|
"The Bear is more than just a famous ship; she is a
symbol for all the service represents—for steadfastness, for
courage, and for constant readiness to help men and vessels in
distress." Capt. Stephen Evans, U.S. Coast Guard, 1790-1915
|
Painting of U.S. Revenue Cutter Service Bear, built in 1874, under
sail and steam on the Bering Sea Patrol sometime during the 1880s.
(U.S. Coast Guard courtesy image)
|
As the quote above indicates, the cutter Bear’s story reflects
the Service’s core values. This extraordinary ship, on which legends
were made, remains the most famous cutter in Coast Guard history.
Built in 1874, Bear was designed specifically to work in
ice-bound conditions, long before the use of icebreakers. It was a
198-foot, 700-ton barkentine rigged steamer constructed in Scotland
for sealing in northern waters. In 1874, iron proved too brittle for
use in the cold Arctic, so Bear’s hull was built of wood, reinforced
with six-inch thick oak planks and sheathed with Australian
“ironwood” for a total hull thickness of 10 inches. Bear also
boasted a steel-plated bow; retractable screw and, in case of long
periods underway, it had extra space for fuel, supplies or added
passengers.
In 1881, Lt. Adolphus Greely, a member of the
U.S. Army’s Signal Corps, led an expedition to study the weather and
winter conditions on Ellesmere Island northwest of Greenland.
Attempts to relieve Greely’s expedition in 1882 and 1883 proved
unsuccessful and members of the expedition began to die of disease
and starvation. In 1884, the U.S. Navy purchased Bear and, in June
1884, the crew managed to help rescue Greely and the five surviving
members of his expedition.
|
USS Bear anchored in Greenland in 1884 as part of the famous Greely
Relief Expedition. U.S. Navy image. (U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo)
|
In the spring of 1885, the Navy transferred Bear to the Revenue
Cutter Service and, in early November, began a voyage to California
around Cape Horn. Capt. Michael Healy took command of Bear in April
1886 after the cutter arrived at its homeport of San Francisco. A
veteran of Alaskan waters and skilled ice pilot, Healy was the first
African American to receive a commission from the U.S. government
and the first to command a federal ship. Under Healy, Bear served on
the Bering Sea Patrol, which comprised between 15,000 and 20,000
miles of cruising. Conditions on Bering Sea were harsh, dangerous,
stressful and at times deadly. Healy described the pressures of
serving on the Bering Sea assignment: “to stand for 40 hours on the
bridge of the Bear, wet, cold and hungry, hemmed in by impenetrable
masses of fog, tortured by uncertainty, and the good ship plunging
and contending with ice seas in an unknown ocean.”
As an Alaskan cutter, Bear crews saved lives at sea and preserved
the lives of those struggling to survive in Alaska’s frozen
frontier. The native people of Alaska had relied heavily on whaling
and fishing when the territory came under U.S. control. However,
after foreign whaling, fishing and sealing vessels entered Alaskan
waters, fish stocks began to diminish causing large-scale
malnutrition and starvation in native villages. To solve the
problem, Healy convinced authorities that Siberian reindeer should
be introduced to Alaska. Healy’s views won over government officials
and, in 1892, he brought over the first shipment of reindeer to the
Seward Peninsula and established a reindeer station at Port
Clarence. By 1930, Alaska’s domesticated deer herds totaled 600,000
head and 13,000 native Alaskans relied on the herds for life’s
essentials.
Under Healy, Bear’s humanitarian support of
Alaska not only included better nutrition for native communities,
the crews also protected endangered seal herds from poachers.
Cutters patrolled the waters off the Pribilof Islands seizing
poaching vessels of all nationalities. Bear enforced seal hunting
regulations into the early 1900’s and, in 1892, was on hand when
military action nearly erupted between the U.S. and Great Britain
over seizure of British sealing vessels.
By 1896, Healy had
served 10 grueling years on the Bering Sea Patrol. During this time,
Bear controlled illegal liquor distribution used to exploit native
people in the territory. Native people called the Bear “Omiak puck
pechuck tonika” or “the fire canoe with no whiskey.” Ironically,
while one of Bear’s missions was to interdict the smuggling of
illegal liquor to native Alaskans, the stress caused by a decade of
cruising encouraged Healy’s own drinking problem. In 1896, the
Service relieved him of command, dropped him to the bottom of the
captain’s list, and placed him out of Service for four years. The
Service later reinstated him and he commanded other cutters before
retiring in 1903 as the third-most senior officer in the Revenue
Cutter Service. Physically spent, he died a year later at the age of
65.
