SAILOR'S SAFEGUARDS--IMPROVEMENTS IN MARINE ARCHITECTURE--THE MAPPING
OF THE SEAS--THE LIGHTHOUSE SYSTEM--BUILDING A LIGHTHOUSE--MINOT'S LEDGE
AND SPECTACLE REEF--LIFE IN A LIGHTHOUSE--LIGHTSHIPS AND OTHER
BEACONS--THE REVENUE MARINE SERVICE--ITS FUNCTION AS A SAFEGUARD TO
SAILORS--ITS WORK IN THE NORTH PACIFIC--THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE--ITS
RECORD FOR ONE YEAR--ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT--THE PILOTS OF NEW
YORK--THEIR HARDSHIPS AND SLENDER EARNINGS--JACK ASHORE--THE SAILORS' SNUG
HARBOR.
Into the long struggle between men and the ocean the last half century has
witnessed the entrance of System, Science and Cooperation on the side of
man. They are three elements of strength which ordinarily assure victory
to the combatant who enlists them, but complete victory over the ocean is
a thing never to be fully won. Build his ships as he may, man them as he
will, map out the ocean highways never so precisely, and mark as he may
with flaring beacons each danger point, yet in some moment of wrath the
winds and the waves will rise unconquerable and sweep all the barriers,
and all the edifices erected by man out of their path. To-day all
civilized governments join in devices and expedients for the protection
and safeguard of the mariner. Steel vessels are made unsinkable with
water-tight compartments, and officially marked with a Plimsoll load line
beneath which they must not be submerged. Charts of every ocean are
prepared under governmental supervision by trained scientists. Myriads of
lights twinkle from headland to reef all round the world. Pilots are
taught to find the way into the narrowest harbors, though they can scarce
see beyond the ship's jibboom, and electric-lighted buoys mark the
channel, while foghorns and sirens shriek their warnings through flying
scud and mist. Revenue cutters ply up and down the coast specially charged
to go swiftly to the rescue of vessels in distress, and life-saving
stations dot the beaches, fitted with every device for cheating the
breakers of their prey. The skill of marine architects, and all the
resources of Government are taxed to the utmost to defeat the wrath of
Ocean, yet withal his toll of life and property is a heavy one.
Now and again men discuss the nature of courage, and try to fix upon the
bravest deed of history. Doubtless _the_ bravest deed has no place in
history, for it must have been the act of some unknown man committed with
none to observe and recount the deed. Gallantry under the stimulus of
onlookers ready to cheer on the adventurer and to make history out of his
exploit, is not the supremest type. Surely first among the brave, though
unknown men, we must rank that navigator, who, ignorant of the compass and
even of the art of steering by the stars, pressed his shallop out beyond
sight of land, into the trackless sea after the fall of night. Such a one
braved, beside the ordinary dangers of the deep, the uncouth and mythical
terrors with which world-wide ignorance and superstition had invested it.
The sea was thought to be the domain of fierce and ravenous monsters, and
of gods quite as dangerous to men. Prodigious whirlpools, rapids, and
cataracts, quite without any physical reason for existence, were thought
to roar and roll just beyond the horizon. It is only within a few decades
that the geographies have abandoned the pleasing fiction of the
maelstrom, and a few centuries ago the sudden downpour of the waters at
the "end of the world" was a thoroughly accepted tenet of physical
geography. Yet men, adventurous and inquisitive, kept ever pushing forward
into the unknown, until now there remain no strange seas and few uncharted
and unlighted. The mariner of these days has literally plain sailing in
comparison with his forbears of one hundred and fifty years ago.
Easily first among the sailor's safeguards is the lighthouse system. That
of the United States is under the direct control of the Light House Board,
which in turn is subject to the authority of the Secretary of the
Treasury. It is the practice of every nation to light its own coast;
though foreign vessels enjoy equal advantages thereby with the ships of
the home country. But the United States goes farther. Not only does it
furnish the beacons to guide foreign ships to its ports; but, unlike Great
Britain and some other nations, it levies no charge upon the
beneficiaries. In order that American vessels might not be hampered by the
light dues imposed by foreign nations, the United States years ago bought
freedom from several states for a lump sum; but Great Britain still exacts
dues, a penny a ton, from every vessel passing a British light and
entering a British port.
The history of the lighthouses of the world is a long one, beginning with
the story of the famous Pharos, at Alexandria, 400 feet high, whose light,
according to Ptolemy, could be seen for 40 miles. Pharos long since
disappeared, overthrown, it is thought, by an earthquake. France possesses
to-day the oldest and the most impressive lighthouse--the Corduan tower,
at the mouth of the Gironde, begun in the fifteenth century. In the United
States, the lighthouse system dates only from 1715, when the first
edifice of this character was begun at the entrance to Boston harbor. It
was only an iron basket perched on a beacon, in which were burned "fier
bales of pitch and ocum," as the colonial records express it Sometimes
tallow candles illuminated this pioneer light of the establishment of
which announcement was made in the Boston _News_, of September 17, 1716,
in this wise: "Boston. By Vertue of an Act of Assembly made in the First
Year of His Majesty's Reign, For Building & Maintaining a Light House upon
the Great Brewster (called Beacon Island) at the Entrance of the Harbor of
Boston, in order to prevent the loss of the Lives & Estates of His
Majesty's Subjects; the said Light House has been built; And on Fryday
last the 14th Currant the Light was kindled; which will be very useful for
all Vessels going out and coming in to the Harbor of Boston for which all
Masters shall pay to the Receiver of Impost, One Peny per Ton Inwards, and
another Peny Outwards, except Coasters, who are to pay Two Shillings each
at their clearance Out. And all Fishing Vessels, Wood Sloops, &c. Five
Shillings each by the Year."
