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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Currents at the Columbia River Bar, "The graveyard of the Pacific)

Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

27/27 The life-savers had a saying: "You have to go out, but you don't have to come back." On 11 October 1896, 130 years ago this Sunday, the men of Pea Island went out, and brought everyone back.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

26/27 More than 30 descendants came, Meekins' grandson, a Coast Guard helicopter pilot, among them. In 2010 Manteo unveiled a statue of Etheridge, with Daniel Gardiner, grandson of the Newman's captain, as keynote speaker. Since 2012 a Coast Guard cutter bears the keeper's name.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

25/27 Coast Guard Commander Stephen Rochon (later the first Black chief usher of the White House) had pushed the case for years. On 5 March 1996, at the Navy Memorial in Washington, the head of the Coast Guard gave all seven men the Gold Lifesaving Medal, posthumously.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

24/27 In the 1990s two researchers, David Zoby and David Wright, dug the story back out of the records. Their slideshow reached Kate Burkart, an eighth-grader in Washington, North Carolina, who wrote to President Clinton and Senator Jesse Helms.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

23/27 Etheridge died at his station on 8 May 1900, after twenty years as keeper. Pea Island kept an all-Black crew until the Coast Guard closed it in 1947. Then the story faded, except in the families of the men who had served there.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

22/27 Their only reward came from Captain Gardiner. He searched the beach until he found the board bearing his ship's name, and gave it to the crew. They gave it to Meekins, who nailed it to his barn on Roanoke Island.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

21/27 The seven men of Pea Island that night: keeper Richard Etheridge and surfmen Benjamin Bowser, Dorman Pugh, Theodore Meekins, Lewis Wescott, Stanley Wise and William Irving. White crews won gold medals for less. They got nothing.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

20/27 They waded out and threw a line aboard with a heaving stick. It was tied to the three-year-old, and the surfmen hauled him off and carried him ashore. In the same way they brought off his mother, then the seven men of the crew. By about 1 a.m., all nine were safe.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

19/27 Neither would work. The surf was too heavy for the boat, and the report says it was "impossible to bury the sand anchor, as the tide was rushing over the entire beach". So Etheridge tied a heavy line around two surfmen, Theodore Meekins and Stanley Wise.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

18/27 There were two usual answers. Row out in the surfboat. Or fire a line over the ship with the Lyle gun, a small brass cannon, and haul people ashore one by one in the breeches buoy: a ring lifebuoy with canvas shorts sewn in, slung from a rope.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

17/27 The crew hitched mules to the beach cart, the heavy two-wheeled wagon that carried the rescue gear, and dragged it south through the water. The service's report: "The sea was sweeping over the beach and threatened to prevent reaching scene of disaster."

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

16/27 He answered with a Coston light, a hand-held flare used by ships and life-savers to signal at night. The Newman was a three-masted schooner bound from Providence to Norfolk, with Captain Sylvester Gardiner, his wife, their son Tommy and six crew aboard.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

15/27 11 October 1896. A hurricane was sweeping the Outer Banks. Around 7 pm the E.S. Newman, sails blown away, was run onto the beach two miles south of the station. Her master had no other way to save his family. Surfman Theodore Meekins saw her distress signal.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

14/27 Etheridge knew one slip would be used to replace his crew with white men. So he drilled them hard, by the service's weekly routine: beach gear, boats, signals, and "restoring the apparently drowned", the period term for reviving people pulled from the sea.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

13/27 On 29 May 1880, four months after he took over, the station burned to the ground. Arson was suspected. No one was ever charged. Etheridge and his men kept going, and the station was rebuilt in time for the winter season.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

12/27 On 24 January 1880 Etheridge became keeper of Pea Island, the first African American to command a life-saving station. The white surfmen would not serve under him. He filled the crew with Black surfmen, and Pea Island became the service's only all-Black station.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

11/27 After the war he came home, fished, and in 1875 joined the Life-Saving Service at Oregon Inlet. Shoemaker called him "one of the best surfmen on this part of the North Carolina coast", while noting that no Black man had ever been made a keeper.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

10/27 Like most Outer Bankers he grew up on the water. In 1862 Union forces took Roanoke Island and it became a refuge for people escaping slavery. In 1863 Etheridge joined the 36th US Colored Troops, a Black regiment, and was made sergeant after a battle near Richmond in 1864.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

9/27 Shoemaker recommended a surfman from Bodie Island, the next station north: Richard Etheridge. He was Black, born enslaved on Roanoke Island in 1842, the son of his owner, John B. Etheridge, who, against the law of the time, taught him to read and write.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

8/27 Lieutenant Charles Shoemaker of the Revenue Marine (the federal sea service whose officers oversaw the life-savers) was sent to find out why so many Outer Banks rescues were failing. Keeper Daniels and his crew were dismissed.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

7/27 Its keeper was a local white man, George Daniels, with a crew of white and Black surfmen. On 30 November 1879 the schooner M. & E. Henderson, carrying phosphate rock to Baltimore, went ashore a mile and a half south of the station. Four of her seven men died.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

6/27 Ten weeks later, on 31 January 1878, the steamship Metropolis broke up off Currituck Beach and 85 people died. Congress paid for more stations and longer seasons. One new station, built that winter just south of Oregon Inlet, was Pea Island: Station No. 17.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