A year after Healy transferred off the Bear, eight
whaling ships became trapped in pack ice near Point Barrow, Alaska.
Concerned that the ship’s 265 crewmembers would starve to death, the
whaling companies appealed to President William McKinley to send a
relief expedition. For a second time in its history, Bear would
support a major rescue mission into the Arctic. In late November
1897, soon after completing its annual Alaskan cruise, the Bear
crews took on supplies and sailed north from Port Townsend,
Washington. This would be the largest of several mass rescues of
American whalers undertaken by Bear during the heyday of Arctic
whaling. And, it was the first time before recent global warming
that a ship deliberately sailed into Arctic waters during the harsh
Alaskan winter.
|
Painting showing Cutter Bear crew in one of its small boats rescuing
shipwrecked whalers in 1897. (U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo)
|
To lead the so-called Overland Relief Expedition, Bear’s captain,
Francis Tuttle, placed Lt. David Jarvis in charge of a team
including Lt. Ellsworth Bertholf, Surgeon Samuel Call and three
enlisted men, and tasked them with driving a herd of the newly
introduced reindeer to the whaling ships. Using sleds pulled by dogs
and reindeer, the rescue party set out on snowshoes in mid-December
1897. In late March 1898, after over three months and 1,500 miles in
ice and snow, the rescue party arrived at Point Barrow. The
expedition delivered 382 reindeer to the starving whalers with no
loss of human life. Jarvis later recounted the rigors of the
expedition: “Though the mercury was -30 degrees, I was wet through
with perspiration from the violence of the work. Our sleds were
racked and broken, our dogs played out, and we ourselves scarcely
able to move, when we finally reached the cape [at Pt. Barrow] . . .
.” For their work, Congress awarded Bertholf, Call, and Jarvis a
specially struck Gold Medal. Jarvis later assumed command of Bear,
as did Bertholf, who rose through the ranks to become the first
commandant of the modern Coast Guard.
Gold had been
discovered in Canada’s Klondike in 1896 bringing with it hundreds of
thousands of prospectors, miners and their followers to the coastal
towns of Alaska. The Klondike was followed by gold discoveries in
Nome and then Fairbanks, Alaska. This rapid migration to the Alaskan
gold fields continued for over 10 years and brought with it the need
for law enforcement, medical services and humanitarian relief. In
the boomtowns of Nome and St. Michel, revenue cuttermen from the
Bear and other cutters patrolled the streets, cared for the sick and
enforced the law where there had been none before. In addition, Bear
evacuated hundreds of invalids, criminals, and sick and desperate
miners from the gold fields back to Seattle, where they received
proper care.
During the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. military leaders had
harbored a fear that Spanish privateers would terrorize the West
Coast. Consequently, they hatched a plan to defend the coast using
revenue cutters stationed out of California and Washington. This
plan included arming and armoring the Cutter Bear. However, the war
ended before Bear had a chance to complete the Overland Relief
Expedition, so there was no need to fortify the cutter. During World
War I, the U.S. remained neutral through much of the war and faced
few threats in the Pacific theater after it entered the conflict.
Consequently, Bear continued its Bering Sea Patrols.
Bear
also provided humanitarian relief to regions outside of Alaska. For
example, the cutter was laid up in San Francisco when the 1906
Earthquake struck. In the quake’s aftermath, Bear’s men immediately
set to work using the cutter’s steam launch to transport goods to
the waterfront and worked with local authorities in search and
rescue and law enforcement. During this effort, Bear personnel
worked closely with U.S. Army units then under the overall command
of General Adolphus Greely. After the relief effort, President
Theodore Roosevelt personally thanked the Revenue Cutter Service for
its “prompt, gallant and efficient work.”
By the mid-1920s,
Bear had served Alaska for over 40 years and over 30 Bering Sea
Patrols. During that career, the whaling fleet had sailed out of the
Arctic fogs into the mists of memory and waves of miners had come
and gone. As Alaskan settlements developed, civilizing influences
once provided from the sea by Bear became locally available on land.
Life in Alaska had become more civilized as new technology shortened
distances between Alaska and the lower 48 states. These improvements
included modern aids to navigation and lighthouses, the telegraph,
military bases, steel steamships, the submarine cable, reliable
aircraft and the radio. The venerable cutter had witnessed many
changes in the north and, in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge
officially signed Bear over to the City of Oakland to become a
historic museum ship.