When the United States Government was formed, with the adoption of the
Constitution in 1789, there were just eight lights on the coast, namely,
Portsmouth Light, N.H.; the Boston Light, mentioned above; Guerney Light,
near Plymouth, Mass.; Brand Point Light, on Nantucket; Beaver Tail Light,
R.I.; Sandy Hook Light; Cape Henlopen Light, Del.; and Charleston Main
Light, on Morris Island, S.C. The Pacific coast, of course, was dark. So,
too, was the Gulf of Mexico, though already a considerable shipping was
finding its way thither. Of the multitudes of lights that gleam and
sparkle in Long Island Sound or on the banks of the navigable rivers that
open pathways into the interior, not one was then established. But as
soon as a national government took the duty in hand, the task of lighting
the mariner's pathway was pressed with vigor. By 1820 the eight lights had
increased to fifty-five. To-day there are 1306 lighthouses and lighted
beacons, and forty-five lightships. As for buoys, foghorns, day beacons,
etc., they are almost uncounted. The board which directs this service was
organized in 1852. It consists of two officers of high rank in the navy,
two engineer officers of the army, and two civilians of high scientific
attainments. One officer of the army and one of the navy are detailed as
secretaries. The Secretary of the Treasury is _ex officio_ president of
the board. Each of the sixteen districts into which the country is
divided is inspected by an army and a navy officer, and a small navy of
lighthouse tenders perform the duty of carrying supplies and relief to the
lighthouses up and down our three coasts.
[Illustration: MINOT'S LEDGE LIGHT]
The planning of a lighthouse to stand on a submerged reef, in a stormy
sea, is an engineering problem which requires extraordinary qualities of
technical skill and scientific daring for its solution, while to raise the
edifice, to seize the infrequent moments of low calm water for thrusting
in the steel anchors and laying the heavy granite substructure on which
shall rise the slender stone column that shall defy the assaults of wind
and wave, demands coolness, determination, and reckless courage. Many
lights have been built at such points on our coast, but the ponderous
tower of Minot's Ledge, at the entrance to Boston Harbor, may well be
taken as a type.
Minot's Ledge is three miles off the mouth of Boston Bay, a jagged reef of
granite, wholly submerged at high tide, and showing a scant hundred yards
of rock above the water at the tide's lowest stage. It lies directly in
the pathway of ships bound into Boston, and over it, on even calm days,
the breakers crash in an incessant chorus. Two lighthouses have reared
their heads here to warn away the mariner. The first was completed in
1848, an octagonal tower, set on wrought-iron piles extending five feet
into the rock. The skeleton structure was expected to offer little surface
to the shock of the waves, and the wrought iron of which it was built
surely seemed tough enough to resist any combined force of wind and water;
but in an April gale in 1851 all was washed away, and two brave keepers,
who kept the lamp burning until the tower fell, went with it. Late at
night, the watchers on the shore at Cohasset, three miles away, heard the
tolling of the lighthouse bell, and through the flying scud caught
occasional glimpses of the light; but morning showed nothing left of the
structure except twisted stumps of iron piles, bent and gnarled, as though
the waves which tore them to pieces had been harder than they.
Then, for a time, a lightship tossed and tugged at its cables to warn
shipping away from Minot's Ledge. Old Bostonians may still remember the
gallant Newfoundland dog that lived on the ship, and, when excursion boats
passed, would plunge into the sea and swim about, barking, until the
excursionists would throw him tightly rolled newspapers, which he would
gather in his jaws, and deliver to the lightship keepers to be dried for
the day's reading. But, while the lightship served for a temporary beacon,
a new tower was needed that might send the warning pencil of light far out
to sea. Minot's was too treacherous a reef and too near a populous ocean
highway to be left without the best guardian that science could devise.
Accordingly, the present stone tower was planned and its construction
begun in 1855. The problem before the designer was no easy one. The famous
Eddystone and Skerryvore lighthouses, whose triumphs over the sea are
related in English verse and story, were easier far to build, for there
the foundation rock is above water at every low tide, while at Minot's
Ledge the bedrock on which the base of the tower rests is below the level
of low tide most of the year. The working season could only be from April
1 to September 15. Nominally, that is almost six months; but in the first
season the sea permitted exactly 130 hours' work; in the second season
157, and in the third season, 130 hours and 21 minutes. The rest of the
time the roaring surf held Minot's Ledge for its own. Nor was this all.
After two years' work, the piles and débris of the old lighthouse had
been cleared away, and a new iron framework, intended to be anchored in
solid masonry, had been set, when up came a savage gale from the
northeast; and when it cleared all was swept away. Then the spirit of the
builder wavered, and he began to doubt that any structure built by men
could withstand the powers of nature at Minot's Ledge. But, in time, the
truth appeared. A bark, the _New Eagle_, heavy laden with cotton, had been
swept right over the reef, and grounded at Cohasset. Examination showed
that she had carried away in her hull the framework of the new tower.
Three years' heart-trying work were necessary before the first cut stone
could be laid upon the rock. In the meantime, on a great table at
Cohasset, a precise model of the new tower was built, each stone cut to
the exact shape, on a scale of one inch to the foot, and laid in mortar.
This model completed, the soil on the hillside near by was scraped away.
The granite rock thus laid bare was smoothed and leveled off into a great
flat circle, and there, stone by stone, the tower was built exactly as in
time it should rise in the midst of the seething cauldron of foam three
miles out at sea. While the masons ashore worked at the tower, the men at
the reef watched their chance, and the moment a square yard of ledge was
out of water at the fall of the tide, they would leap from their boats,
and begin cutting it. A circle thirty feet in diameter had to be leveled,
and iron rods sunk into it as anchorages for the masonry. To do that took
just three years of time, though actually less than twenty-five days of
working time. From the time the first cut stone was laid until the
completion of the tower, was three years and three months, though in all
there were but 1102 working hours.
