American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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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.

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