But the venerable Bear was destined for
greater glory. After retirement by the Coast Guard and a brief
career as a floating museum, Arctic explorer Richard Byrd
re-activated the famous cutter. In 1928, Byrd used Bear as one of
two ships for his first Antarctic expedition in which he established
the well-known research base at Little America. He returned home in
1930 and used Bear on a second expedition in 1933. Byrd’s
expeditions were the first American scientific missions to the
Antarctic and they resulted in advanced discoveries in weather,
climate and geography. Meanwhile, Bear still relied on its 19th
century sail rig and coal-fired steam engine. Describing his trusted
ice-ship, Byrd claimed: “There was a joy and spirit to the Bear’s
attack . . . She was built for the ice . . . She could lower [her]
head and bore in. Therein lay the merit of the honorable and ancient
Bear . . .”
In the late 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt
placed Byrd in charge of the United Sates Antarctic Service. And, in
1939, Byrd employed Bear once again to reach his base in Antarctica.
Prior to this cruise, to the Antarctic, technological change had
overtaken Bear’s original design and construction. Its new diesel
powerplant no longer required a tall coal-fired smoke stack and
Bear’s barkentine rig was altered to support a scout plane. By 1941,
with war clouds forming on the horizon, Bear evacuated the
scientific personnel stationed at the Antarctic bases and returned
to the States.
Bear not only served a variety of populations,
the cutter carried an ethnically and racially diverse crew. Like
other Pacific-based cutters, Bear proved to be a cultural and ethnic
“melting pot,” much more so than the nation it served. Bear carried
a crew whose native lands not only included U.S. natives, but also
Asian and Pacific Island nations, Europeans and Scandinavians. Bear
also held the distinction of carrying not only Michael Healy, the
first African American to take a ship into the Arctic; the cutter
also carried George Gibbs, Jr., the first person of African descent
to set foot on the Antarctic continent.
In 1944, at 70 years
of age, Bear was re-activated by the Navy for service in Greenland,
where the cutter undertook its first mission as a United States ship
in 1884. Bear served in the Greenland Patrol as USS Bear, only this
time it looked very different from its first year in the Navy. In
1941, the Navy cut down the masts to support radio gear, added
modern armament and equipped the vessel to carry an amphibious
reconnaissance aircraft. Unlike in 1884, Bear relied on a Coast
Guard crew during World War II. As a part of the Greenland Patrol,
Bear cruised Greenland’s waters and, in October 1941, brought home
the German trawler Buskoe, the first enemy vessel captured by the
U.S in WWII.
|
Appearing very different from its last Greenland visit in 1884, USS Bear returned in 1944 as part of the Coast Guard’s Greenland Patrol. (U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo)
|
In May 1944, the Navy decommissioned Bear for the last
time and transferred it to the U.S. Maritime Commission.
Bear remained in surplus until 1948 even though its timbers
were still sound. Buyers from Halifax purchased Bear hoping
to use the cutter in the sealing trade. Bear remained moored
in Halifax for years until its Canadian owners finally sold
it to a restaurant entrepreneur in Philadelphia. In March
1963, a seagoing tug took the old cutter in tow to its new
home. During the transit, heavy seas developed and, at a
point south of Halifax and 200 miles off the Massachusetts
coast, Bear parted the tug’s towline. Bear began taking on
water through its seams and the tug evacuated the crew
trapped aboard the powerless vessel. The historic ship began
sinking and finally left the surface of the water at 9:10
a.m. on March 19, 1963.
Over its long life, Bear
explored, policed, protected, nurtured, defended and helped
preserve the polar regions of the world and the populations
of humans and animals that inhabit the earth’s frozen
regions. During that time, the cutter performed the missions
of search and rescue, ice operations, law enforcement,
environmental protection, humanitarian relief, polar
research and exploration, and maritime defense. The cutter
recorded many firsts, such as the first to ship to deliver
reindeer to Alaska; first to journey into the Arctic in
winter; first to chart parts of the Bering Sea; and first
and only ship to serve under the U.S. Navy, Revenue Cutter
Service, Coast Guard and Antarctic Service. Cutter Bear and
the men who sailed aboard remain a part of Arctic legend and
the lore of the long blue line.
By William H. Thiesen, Atlantic Area Historian, USCG
Provided
through
Coast
Guard
Copyright 2017
Comment on this article |