One keeper and three assistants guard the light over Minot's Ledge. Three
miles away across the sea, now blue and smiling, now black and wrathful,
they can see the little group of dwellings on the Cohasset shore which the
Government provides for them, and which shelter their families. The term
of duty on the rocks is two weeks; at the end of each fortnight two happy
men go ashore and two grumpy ones come off; that is, if the weather
permits a landing, for keepers have been stormbound for as long as seven
weeks. The routine of duty is much the same in all of the lighthouses. By
night there must be unceasing watch kept of the great revolving light;
and, if there be other lights within reach of the keeper's glass, a watch
must be kept on them as well, and any eclipse, however brief, must be
noted in the lighthouse log. By day the lens must be rubbed laboriously
with a dry cloth until it shines like the facets of a diamond. Not at all
like the lens we are familiar with in telescopes and cameras is this
scientifically contrived device. It is built up of planes and prisms of
the finest flint glass, cut and assembled according to abtruse
mathematical calculations so as to gather the rays of light from the great
sperm-oil lamp into parallel rays, a solid beam, which, in the case of
Minot's Ledge light, pierces the night to a distance of fifteen miles. On
foggy days, too, the keepers must toll the fog-bell, or, if the light be
on the mainland, operate the steam siren which sends its hoarse bellow
booming through the gray mist to the alert ears of the sailor miles away.
The regulations do not prescribe that the keeper of a light shall hold
himself ready to go to the assistance of castaways or of wrecked vessels;
but, as a matter of fact, not a few of the most heroic rescues in the
history of the coast have been performed by light-keepers. In the number
of lives saved a woman--Ida Lewis, the keeper of the Limerock Light in
Newport Harbor--leads all the rest. But there is hardly any light so
placed that a boat can be launched that has not a story to tell of brave
men putting out in frail boats in the teeth of a roaring gale to bring in
some exhausted castaways, to carry a line to some stranded ship, or to
guide some imperiled pleasure-seekers to safety.
While the building of the Minot's Ledge light had in it more of the
picturesque element than attaches to the record of construction of the
other beacons along the coast of the United States, there are but few
erected on exposed points about which the builders could not tell some
curious stories of difficult problems surmounted, or dire perils met and
conquered. The Great Lakes, on which there are more than 600 light
stations, offer problems of their own to the engineer. Because of the
shallowness of their waters, a gale speedily kicks up a sea which old
Ocean itself can hardly outdo, and they have an added danger in that
during the winter they are frozen to such a depth that navigation is
entirely abandoned. The lights, too, are abandoned during this season, the
Lighthouse Board fixing a period in the early winter for extinguishing
them and another in spring for reilluminating them. But between these
dates the structures stand exposed to the tremendous pressure of such
shifting floes of ice as are not found on the ocean outside of the Arctic
regions. The lake lighthouse, the builders of which had most to apprehend
from this sort of attack, is that at Spectacle Reef, in Lake Huron, near
the Straits of Mackinaw. It is ten miles from land, standing on a
limestone reef, and in the part of the lakes where the ice persists
longest and moves out with the most resistless crush. To protect this
lighthouse, it was necessary to build a rampart all about it, against
which the ice floes in the spring, as the current moves them down into
Lake Huron, are piled up in tumultuous disorder. In order to get a
foundation for the lighthouse, a huge coffer-dam was built, which was
launched like a ship, towed out to the reef and there grounded. When it
was pumped out the men worked inside with the water surrounding them
twelve to fourteen feet above their heads. Twenty months of work, or three
years in time, were occupied in erecting this light. Once in the spring,
when the keepers returned after the closed season to prepare for the
summer's navigation, they found the ice piled thirty feet against the
tower, and seventy feet above the doorway, so that they were compelled, in
order to enter the lighthouse, to cut through a huge iceberg of which it
was the core.
The Spectacle Reef light, like that at Minot's Ledge, is a simple tower of
massive masonry, and this is the approved design for lighthouses exposed
to very heavy strain from waves or ice. A simpler structure, used in
tranquil bays and in the less turbulent waters of the Gulf, is the
"screw-pile" lighthouse, built upon a skeleton framework of iron piling,
the piles having been so designed that they bore into the bed of the ocean
like augers on being turned. The "bug-light" in Boston Harbor, and the
light at the entrance to Hampton Roads are familiar instances of this sort
of construction. For all their apparent lightness of construction, they
are stout and seaworthy, and in their erection the builders have often had
to overcome obstacles and perils offered by the sea scarcely less savage
than those overcome at Minot's Ledge. Indeed, a lighthouse standing in its
strength, perhaps rising out of a placid summer sea, or towering from a
crest of rock which it seems incredible the sea should have ever swept,
gives little hint to the casual observer of the struggle that brave and
skilful men had to go through with before it could be erected. The light
at Tillamook Rock, near the mouth of the Columbia River, offers a striking
illustration of this. It is no slender shaft rising from a tumultuous sea,
but a spacious dwelling from which springs a square tower supporting the
light, the whole perched on the crest of a small rock rising precipitously
from the sea to the height of some forty feet. Yet, sturdy and secure as
the lighthouse now looks, its erection was one of the hardest tasks that
the board ever undertook. So steep are the sides of Tillamook Rock that to
land upon it, even in calm weather, is perilous, and the foreman of the
first party that went to prepare the ground for the light was drowned in
the attempt. Only after repeated efforts were nine men successfully landed
with tools and provisions. Though only one mile from shore they made
provision for a prolonged stay, built a heavy timber hut, bolting it to
the rock, and began blasting away the crest of the island to prepare
foundations for the new lighthouse. High as they were above the water, the
sea swept over the rock in a torrent when the storms raged. In one tempest
the hut was swept away and the men were barely able to cling to the rock
until the waves moderated. That same night an English bark went to pieces
under the rock, so near that the workmen above, clinging for dear life to
their precarious perch, could hear the shouts of her officers giving their
commands. A bonfire was kindled, in hope of warning the doomed sailors of
their peril, but it was too late, for the ship could not be extricated
from her position, and became a total wreck, with the loss of the lives of
twenty of her company. To-day a clear beam of light shines out to sea,
eighteen miles from the top of Tillamook, and only the criminally careless
captain can come near enough to be in any danger whatsoever. Such is one
bit of progress made in safeguarding the sea.
