The Revenue Cutter Service
The Revenue Cutter Service also greatly influenced the maritime history of these states. The Revenue Cutter Service’s largest role in the Pacific region came in Alaskan waters. After the Alaska purchase, the revenue cutter Lincoln transported officials to tour the vast new territory. The Bering Sea became the center of the service’s multifaceted duties in the north. Eventually, the work would formally be called the Bering Sea Patrol. For nearly 100 years, revenue cutters sailed to the frigid, fog-shrouded waters of the Bering Sea in the spring and returned to their homeports in the fall.
The Bering Sea Patrol started as a reaction to the large scale harvesting of the fur seals. The illegal killing of these animals threatened to lead to their extinction and to deprive the U.S. of a revenue source. The revenue cutters however, soon found themselves engaged in more duties than simply protecting seals. The small cutters provided a badly needed search and rescue service in an extremely isolated region. In 1880 and 1881, Corwin, under the command of Captain Calvin L. Hooper, searched for the steamer Jeannette and two whalers, Mount Wollaston and Vigilant. Throughout the seasons, Hooper maneuvered his cutter through ice-blocked waters and even sent parties overland by dog sled waiting for the ice to break. Hooper’s skills earned the praise of Captain Robley D. "Fighting Bob" Evans, commander of all U.S. forces in the sea. Evans noted that Hooper was an able, fearless man who would carry out orders and accomplish his mission.
The cutters also came close to playing a military role in the Bering Sea. During the Bering Sea controversy of the 1890s, tensions between the U.S. and Great Britain were heightened over fur seals harvesting. The cutter Corwin, operating with the Navy, apprehended the British steamer Coquitlan. The ship was bonded for $600,000 which Evans thought, "paid for most of the expenses of our summers work."
The cutters performed a variety of tasks. One of the more famous cutters in Alaska was Nunivak, a stern wheel cutter assigned to the Yukon River in 1899. Under the command of First Lieutenant John C. Cantwell the cutter’s crew enforced customs, navigational laws and performed scientific studies in the region. Cantwell and his crew also enforced a quarantine at St. Michael, near the mouth of the Yukon River. A smallpox epidemic was raging in Nome and the cutter’s work stopped the spread of the disease. One writer noted; "smallpox along the Yukon River was made practically impossible by the work of the Nunivak."
A theme that runs throughout the reports and logs of the officers of the Bering Sea Patrol is the concern for and the effort to help settlers and natives in these isolated regions. To provide services, the cutters visited villages from Unalaska to Point Barrow providing medical care and food. In 1891 the legendary cutter Bear, under the command o Captain Michael A. "Hell Roaring Mike" Healy, transported reindeer from Siberia to Alaska in an experiment aimed at turning natives from hunters to herdsmen and provided them with a steady food supply. In 1897-1898, First Lieutenant David H. Jarvis, Second Lieutenant Ellsworth P. Bertholf and Dr. Samuel J. Call, all of the cutter Bear, drove a herd of reindeer, in winter’s brutal grip, from Teller, Alaska, on the Bering Sea, to Point Barrow. Here, they provided food for a fleet of whalers frozen in the ice.
The Revenue Cutter Service provided a form of law and order in this isolated unforgiving land. They performed these duties in a region where no other law enforcement agency existed. The Revenue Service for many years acted as the only law enforcement agency and provided many civil functions. They even performed marriage ceremonies and held church services.
The cutters that sailed the Bering Sea Patrol were assigned to ports on the West Coast and Hawaii. The revenue cutter Thetis, homeported in Honolulu from 1909 to 1916, made three voyages to the north. When Thetis was not sailing in the north it performed a variety of duties in the more temperate climates of its homeport.
A cutterman recalled duty aboard Thetis during this period: "We used to make trips to Midway and visit all the islands in between. We used to inspect ships suspected of bringing opium from the Orient. If we had reason to believe some ship was trying to smuggle opium into Hawaii we would go aboard and try to find it."
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson began searching for a means to streamline the federal government. One suggestion was to combine the Revenue Cutter Service and the Navy. This did not meet with approval, but a proposal to merge the Life-Saving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service did. So on January 15, 1915, the measure was approved and the Coast Guard was established.
For the next five years little changed in the normal operating procedures for the new Coast Guard in Alaska and Hawaii. The Bering Sea Patrol continued to operate as before and errands of mercy remained high on its list of priorities. Changing technology hastened the end of the Bering Sea Patrol which ended officially in 1964. Aircraft could now reach many of the villages formally reached only by ship. This, however, does not mean cutters do not still work in the area. In fact, with large scale fishing in the Bering Sea, the Coast Guard is perhaps busier than before in the region. Alaska comprises 56 percent of the U.S. coastline and 70 percent of domestic and foreign fish are caught in these waters.
The Life-Saving Service
The Coast Guard has a deservedly strong reputation as a lifesaving organization. The foundation for the modern reputation was the U.S. Life-Saving Service.
This service, however, got a relatively late start in both territories. In the age of sail, the best way to assist shipwrecks close to the beach was by shore-based small boats. Life-Saving stations were usually established in areas known to be treacherous to ships. The nature of shipping, terrain and weather in the Pacific Ocean around Hawaii dictated that the islands would have no stations. Alaska met all the requirements of terrain and weather, but for many years the amount of shipping did not warrant the establishment of stations.
The Alaskan gold rush drew thousands of fortune-seekers to the town of Nome. Nome’s offshore anchorage provided no shelter and is extremely shallow, so passengers and freight had to be transferred to shore from two miles out by small boats. This eventually led to the establishment of a Life-Saving station there in 1905. This station marked the northern-most of all units in the service. There was a refuge station at Point Barrow but this was not controlled by the Life-Saving Service.
