Coastguard station

“ And the old-time prejudice against the men has had plenty of time to die away during the eighty years or so in which the coastguard service has existed. There are still, however, some eleven or twelve old hulks in use as coastguard stations; principally in the estuaries of the Thames and Medway.
The Preventive Water-Guard, from which the existing coastguard service was developed, was not only the old coast-blockade reorganised, but was an extension of it from the shores of Hampshire, Sussex, Kent, and Essex, to the entire coast-line of the United Kingdom. ”

“ Meanwhile the passage of the years brought changes to Carrowkeel. The Admiralty established a coastguard station near the village, and arranged, for the greater security of the Empire, that men in blue-serge clothes should take it in turns to look at the Atlantic through a telescope. Then the unquiet spirit of the Congested Districts Board possessed the place for a while. A young engineer designed a new pier to shelter fishing-boats. He galvanized the people into unwonted activity, and, though sceptical of good results, they earned a weekly wage by building it. ”

“ There are also numerous storm-signalling stations, and there are no fewer than thirteen lifeboats, of which eight are on the south coast. The men of the thirty-three Devonshire Coastguard stations have been the means of saving many lives.
On the two coasts, including Lundy, there are in all fifty-one lights of various sorts and sizes, from the eight first-class lighthouses with massive stone towers, of which the most famous although not the most powerful is the Eddystone, down to the small but useful lights of a hundred candle-power or less, most of which are connected with quays and harbours ”

“ Nine stations were initially built at Monomoy, Chatham, Orleans, Nauset, Cahoon Hollow, Pamet River, Peaked Hill Bars, Highland, and Race Point. Eventually others joined them at Monomoy Point, Old Harbor, High Head, and Wood End. All were manned almost entirely by local men. From 1872 to 1915, station crews patrolled the beaches day and night in rain, fog, and blizzard, meeting at halfway stations to exchange tokens and return to their stations. If a wreck or a ship in trouble was sighted, a red Coston flare was ignited to alert the ship that it had been seen. ”

“ Fall and winter storms often develop quickly and tear away at the shorelines, removing sands from one place and depositing them elsewhere.
One survivor of this coastal erosion is the Old Harbor Life Saving Station. Now a maritime museum at Race Point Beach in Provincetown, it began life in 1897 twenty miles to the south on Chatham’s North Beach. In 1977, in the face of imminent destruction, the station was cut in half and floated on two barges to its present site.
During the summer, the beaches of the Outer Cape present a generally peaceful and benign aspect. ”

“ The Coast Guard from Nauset and Chatham reached the64 scene as promptly as they could, but they were a long distance from the wreck, and the nature of the cargo made it practically impossible to send a line over the vessel, and the distance from the shore where the craft lay still further operated against the rescue of the unfortunate crew.
Sometimes the Government has fits of economy, but the Coast Guard service is a poor place to begin the practice of it. Some time before the Coast Guard Station at Orleans had been abandoned, that is, the crews had been withdrawn and the station locked up. ”

“ Coasting vessels are dependent in a great measure upon them; if they pass a station with the storm-signal displayed, they frequently escape encountering destructive gales by putting into the nearest port until the danger has passed.
The coast telegraph lines connecting the signal and the life saving stations have been constructed by the government, and are operated by the signal corps. ”

“ The later and better built stations have interior walls of lath and plaster, and are furnished outside with cisterns for the collection of rain-water. The lack of fresh water on the beaches is one of the hardships of station-life.
The life-boat stations are usually twenty-four feet high from base to peak forty-two feet long by twenty-two feet wide, exterior measurements, and contain a loft above, and a room below twelve feet high, twenty feet wide, and forty feet long, for the accommodation of the life-boat and its gear. ”

“ In front, upon the water, were double lines of market and fish-boats, secured to the Levée, forming a small connecting link of the long chain of shipping and steamboats that extend for a league in front of the city. At the lower part of the town lie generally those ships, which having their cargoes on board, have dropped down the river to await their turn to be towed to sea. Fronting this station are no stores, but several elegant private dwellings, constructed after the combined French and Spanish style of architecture, almost embowered in dark, evergreen foliage, and surrounded by parterres. ”

“ While hot coffee and dry clothes were making every one comfortable at the station, it was Tom Walker, one of the surfmen out patrolling, that hurried into the living–room, startling the station crew with the announcement, “There’s a man in the Chair!”
If a rocket from some wreck at sea had come up through the floor of the station and made its hideous, fiery racket in the very midst of the station crew, a greater excitement could not have followed. ”

“ Dugald told me as we walked back how the men from the Coast Guard Stations patrol the shores of our country so that there is not a bit of our seacoast that is not guarded. One starts out from one station and meets another from another station and they exchange little checks which they take back so that their commanders know they have been all the way. Is it not a lovely feeling to think that as we sleep someone is watching our shores by night? Only I wonder how if there are any pirates, and Captain Davies said there still were, they can land anywhere without one of these guards seeing them. ”

“ The coast near the station rightly bears the name “Ocean Graveyard.” Sunken rips stretch far out under the sea at this place, ever ready to grasp the keels of the ships that sail down upon them, and many appalling disasters have taken place there. There are two lines of bars that lie submerged off the shore at Peaked Hill Bars Station,73 the outer and inner bars they are called. They run parallel with the coast line for a distance of about six miles. The outer bars lie about fourteen hundred yards offshore, the inner bars about six hundred. ”

“ Blue Anchor station must in its time have misled many strangers, for where a railway station is, there one expects a town, or village, also. But here is a void, an emptiness, a vacuum. Only a solitary bay is disclosed before the astounded stranger’s gaze. It is a noble bay, it is true, and commands lovely views of the great North Hill at Minehead, with Dunster nestling midway; and the sunsets are magnificent. But railway companies don’t build railway stations merely for the convenience of those few people who would take a journey especially for sake of a view or a sunset ”