More wearing even than life in a lighthouse is that aboard the lightships,
of which the United States Government now has forty-five in commission.
The lightship is regarded by the Government as merely a makeshift, though
some of them have been in use for more than a quarter of a century. They
are used to mark shoals and reefs where it has thus far been impossible to
construct a lighthouse, or obstructions to navigation which may be but
temporary. While costing less than lighthouses, they are not in favor with
the Lighthouse Board, because the very conditions which make a light most
necessary, are likely to cause these vessels to break from their moorings
and drift away, leaving their post unguarded. Their keepers suffer all the
discomforts of a sailor's life and most of its dangers, while enjoying
none of its novelty and freedom. The ships are usually anchored in shoal
water, where the sea is sure to run high, and the tossing and rolling of
the craft makes life upon it insupportable. They are always farther out to
sea than the lighthouses, and the opportunities for the keepers to get
ashore to their families are correspondingly fewer. In heavy storms their
decks are awash, and their cabins dripping; the lights, which must be
watched, instead of being at the top of a firm, dry tower, are perched on
reeling masts over which the spray flies thick with every wave, and on
which is no shelter for the watcher. During long weeks in the stormy
season there is no possible way of escaping from the ship, or of bringing
supplies or letters aboard, and the keepers are as thoroughly shut off
from their kind as though on a desert island, although all day they may
see the great ocean liners steaming by, and through their glasses may be
able to pick out the roofs of their cottages against the green fields far
across the waves.
[Illustration: WHISTLING BUOY]
Less picturesque than lighthouses and lightships, and with far less of
human interest about them, are the buoys of various sorts of which the
Lighthouse Board has more than one thousand in place, and under constant
supervision. Yet, among the sailor's safeguards, they rank near the head.
They point out for him the tortuous pathway into different harbors; with
clanging bell or dismal whistle, they warn him away from menacing shallows
and sunken wrecks. The resources of science and inventive genius have been
drawn upon to devise ways for making them more effective. At night they
shine with electric lights fed from a submarine cable, or with steady gas
drawn from a reservoir that needs refilling only three or four times a
year. If sound is to be trusted rather than light, recourse is had to a
bell-buoy which tolls mournfully as the waves toss it about above the
danger spot, or to a whistling buoy which toots unceasingly a locomotive
whistle, with air compressed by the action of the waves. The whistling
buoy is the giant of his family, for the necessity for providing a heavy
charge of compressed air compels the attachment to the buoy of a tube
thirty-two feet or more deep, which reaches straight down into the water.
The sea rising and falling in this, as the buoy tosses on the waves, acts
as a sort of piston, driving out the air through the whistle, as the water
rises, admitting more air as it falls.
Serving a purpose akin to the lighthouses, are the post and range-lights
on the great rivers of the West. Very humble devices, these, in many
instances, but of prodigious importance to traffic on the interior
waterways. A lens lantern, hanging from the arm of a post eight or ten
feet high, and kept lighted by some neighboring farmer at a cost of $160 a
year, lacks the romantic quality of a lighthouse towering above a hungry
sea, but it is because there are nearly two thousand such lights on our
shallow and crooked rivers that we have an interior shipping doing a
carrying trade of millions a year, and giving employment to thousands of
men.
Chief among the sailors' safeguards is the service performed by the United
States revenue cutters. The revenue cutter service, like the lighthouse
system, was established very shortly after the United States became a
nation by the adoption of the Constitution. Its primary purpose, of
course, is to aid in the enforcement of the revenue laws and to suppress
smuggling. The service, therefore, is a branch of the Treasury Department,
and is directly under the charge of the Secretary of the Treasury. In the
course of years, however, the revenue cutter service has extended its
functions. In time of war, the cutters have acted as adjuncts to the navy,
and some of the very best armed service on the high seas has been
performed by them. Piracy in the Gulf of Mexico was largely suppressed by
officers of revenue cutters, and pitched battles have more than once been
fought between small revenue cutters and the pirates of the Louisiana and
the Central American coasts.
But the feature of the service which is of particular pertinence to our
story of American ships and sailors, is the part that it has taken in
aiding vessels that were wrecked, or in danger of being wrecked. Many
years ago, the Secretary of the Treasury directed the officers of the
revenue marine to give all possible aid to vessels in distress wherever
encountered. Perhaps the order was hardly necessary. It is the chiefest
glory of the sailor, whether in the official service, or in the merchant
marine, that he has never permitted a stranger ship to go unaided to
destruction, if by any heroic endeavor he could save either the ship or
her crew. The annals of the sea are full of stories of captains who risked
their own vessels, their own lives, and the lives of their people, in
order to take castaways from wrecked or foundering vessels in a high sea.
But the records of the revenue marine service are peculiarly fruitful of
such incidents, because it was determined some thirty years ago that
cutters should be kept cruising constantly throughout the turbulent winter
seasons for the one sole purpose of rendering aid to vessels in distress.