Keeper Thomas A. Ross and his crew of surfmen performed lookout duties and beach patrols. The surfmen rescued people from ice floes, grounded ships and capsized boats. The lifesavers also helped the local fire department fight fires. The surfmen performed other humanitarian services, Between 1918 and 1919, a devastating influenza epidemic swept Alaska. Keeper Ross sent a dog sled with surfman Levi Edward Ashton and driver Anders Peter Brandt, to Cape Prince of Wales and other villages with medicine and supplies. The two men were gone for almost two months.
The Nome Station was slowly reduced in the early 1930's, due again, to the changing nature of shipping and technology. Ross recommended cuts, but in 1934 fire destroyed the station and it was never rebuilt. The Coast Guard used other buildings during World War II, but by 1951 the station was permanently closed.
The middle to late 1930s marked important changes for the Coast Guard in the Pacific area. To replace aging cutters, the Coast Guard acquired new ships, the best of which were the 327-foot Secretary Class. These tough cutters could carry a fixed-wing aircraft on board. The long range of the ships marked them for duty in the Pacific. The cutter Taney went to Honolulu while Spencer went to Cordova, Alaska. World War II had a great impact on the Coast Guard in Alaska and Hawaii. Before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, district operations and personnel were limited in Hawaii. In July of 1939, only 30 officers and 200 men were assigned to the district. Floating units consisted of Taney, two 125-foot patrol boats, two buoy tenders and five smaller patrol boats. Also within the district were 12 major light stations, 52 unattended fixed aids and a few other miscellaneous units.
At the beginning of the war, the district encompassed an area bounded roughly from the Hawaiian Islands to Midway Island, Wake Island and to Palmyra Island. Four years later, the area of responsibility stretched to include Japan, the Philippines and to near Samoa. And 200 officers and 3,000 enlisted people served in the district. Coast Guardsmen in the Pacific served aboard transports protecting convoys and were coxswains aboard landing craft during invasions. Even the seemingly non-combatant buoy tenders were at times in the midst of the fighting. Sweetbriar, for example, repeatedly put up anti-aircraft fire against Kamikaze attacks. In May 1945, it assisted in downing a Japanese "Zeke" and although the Coast Guard did play an important combat role in the Pacific, one of the most lasting legacies of the war for the service was LORAN.
LORAN (Long-Range Aids to Navigation) uses radio signals to help ships and aircraft obtain an accurate position. Clearly, any device that would help navigators in the vast region of the Pacific would be of great help to the war effort. On March 1,1944, LT Alvin L. Loose and a small party of men built the first LORAN A station in the Pacific at Baker Island. LORAN units were built with increasing speed afterwards.
From November 8, 1944, to June 22, 1945, 19 stations were built throughout the Pacific Islands. Problems of supply and administration were enormous. The distance from Honolulu to units in the Marianas, for example, was 4,600 miles. "No other Coast Guard District," one official history stated, "was faced with such problems of distance, supply and transportation."
The LORAN A stations were classified as secret and each unit was given a code word. Sometimes six months would pass before a re-supply ship would appear. Eighteen months was a regular tour of duty. One official report aptly summed up the duty: "For the personnel who operated the stations, there was no glory and no medals only dull, monotonous routine watches."
One of the most isolated of all LORAN stations and the one most Coast Guardsmen of the 1950s and 1960s came to recognize as the symbol of LORAN duty was French Frigate Shoals located 500 miles west-northwest of Honolulu. The station was on Tern Island, which was bulldozed into the shape of an aircraft carrier during World War II. It provided a landing strip for the invasion of Midway Island. The length of the runway is 3,100 feet, with a width of 410 feet and a mean elevation of nine feet above sea level.
On this small island, two officers and 18 enlisted men served for a one year period. The station was supplied weekly by C-130 aircraft from Air Station Barbers Point. The crew was once evacuated by a helicopter from a New Zealand frigate when heavy seas washed over the island in 1969. On June 30, 1979, the unit was disestablished when LORAN C and OMEGA electronic navigational aids systems came into being.
The 339-foot cutter Kukui maintained many of these isolated stations and was a workhorse for the islands. Coast Guardsmen assigned to this ship had to be jacks-of-all-trades and move from island to island. In 1972 Kukui touched at, or worked on stations at Johnson, Atoll, Marcus, Saipan, Guam, Yap, Palau Islands, Anguor, Koror, Keelung, Iwo Jima, Yokosuka, Kure, Midway and French Frigate Shoals. Other navigational devices began to replace LORAN A stations and the need for this type of ship ended. Kukui was decommissioned in 1972.
The modern Coast Guard has benefited greatly due to advances in technology and it has changed the nature of search and rescue. The helicopter, combined with better motor lifeboats, now insures that people can be reached faster than ever before. In fact, shore-based rescue operations can now reach further out to sea than ever before. The famous Prinsendam case in the Gulf of Alaska is a perfect example. In 1980, the cruise ship was disabled by fire and 519 passengers and crew took to lifeboats. The nearest point of land was 129 miles away. The Coast Guard together with merchant marine, Air Force, and the Canadians, turned a potential disaster into a dramatic rescue of all passengers and crew.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, the service has been many things to those in the 14th and 17th Districts: a marine policeman; a doctor; a protector of life and a guide to safe harbors. Today, the men and women of the Coast Guard, building upon a strong foundation of service to others, now surpass the efforts of their illustrious predecessors in their service to those in Alaska and Hawaii.
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