“ Almost impossible to face by day through sliding sands and buffeting winds, at night it was impracticable through the dense sea-fog that stole softly through the Golden Gate at sunset. Thence, until morning, sea and shore were a trackless waste, bounded only by the warning thunders of the unseen sea. The station itself, a rudely built cabin, with two windows,—one furnished with a telescope,—looked like a heap of driftwood, or a stranded wreck left by the retiring sea ”

“ 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. ”

“ He worked at odd jobs and on fair evenings could be seen sitting on the pier near the station, watching the widely-spaced procession of great carriers that moved upward toward Duluth or down for Chicago or Cleveland or Buffalo; passing ships that some day might need the help of the men who moved about the Coast Guard reservation and who now and then flung toward him some derisive observation or greeting. ”

“ At one point the line where woods and dunes meet stands out clearly and there are indicated the rude things, vines, bushes, which form the outer uneven rim of the woods—the only things that grow in the sand. At another point a sand-hill is menacing the woods. This old life-saving station is at a point where the sea curves, so through the open door the sea also is seen. (The station is located on the outside shore of Cape Cod, at the point, near the tip of the Cape, where it makes that final curve which forms the Provincetown Harbor.) ”

“ Between Highland and Race Point Lighthouses, on Cape Cod, stretches a long line of treacherous, dangerous sand bars. Situated midway between these points on the shore is the Coast Guard Building known as the Peaked Hill Bars Station. From this station the surfmen have rescued many lives and have seen many sailors go down to death in the raging sea.
On November 30th, 1880, a cold northerly gale was sweeping down the coast from Massachusetts Bay and lashing into fury the waters that pounded over the sand bars from Race Point to Wellfleet. ”

“ Not one of the original crew of the Highland Station is in the service at present, save the veteran keeper Captain Worthen. For thirty years he has made the station which he helped to build his home, and has been a faithful and vigilant guardian of the coast. Skilled in the art of handling boats through the surf, absolutely fearless when duty calls, he has an enviable record as a life saver. ”

“ Out from the cove to the south of us shot the big power lifeboat of the Southport station, and we watched her head towards the breakers which we could see jumping in air on the harbor bar. By six o’clock the tug and pilots were back. They reported a big four-master bound east was almost out of water some six miles from shore but that the lifesavers were standing by on north side of shoal. Another fierce gale is springing up from west and northwest as I write, and the sea outside must be truly awful. I hope with all my heart and soul that those poor devils are safe ashore. ”

“ By this means the time which would otherwise be occupied in sailing the distance [Pg 165] backward and forward to the land station, not unfrequently a distance of some hundreds of miles, would be saved, and the luggers enabled to go on working uninterruptedly. A floating station is also capable of meeting ships in the open sea, and of transhipping to them her cargo of shell, packed and addressed direct to the London markets, by this means again saving agents' fees, storage, wharfage, etc., etc., in Thursday Island. The advantages to be gained by employing such a vessel must be obvious. ”

“ They have all come forward by this time, and now the men, going eagerly to seize on any coats and hats nearest to them, make themselves ready to go down and render any assistance that may be required of them. The station is but a little one, the coast-guards few, and of late a sort of intermittent fever has laid many of the fishermen low, so that their help may, for all they yet can know, be sorely needed. ”

“ Surfman Conwell, while a young man, is an experienced boatman and has the youth and vigor that will help to make him a valuable member of any life-saving crew to which he may become attached.
HIGH HEAD STATION.
This station was established and manned in 1883 by Captain Kelley and a crew of trained surfmen. The station is three and one-half miles northwest of Cape Cod Highland Light, and its approximate position as obtained from the latest coast survey charts is latitude 42° 03′ 55′′ longitude west 70° 06′ 50′′. From Provincetown the station is about five miles distant. ”

“ In 1902 halfway down from Chatham to Point Rip stood the old Monomoy Lifesaving Station. Four miles from the Chatham Station, four miles from Point Rip, where it stands today discarded and deserted. There it stands today amid the sand dunes and the hollows, a grim reminder of the tragedy of Monomoy Beach. In 1915 the Life Saving Service was absorbed by the Coast Guard and today if a young fellow wishes to become a coastguardsman even though he has never been out over the surf in an open boat, he sends in an application. ”

“ The alarm bell clanging for ‘Action Stations’ was the first intimation I had that anything was afoot. In the Adriatic, as everywhere else, everyone in a destroyer turns in ‘all standing’; so it was only a few seconds until I was out of my bunk and up to my station on the bridge. ”

“ There are hundreds of amateur wireless stations along the Atlantic seaboard listening to ships’ messages. It is comforting to know that if, by an accident, the powerful shore stations should fail to catch our messages, an army of alert boys are on guard.
Some four hours after your ship has passed out of Sandy Hook, or after a ninety-mile run, the operator bids the Sea Gate station good-by, and begins to feel ahead for the next station at Sagaponack, or even the one at Siasconset, on Nantucket Island. If your ear is Sensitive enough, you have probably heard her call sometime before. ”

“ We know, when we stop at a station to drink, that we are drawing near the primeval basin of a stagnant sea, now shrunk to its final pool in Salt Lake, but once in size a rival of the Mediterranean. We pass over an alternation of mountain-grades and sandy levels, cross the Green or Upper Colorado River, stop for five minutes at the Fort-Bridger station, thread the sinuous galleries of the Wahsatch, and come down from a savage wilderness of sage-brush, granite, and red sandstone, into the luxuriant green pastures of Mormondom, heavy with crops and irrigated from the snow-peaks. ”