In these late years, when harbors are thoroughly policed, and when steam
navigation has come to dominate the ocean, there is little use for the
revenue cutter in its primary quality of a foe to smugglers. People who
smuggle come over in the cabins of the finest ocean liners, and the
old-time contraband importer, of the sort we read of in "Cast Up By The
Sea," who brings a little lugger into some obscure port under cover of a
black night, has entirely disappeared.
A duty which at times has come very near to true war service, has been the
enforcement of the _modus vivendi_ agreed upon by Great Britain and the
United States, as a temporary solution of the problem of the threatened
extinction of the fur-bearing seals. This story of the seal "fishery," and
the cruel and wholesale slaughter which for years attended it, is one of
the most revolting chapters in the long history of civilized man's warfare
on dumb animals. It is to be noted that it is only the civilized man who
pursues animals to the point of extinction. The word "savage" has come to
mean murderous, bloodthirsty, but the savages of North America hunted up
and down the forests and plains for uncounted centuries, living wholly on
animal food, finding at once their livelihood and their sport in the
chase, dressing in furs and skins, and decking themselves with feathers,
but never making such inroads upon wild animal life as to affect the herds
and flocks. Civilized man came with his rifles and shot-guns, his
eagerness to kill for the sake of killing, his cupidity, which led him to
ignore breeding-seasons, and seek the immediate profit which might accrue
from a big kill, even though thereby that particular form of animal life
should be rendered extinct. In less than forty years after his coming to
the great western plains, the huge herds of buffalo had disappeared. The
prairie chicken and the grouse became scarce, and fled to the more remote
regions. Of lesser animal life, the woods and fields in our well-settled
states are practically stripped bare. A few years ago, it became apparent
that for the seals of the North Pacific ocean and Bering Sea, early
extinction was in store. These gentle and beautiful animals are easily
taken by hunters who land on the ice floes, where they bask by the
thousands, and slaughter them right and left with heavy clubs. The eager
demand of fashionable women the world over for garments made of their
soft, warm fur, stimulated pot-hunters to prodigious efforts of murder. No
attention was given to the breeding season, mothers with young cubs were
slain as ruthlessly as any. Schooners and small steamers manned by as
savage and lawless men as have sailed the seas since the days of the
slave-trade, put out from scores of ports, each captain eager only to make
the biggest catch of the year, and heedless whether after him there should
be any more seals left for the future. This sort of hunting soon began to
tell on the numbers of the hapless animals, and the United States
Government sent out a party of scientific men in the revenue cutter
"Lincoln," to investigate conditions, particularly in the Pribylof
Islands, which had long been the favorite sealing ground. As a result of
this investigation, the United States and Great Britain entered into a
treaty prohibiting the taking of seals within sixty miles of these
islands, thus establishing for the animals a safe breeding-place. The
enforcement of the provisions of this treaty has fallen upon the vessels
of the revenue service, which are kept constantly patrolling the waters
about the islands, boarding vessels, counting the skins, and investigating
the vessel's movements. It has been a duty requiring much tact and
firmness, for many of the sealers are British, and the gravest
international dissension might have arisen from any unwarrantable or
arbitrary interference with their acts. The extent of the duty devolving
upon the cutters is indicated by some figures of their work in a single
year. The territory they patrolled covered sixty degrees of longitude and
twenty-five of latitude, and the cruising distance of the fleet was 77,461
miles. Ninety-four vessels were boarded and examined, over 31,000 skins
counted, and four vessels were seized for violation of the treaty. In the
course of this work, the cutters engaged in it have performed many useful
and picturesque services. On one occasion it fell to one of them to go to
the rescue of a fleet of American whalers who, nipped by an unusually
early winter in the polar regions, were caught in a great ice floe, and in
grave danger of starving to death. The men from the cutters hauled food
across the broad expanse of ice, and aided the imprisoned sailors to win
their freedom. The revenue officers, furthermore, have been to the people
of Alaska the respected representatives of law and order, and in many
cases the arbiters and enforcers of justice. Along the coast of Alaska
live tribes of simple and ignorant Indians, who were for years the prey of
conscienceless whites, many of whom turned from the business of sealing,
when the two Governments undertook its regulation, to take up the easier
trade of fleecing the Indians. The natives were all practised trappers and
hunters, and as the limitations upon sealing did not apply to them, they
had pelts to sell that were well worth the buying. Ignorant of the values
of goods, eager for guns and glittering knives, and always easily
stupefied with whisky, the Indians were easy prey to the sea traders. For
a gun of doubtful utility, or a jug of fiery whisky, the Indian would not
infrequently barter away the proceeds of a whole year of hunting and
fishing, and be left to face the winter with his family penniless. It has
been the duty of the officers of the revenue cutters serving on the North
Pacific station to suppress this illicit trade, and to protect the
Indians, as far as possible, from fraud and extortion. The task has been
no easy one, but it has been discharged so far as human capacity would
permit, so that the Alaska Indians have come to look upon the men wearing
the revenue uniform as friends and counselors, while to a great extent
the semi-piratical sailors who infested the coast have been driven into
other lines of dishonest endeavor. Perhaps not since the days of Lafitte
and the pirates of Barataria has any part of the coast of the United
States been cursed with so criminal and abandoned a lot of sea marauders
as have for a decade frequented the waters off Alaska, the Pribylof
Islands, and the sealing regions. The outlawry of a great part of the seal
trade, and the consequent heavy profits of those who are able to make one
or two successful cruises uncaught by officers of the law, have attracted
thither the reckless and desperate characters of every sea, and with these
the revenue cutters have to cope. Yet so diversified are the duties of
this service that the revenue officers may turn from chasing an illicit
sealer to go to the rescue of whalers nipped in the ice, or may make a
cruise along the coast to deliver supplies from the Department of
Education to mission schools along Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, or to
carry succor to a party of miners known to be in distress. The rapid
development of Alaska since the discoveries of gold has greatly added to
the duties of this fleet.
