American Merchant Ships and Sailors Part 14

A gaff--a stick about the size and length of a broom handle with a large, sharp hook attached--lay near at hand, and was frequently used in landing a fish over the side. Occasionally a fish would free itself from the trawl hook as it reached the surface, but the fisherman, with remarkable dexterity, would grab the gaff, and hook the victim before it could swim out of reach. What would be on the next hook was always an interesting uncertainty, for it seemed that all kinds of fish were represented. Cod and haddock were, of course, numerous, but hake and pollock struggled on many a hook. Besides these, there was the brim, a small, red fish, which is excellent fried; the cat fish, also a good pan fish; the cusk, which is best baked; the whiting, the eel, the repulsive-looking skate, the monk, of which it can almost be said that his mouth is bigger than himself, and last, but not least, that ubiquitous fish, the curse of amateur harbor fishers, the much-abused sculpin. Nor were fish alone caught on the hooks, for stones were frequently pulled up, and one dory brought in a lobster, which had been hooked by his tail. Some of the captives showed where large chunks had been bitten out of them by larger fish, and sometimes, when a hook appeared above water, there would be nothing on it but a fish head. This was certainly a case of one fish taking a mean advantage of another."

Such is the routine of trawling when weather and all the fates are propitious. But the Banks have other stories to tell--stories of men lost in the fog, drifting for long days and nights until the little keg of fresh water and the scanty store of biscuit are exhausted, and then slowly dying of starvation, alone on the trackless sea; of boats picked up in winter with frozen bodies curled together on the floor, huddled close in a vain endeavor to keep warm; of trawlers looking up from their work to see towering high above them the keen prow of an ocean grayhound, and thereafter seeing nothing that their dumb lips could tell to mortal ears.

Many a story of suffering and death the men skilled in the lore of the Banks could tell, but most eloquent of all stories are those told by the figures of the men lost from the fis.h.i.+ng ports of New England. From Gloucester alone, in 1879, two hundred and fifty fishermen were lost. In one storm in 1846 Marblehead lost twelve vessels and sixty-six men and boys. In 1894, and the first month of 1895, one hundred and twenty-two men sailing out of Gloucester, were drowned. In fifty years this little town gave to the hungry sea two thousand two hundred men, and vessels valued at nearly two million, dollars. Full of significance is the fact that every fis.h.i.+ng-boat sets aside part of the proceeds of its catch for the widows'

and orphans' fund before making the final division among the men. One of the many New England poets who have felt and voiced the pathos of life in the fis.h.i.+ng villages, Mr. Frank H. Sweet, has told the story of the old and oft-repeated tragedy of the sea in these verses:

"THE WIVES OF THE FISHERS

"The boats of the fishers met the wind And spread their canvas wide, And with bows low set and taffrails wet Skim onward side by side; The wives of the fishers watch from sh.o.r.e, And though the sky be blue, They breathe a prayer into the air As the boats go from view.

"The wives of the fishers wait on sh.o.r.e With faces full of fright, And the waves roll in with deafening din Through the tempestuous night; The boats of the fishers meet the wind Cast up by a scornful sea; But the fishermen come not again, Though the wives watch ceaselessly."

**Transcriber's Notes: Page 317: changed cherry to cheery.

Page 329: page ends "cry of 'Fish"; next page begins with a new paragraph, punctuation added to read 'Fis.h.!.+'

Page 330: changed volent to violent changed trumphantly to triumphantly

CHAPTER X

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--LIGHTs.h.i.+PS 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 HARDs.h.i.+PS AND SLENDER EARNINGS--JACK ASh.o.r.e--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 a.s.sure victory to the combatant who enlists them, but complete victory over the ocean is a thing never to be fully won. Build his s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p'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 compa.s.s 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 superst.i.tion had invested it.

The sea was thought to be the domain of fierce and ravenous monsters, and of G.o.ds 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ps of the home country. But the United States goes farther. Not only does it furnish the beacons to guide foreign s.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sing 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 oc.u.m," 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 a.s.sembly 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 s.h.i.+llings each at their clearance Out. And all Fis.h.i.+ng Vessels, Wood Sloops, &c. Five s.h.i.+llings each by the Year."

When the United States Government was formed, with the adoption of the Const.i.tution in 1789, there were just eight lights on the coast, namely, Portsmouth Light, N.H.; the Boston Light, mentioned above; Guerney Light, near Plymouth, Ma.s.s.; 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 s.h.i.+pping was finding its way thither. Of the mult.i.tudes 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 lights.h.i.+ps. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 a.s.saults 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 sh.o.r.e at Coha.s.set, 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 lights.h.i.+p tossed and tugged at its cables to warn s.h.i.+pping away from Minot's Ledge. Old Bostonians may still remember the gallant Newfoundland dog that lived on the s.h.i.+p, and, when excursion boats pa.s.sed, 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 lights.h.i.+p keepers to be dried for the day's reading. But, while the lights.h.i.+p 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 debris of the old lighthouse had been cleared away, and a new iron framework, intended to be anch.o.r.ed 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 Coha.s.set. 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 Coha.s.set, 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 ash.o.r.e 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 a.s.sistants 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 Coha.s.set sh.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 gla.s.s, cut and a.s.sembled 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sistance 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 extinguis.h.i.+ng them and another in spring for reilluminating them. But between these dates the structures stand exposed to the tremendous pressure of such s.h.i.+fting 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 ma.s.sive 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 ill.u.s.tration of this. It is no slender shaft rising from a tumultuous sea, but a s.p.a.cious 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, st.u.r.dy 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 sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 lights.h.i.+ps, of which the United States Government now has forty-five in commission.

The lights.h.i.+p is regarded by the Government as merely a makes.h.i.+ft, 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 s.h.i.+ps are usually anch.o.r.ed 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 ash.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 gla.s.ses may be able to pick out the roofs of their cottages against the green fields far across the waves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHISTLING BUOY]

Less picturesque than lighthouses and lights.h.i.+ps, 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 s.h.i.+ne 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 Const.i.tution. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+p to go unaided to destruction, if by any heroic endeavor he could save either the s.h.i.+p 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 lat.i.tude, 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 fis.h.i.+ng, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 makes.h.i.+ft, and no officer can feel a.s.sured 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 sh.o.r.es 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 s.h.i.+ps. 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 s.h.i.+pwrecks, 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 s.h.i.+pwrecks. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e. All were drowned, and when the storm went down, the dead bodies of thirteen sailors lay strewn along the beach, while the s.h.i.+p 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e in their small boat through, or in, the surf.... I inst.i.tuted 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 s.h.i.+p, bringing a sailor ash.o.r.e 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 steams.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 seamans.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+pping 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 s.h.i.+p. He draws no regular salary, but his fee is graduated by the draft of the vessel he pilots. When a s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p makes no answer, she is known to be supplied, and pa.s.ses 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 sh.o.r.e 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 steams.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p with force enough to break his hold and drop him overboard. Sometimes in the dead of winter the s.h.i.+p 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 sh.o.r.e; but still the ranks of the pilots are kept full by the admission to a long apprentices.h.i.+p of boys who are ready to enter this adventurous and arduous calling. Few occupations require a more a.s.siduous preparation, and the members of but few callings are able to guard themselves so well against the danger of over-compet.i.tion. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps, or, the worst ill-luck that can befall a pilot, he may get caught on an outbound s.h.i.+p 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.