Reservist

ISS2 2015

Reservist Magazine is the award-winning official publication of the United States Coast Guard Reserve. Quarterly issues include news and feature articles about the men and women who comprise America's premier national maritime safety and security

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He apprehended, tried and fined unscrupulous white men who had been selling liquor to Indians and Eskimos in violation of the 1868 act of Congress prohibiting such traffic. He arbitrated disputes over fishing rights and rescued shipwrecked sailors. He was equally ready to sail west to Kamchatka or the Siberian coast in case of sudden calamity, such as outbreak of plague or threat of starvation. The Russian authorities came to prize Mike Healy as an indispensable arm of their own marine law enforcement system. As captain of the CORwin in 1879, he approached Sevak, a village on the coast of St. Lawrence Island. Puzzled at the lack of native canoes which had always before approached the eagerly- awaited CORwin, Healy went ashore in a small boat, where he found the village's entire population dead of starvation. At a second and larger village, the same sight greeted Healy; so many score of dead Eskimos that his crew did not attempt to bury them. Natives from a nearby village told Healy what had happened. An American ship had arrived with a cargo of rum, which was traded for sealskins and walrus ivory. The Eskimos had spent the weeks of summer drinking rum instead of pursuing whales, while the whites tarried to enjoy the native women. When the ship left, the Eskimos in both villages, already debilitated, grew progressively weaker. Finally, one by one, they died of starvation. Earlier on the same voyage, Healy had come upon six survivors of an icebound New Bedford whaler at desolate Point Hope. The bodies of some of their dead companions showed clear evidence of cannibalism. Many of the CORwin's officers, outraged, demanded that the survivors be left to their fate. Healy overruled the officers, stubbornly insisting that none of them, nor any other man, knew what he would do in such a situation. The men were taken aboard, and although shunned by officers and crewmen alike, Mike Healy sat with them, talked with them and heard the horrifying details of their ordeal; whereupon he was more firmly convinced than every that his decision had been the right one. Named as prospective commanding officer of the cutter BeAR in San Francisco in late 1885, Healy protested that the ship was unsuited to Arctic operations, but was ordered to take command the following year, under protest. In early 1887, Healy and his crew steamed north from San Francisco. He would captain the BeAR for eight years, and would soon come to a far higher opinion of his sturdy vessel, which would continue operating in the Arctic, under a succession of commanding officers, until 1926. The first voyage involved steaming through steadily- thickening floes, then inching forward through dense pack ice. Healy's cutter became the nation's first icebreaker, rescuing in its course the crews of three vessels whose sides had been crushed by the pressure of the ice. Under Healy's practiced hand, the BeAR forced its way to Point Barrow on Alaska's Arctic Ocean shore. In 1890, after years in pursuit of Arctic lawbreakers, Mike Healy acquired an unlikely ally with whom he would work closely and effectively for several years. The Rev. Sheldon Jackson was a diminutive bundle of missionary zeal, a fervent Presbyterian and Republican whose intense lobbying efforts in Congress and personal acquaintance with President Harrison had secured him an appointment as federal education agent in Alaska. The leadership cadre of the Revenue Cutter Bear in the Summer of 1895. BACk Row: Dr. Bodkin, Engineer Coffn, LT Daniels, LT white, LT Emery; FRoNT Row: CH ENG Schwartz, CPT Healy, ENG Dorry, LT Buhner, Carpenter Cain, Master At Arms Baundy. Photo from the scrapbook of John M. Justice. USCG Historian Issue 2 • 2015 � RESERVIST 37

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