[Illustration: REVENUE CUTTER]
The revenue service stands midway between the merchant service and the
navy. It may almost be said that the officers engaged in it suffer the
disadvantages of both forms of sea service without enjoying the advantages
of either. Unlike navy officers, they do not have a "retired list" to look
forward to, against the time when they shall be old, decrepit, and unfit
for duty. Congress has, indeed, made provision for placing certain
specified officers on a roll called "permanent waiting orders," but this
has been but a temporary makeshift, and no officer can feel assured that
this provision will be made for him. Promotion, too, while quite as slow
as in the navy, is limited. The highest officer in the service is a
captain, his pay $2500 a year--but a sorry reward for a lifetime of
arduous labor at sea, during which the officer may have been in frequent
peril of his life, knowing all the time that for death in the discharge of
duty, the Government will pay no pension to his heirs unless the disaster
occurred while he was "cooperating with the navy." In one single year the
records of the revenue service show more than one hundred lives saved by
its activity, without taking into consideration those on vessels warned
away from dangerous points by cutters. Yet neither in pay, in provision
for their old age, or for their families in case of death met in the
discharge of duty, are the revenue officers rewarded by the Government as
are navy officers, while public knowledge and admiration for the service
is vastly less than for the navy. It is a curious phenomenon, and yet one
as old at least as the records of man, that the professional killer--that
is to say, the officer of the army or navy--has always been held in higher
esteem socially, and more lavishly rewarded, than the man whose calling it
is to save life.
To a very considerable degree the life-saving service of the United States
is an outgrowth of the revenue marine. To sojourners by the waterside, on
the shores of either ocean or lake, the trim little life-saving stations
are a familiar sight, and summer pleasure-seekers are entertained with the
exhibition drills of the crews in the surf. It is the holiday side of this
service as a rule that the people chiefly know, but its records show how
far from being all holiday pleasure it is. In 1901 the men of the
life-saving corps were called to give aid to 377 wrecked ships. Of
property in jeopardy valued at $7,354,000, they saved $6,405,035 worth. Of
93,792 human beings in peril of death in the waters, all save 979 were
saved. These are the figures relating only to considerable shipwrecks, but
as life-saving stations are established at nearly every harbor's mouth,
and are plentiful about the pleasure cruising grounds of yachts and small
sailboats, hundreds of lives are annually saved by the crews in ways that
attract little attention. In 1901 the records show 117 such rescues.
The idea of the life-saving service originated with a distinguished
citizen of New Jersey, a State whose sandy coast has been the scene of
hundreds of fatal shipwrecks. In the summer of 1839 William A. Newell, a
young citizen of that State, destined later to be its Governor, stood on
the beach near Barnegat in a raging tempest, and watched the Austrian brig
"Count Perasto" drift onto the shoals. Three hundred yards from shore she
struck, and lay helpless with the breakers foaming over her. The crew
clung to the rigging for a time, but at last, fearing that she was about
to go to pieces, flung themselves into the raging sea, and strove to swim
ashore. All were drowned, and when the storm went down, the dead bodies of
thirteen sailors lay strewn along the beach, while the ship itself was
stranded high and dry, but practically unhurt, far above the water line.
"The bow of the brig being elevated and close to the shore after the storm
had ceased," wrote Mr. Newell, in describing the event long years after,
"the idea was forced quickly upon my mind that those unfortunate sailors
might have been saved if a line could have been thrown to them across the
fatal chasm. It was only a short distance to the bar, and they could have
been hauled ashore in their small boat through, or in, the surf.... I
instituted experiments by throwing light lines with bows and arrows, by
rockets, and by a shortened blunderbuss with ball and line. My idea
culminated in complete success, however, by the use of a mortar, or a
carronade, and a ball and line. Then I found, to my great delight, that it
was an easy matter to carry out my desired purpose."
Shortly after interesting himself in this matter Mr. Newell was elected to
Congress, and there worked untiringly to persuade the national Government
to lend its aid to the life-saving system of which he had conceived the
fundamental idea. In 1848 he secured the first appropriation for a service
to cover only the coast of New Jersey. Since then it has been continually
extended until in 1901 the life-saving establishment embraced 270 stations
on the Atlantic, Pacific, and lake coasts. The appropriation for the year
was $1,640,000. For many years the service was a branch of the revenue
marine, and when in 1878 it was made a separate bureau, the former chief
of the revenue marine bureau was put at its head. The drill-masters for
the crews are chosen from the revenue service, as also are the inspectors.
[Illustration: LAUNCHING A LIFEBOAT THROUGH THE SURF]
The methods of work in the life-saving service have long been familiar,
partly because at each of the recurring expositions of late years, the
service has been represented by a model station and a crew which went
daily through all the operations of shooting a line over a stranded ship,
bringing a sailor ashore in the breeches-buoy or the life-car, and
drilling in the non-sinkable, self-righting surf-boat. Along the Atlantic
coast the stations are so thickly distributed that practically the whole
coast from Sandy Hook to Hatteras is continually under patrol by watchful
sentries. Night and day, if the weather be stormy or threatening,
patrolmen set out from each station, walking down the beach and keeping a
sharp eye out for any vessel in the offing. Midway between the stations
they meet, then each returns to his own post. In the bitter nights of
winter, with an icy northeaster blowing and the flying spray, half-frozen,
from the surf, driven by the gale until it cuts like a knife, the
patrolman's task is no easy one. Indeed, there is perhaps no form of human
endeavor about which there is more constant discomfort and positive danger
than the life-saving service. It is the duty of the men to defy danger, to
risk their lives whenever occasion demands, and the long records of the
service show uncounted cases of magnificent heroism, and none of failure
in the face of duty.
A form of seafaring which still retains many of the characteristics of the
time when Yankee sailors braved all seas and all weather in trig little
wooden schooners, is the pilot service at American ports, and notably at
New York. Even here, however, the inroads of steam are beginning to rob
the life of its old-time picturesqueness, though as they tend to make it
more certain that the pilot shall survive the perils of his calling, they
are naturally welcomed. Under the law every foreign vessel entering an
American port must take a pilot. If the captain thinks himself able to
thread the channel himself, he may do so; but nevertheless he has to pay
the regular pilot fee, and if the vessel is lost, he alone is responsible,
and his owners will have trouble with the insurance companies. So the law
is acquiesced in, perhaps not very cheerfully, and there have grown up at
each American port men who from boyhood have studied the channels until
they can thread them with the biggest steamship in the densest fog and
never touch bottom. New York as the chief port has the largest body of
pilots, and in the old days, before the triumph of steam, had a fleet of
some thirty boats, trim little schooners of about eighty tons, rigged like
yachts, and often outsailing the best of them. In those days the rivalry
between the pilots for ships was keen and the pilot-boats would not
infrequently cruise as far east as Sable Island to lay in wait for their
game. That was in the era of sailing ships and infrequent steamers, and it
was the period of the greatest mortality among the pilots; for staunch as
their little boats were, and consummate as was their seamanship, they were
not fitted for such long cruises. The marine underwriters in those days
used to reckon on a loss of at least one pilot-boat annually. Since 1838
forty-six have been lost, thirteen going down with all on board. In late
years, however, changes in the methods of pilotage have greatly decreased
the risks run by the boats. When the great ocean liners began trying to
make "record trips" between their European ports and Sandy Hook, their
captains became unwilling to slow up five hundred miles from New York to
take a pilot. They want to drive their vessels for every bit of speed that
is in them, at least until reported from Fire Island. The slower boats,
the ocean tramps, too, look with disfavor on shipping a pilot far out at
sea, for it meant only an idler aboard, to be fed until the mouth of the
harbor was reached. So the rivalry between the pilots gave way to
cooperation. A steamer was built to serve as a station-boat, which keeps
its position just outside New York harbor, and supplies pilots for the
eight boats of the fleet that cruise over fixed beats a few score miles
away. But this change in the system has not so greatly reduced the
individual pilot's chance of giving up his life in tribute to Neptune, for
the great peril of his calling--that involved in getting from his
pilot-boat to the deck of the steamer he is to take in--remains unabated.
[Illustration: THE EXCITING MOMENT IN THE PILOT'S TRADE]
Professional pride no less than hope of profit makes the pilot take every
imaginable risk to get to his ship. He draws no regular salary, but his
fee is graduated by the draft of the vessel he pilots. When a ship is
sighted coming into port, the pilot-boat makes for her. If she has a blue
flag in her rigging, half way up, by day, she has a pilot aboard. At
night, the pilot-boats show a blue flare, by way of query. If the ship
makes no answer, she is known to be supplied, and passes without slowing
up; but if in response to signal she indicates that she is in need of a
pilot, the exciting moment in the pilot's trade is at hand. Perhaps the
night is pitchy dark, with a gale blowing and a heavy sea on: but the
pilot slips on his shore clothes and his derby hat--it is considered
unprofessional to wear anything more nautical--and makes ready to board.
The little schooner runs up to leeward of where the great liner, with her
long rows of gleaming portholes, lies rolling heavily in the sea. Sharp up
into the wind comes the midget, and almost before she has lost steerage
way a yawl is slid over the side, the pilot and two oarsmen tumble into
it, and make for the side of the steamship. To climb a rope-ladder up the
perpendicular face of a precipice thirty feet high on an icy night is no
easy task at best; but if your start is from a boat that is being tossed
up and down on a rolling sea, if your precipice has a way of varying from
a strict perpendicular to an overhanging cliff, and then in an instant
thrusting out its base so that the climber's knees and knuckles come with
a sharp bang against it, while the next moment he is dropped to his
shoulders in icy sea-water, the difficulties of the task are naturally
increased. The instant the pilot puts his feet on the ladder he must run
up it for dear life if he would escape a ducking, and lucky he is if the
upward roll does not hurl him against the side of the ship with force
enough to break his hold and drop him overboard. Sometimes in the dead of
winter the ship is iced from the water-line to the rail, and the task of
boarding is about equivalent to climbing a rolling iceberg. But whatever
the difficulty, the pilot meets and conquers it--or else dies trying. It
is all in the day's work for them. Accidents come in the form of boats run
down by careless steamers, pilots crushed against the side or thrown into
the sea by the roll of the vessel, the foundering of the pilot-boat or its
loss on a lee shore; but still the ranks of the pilots are kept full by
the admission to a long apprenticeship of boys who are ready to enter this
adventurous and arduous calling. Few occupations require a more assiduous
preparation, and the members of but few callings are able to guard
themselves so well against the danger of over-competition. Nevertheless
the earnings of the pilots are not great. They come under the operation of
the rule already noted, that the more dangerous a calling is, the less are
its rewards. Three thousand dollars a year is a high income for a pilot
sailing out of New York harbor, and even this is decreasing as the ships
grow bigger and fewer. Nor can he be at all certain as to what his income
will be at any time, for the element of luck enters into it almost as much
as into gambling. For weeks he may catch only small ships, or, the worst
ill-luck that can befall a pilot, he may get caught on an outbound ship
and be carried away for a six weeks' voyage, during which time he can earn
nothing. But the pilot, like the typical sailor of whatever grade, is
inured to hard luck and accustomed to danger.
Such are some of the safeguards which modern science and organization have
provided for the sailor in pursuit of his always hazardous calling. Many
others of course could be enumerated. The service of the weather bureau,
by which warning of impending storms is given to mariners, is already of
the highest utility. The new invention of wireless telegraphy, by which a
ship at sea may call for aid from ashore, perhaps a thousand miles away,
has great possibilities. Modern marine architecture is making steamships
almost unsinkable, more quickly responsive to their helms, more seaworthy
in every way. Perhaps with the perfection of the submarine boat, ships,
instead of being tossed on the boisterous surface of the waves, may go
straight to their destination through the placid depths of ocean. But
whatever the future may bring, the history of the American sailor will
always bear evidence that he did not wait for the perfection of safety
devices to wrest from the ocean all that there was of value in the
conquest; that no peril daunted him, nor was any sea, however distant, a
stranger to his adventurous sail.
Much has been said and written of the improvidence of the sailor, of his
profligacy when in port, his childlike helplessness when in the hands of
the landsharks who haunt the waterside streets, his blind reliance upon
luck to get him out of difficulties, and his utter indifference to all
precautionary provisions for the proverbial rainy day. Perhaps the sailor
has been getting a shade the worse of it in the literature on this
subject, for he, himself, is hardly literary in his habits, and has not
been able to tell his own story. The world has heard much of the jolly
Jack Tars who spend in a few days' revel in waterside dives the whole
proceeds of a year's cruise; but it has heard less of the shrewd schemes
which are devised for fleecing poor Jack, and applied by every one with
whom he comes in contact, from the prosperous owner who pays him off in
orders that can only be conveniently cashed at some outfitter's, who
charges usurious rates for the accommodation, down to the tawdry drab who
collects advance money on account of half a dozen sailor husbands. The
seaman landing with money in his pocket in any large town is like the
hapless fish in some of our much-angled streams. It is not enough to avoid
the tempting bait displayed on every side. So thick are the hooks and
snares that merely to swim along, intent on his own business, is likely to
result sooner or later in his being impaled on some cruel barb. Not enough
has been said, either, of the hundreds of American lads who shipped before
the mast, made their voyages around Cape Horn and through all the Seven
Seas, resisted the temptations of the sailors' quarters in a score of
ports, kept themselves clean morally and physically, and came, in time, to
the command and even the ownership of vessels. Among sailors, as in other
callings, there are the idle and the industrious apprentices, and the
lesson taught by Hogarth's famous pictures is as applicable to them that
go down to the sea in ships as to the workers at the loom. It is doubtful,
too, whether the sailor is either more gullible or more dissolute when in
port than the cowboy when in town for a day's frolic, or the miner just in
camp with a pocket full of dust, after months of solitude on his claim.
Men are much of a sort, whatever their calling. After weeks of monotonous
and wearing toil, they are apt to go to extremes when the time for
relaxation comes. Men whose physical natures only are fully developed seek
physical pleasures, and the sailor's life is not one to cultivate a taste
for the quieter forms of recreation.
But the romance that has always surrounded the sailor's character, his
real improvidence, and his supposedly unique simplicity have, in some
slight degree, redounded to his advantage. They have led people in all
lands to form organizations for his aid, protection, and guidance,
hospitals to care for him in illness, asylums and homes to provide for the
days of his old age and decrepitude. Best known of all these charitable
institutions for the good of Jack Tar is the Sailor's Snug Harbor, whose
dignified buildings on Staten Island look out across the finest harbor in
the world to where New York's tall buildings tower high above the
maintop-gallant mast of the biggest ship ever built. This institution,
founded just one hundred years ago by the will of Captain Robert R.
Randall, himself an American sailor of the old type, who amassed his
fortune trading to all the countries on the globe, now has an income of
$400,000 annually, and cares for 900 old sailors, each of whom must have
sailed for at least five years under the American flag.
* * * * *
A new chapter in the story of the American sailor is opening as this book
is closed. The period of the decadence of the American merchant marine is
clearly ended, and everything gives assurance that the first quarter of
this new century will do as much toward re-establishing the United States
flag on the high seas as the first quarter of the nineteenth century did
toward first putting it there. As these words are being written, every
shipyard in the United States is busy, and some have orders that will tax
their capacity for three years to come. New yards are being planned and
small establishments, designed only to build pleasure craft, are reaching
out after greater things. The two biggest steamships ever planned are
building near New London, where four years ago was no sign of shipyard or
factory. The Great Lakes and the Pacific coast ring with the sound of the
steel ship-builder's hammer.
But will the American sailor share in the new life of the American ship?
The question is no easy one to answer. Modern shipping methods offer
little opportunity for ambitious lads to make their way from the
forecastle to the owner's desk. The methods by which the Cleavelands,
Crowninshields, Lows, and their fellows in the early shipping trade won
their success, have no place in modern economy. As I write, the actual
head of the greatest shipping concern the world has ever known, is a Wall
Street banker, whose knowledge of the sea was gained from the deck of a
private steam yacht or the cabin _de luxe_ of a fast liner, and who has
applied to the shipping business only the same methods of stock
manipulating that made him the greatest railroad director in the world
before he thought to control the ocean as well. With steam, the sailor has
become a mere deckhand; the captain a man of business and a
disciplinarian, who may not know the names of the ropes on a real ship;
the owner a corporation; the voyages mere trips to and fro between
designated ports made with the regularity and the monotony of a
sleeping-car's trips between Chicago and San Francisco. Until these
conditions shall materially change, there is little likelihood that the
sea will again attract restless, energetic, and ambitious young Americans.
Men of the type that we have described in earlier chapters of this book do
not adopt a life calling that will forever keep them in subordinate
positions, subject to the whims and domination of an employing
corporation. A genial satirist, writing of the sort of men who became
First Lords of the Admiralty in England, said:
"Mind your own business and never go to sea,
And you'll come to be the ruler of the Queen's navee."
Perhaps a like situation confronts the American merchant marine in its new
development.