5/27 The Outer Banks had stations by 1874, but they were manned only in winter. On 24 November 1877 the Navy steamer USS Huron ran aground near Nags Head. 98 of her 134 men drowned. The nearest station was two miles away, still closed for the season.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

4/27 The system took shape from 1871 under Sumner Kimball, a Treasury official who turned a string of neglected volunteer boathouses into a disciplined full-time service. In 1878 it became the US Life-Saving Service, one of the forerunners of today's Coast Guard.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

3/27 To save their crews, the United States built life-saving stations along its coasts. Each had a keeper, the station's commander, and six or seven surfmen: paid local boatmen who rowed out through the breakers or fired lines to wrecks from the beach.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

2/27 The Outer Banks are a 200-mile chain of thin sand islands off North Carolina. Offshore, the warm Gulf Stream meets colder water from the north over shifting shoals (shallow sandbanks). So many ships died here that it is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

1/27 #otd 11 October 1896, North Carolina. A hurricane drives the schooner E.S. Newman ashore with the captain's wife and three-year-old son aboard. Seven men of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station get all nine people off alive. Their medals came 100 years late. #maritimehistory

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

26/26 Sturgeon have all but vanished from British waters; a 2024 Zoological Society of London map gathers 2,500 sightings over 400 years. So if a whale or a sturgeon washes up on an English beach, call the Coastguard. The head is the King's. The tail is the Queen's.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

25/26 The fish went to market in Plymouth and police stopped the sale: sturgeon are protected, and selling one is a crime. It ended up in the Natural History Museum, whose fish curator called it "hugely important", as sturgeon are now so rare in British waters.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

24/26 In June 2004 Robert Davies, a 27-year-old fisherman from Llanelli in Wales, landed a sturgeon in Swansea Bay: about 9 feet long and 120 kg. He knew the law and offered it to the Queen. A fax came back from the Palace: he could dispose of it as he saw fit.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

23/26 In 1971 Parliament swept away the Crown's old rights to wild creatures, with two exceptions spelled out in the Act: "royal fish and swans". The monarch still owns them. The Receiver of Wreck still takes possession of royal fish found on the shores of England and Wales.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

22/26 Coastguards filled in postcards for every whale, dolphin and porpoise on the beach. The founder of the scheme, zoologist Sidney Harmer, later ran the Natural History Museum. Since 1990 the UK Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme carries on the work.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

21/26 In 1912, at the request of the British Museum's trustees, the Board of Trade told its Receivers of Wreck, the officials who deal with wreck and salvage, to report stranded royal fish. From 1913 the reports went to the museum's natural history branch in London.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

20/26 Scotland has its own version. There the Crown takes only whales too big to be pulled ashore by a "wain drawn by six oxen", a wain being a farm wagon. Today that is read as anything over 25 feet, about 7.6 metres. Smaller whales, dolphins and sturgeon go to the council.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

19/26 Moby-Dick first appeared in London on 18 October 1851, in three volumes titled The Whale, published by Richard Bentley. The New York edition followed weeks later under the name we know. This month the book turns 175, and its royal fish are still royal.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

18/26 A local clergyman wrote to the Duke on the men's behalf. In Melville's version, the Duke replied that he had already received the money and would thank the clergyman to mind his own business. Melville calls it recent news; whether it really happened is unclear.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

17/26 Up steps "a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a copy of Blackstone under his arm". He lays it on the whale's head and claims the fish for the Lord Warden. To every plea of the sailors he gives one answer: "It is his."

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

16/26 Twenty years later the Duke turned up in fiction. In Moby-Dick, chapter 90, "Heads or Tails", Melville tells of Cinque Ports mariners who chase and kill a whale, haul it ashore, and dream of the 150 pounds its oil and bone will bring.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

15/26 The Warden's court registrar dug out a precedent from 1668: the King's right could be granted to someone else, in this case the Lord Warden. Wellington won. The whale was his, not the King's, and certainly not the fishermen's.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

14/26 Wellington's salvage commissioner advised him to let the claim go. Then the Admiralty took the Duke to the High Court, arguing the whale was a royal fish that belonged to King William IV himself. The Lord Warden had no business giving it away.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

13/26 From 1829 the Lord Warden was the Duke of Wellington, the victor of Waterloo and a former Prime Minister. In autumn 1831 a whale was beached in Whitstable Bay in Kent, and local fishermen claimed salvage on it: a reward for saving property from the sea.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

12/26 The most famous holder of the right was the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. The Cinque Ports were a league of Channel ports, Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich, that supplied ships to the Crown in return for privileges. Their Warden held royal rights there.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

11/26 That made for quarrels. Around 1440 in Ireland, the Crown and Christopher St Lawrence, Baron Howth, lord of the Howth peninsula north of Dublin, both claimed a huge stranded grampus, an old name for Risso's dolphin. His family claimed every grampus and porpoise found there

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

10/26 Note the escape clause: "except in places privileged by the King". The Crown often granted its rights away. Lords of coastal manors, bishops and abbeys held "wreck of the sea", the right to what the tide brought ashore, and with it often the royal fish.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

9/26 Later lawyers widened the catch. Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Chief Justice of England in the 1670s, wrote a treatise on who owns the sea and the shore and added the porpoise. Today the royal fish are all whales, dolphins and porpoises, plus sturgeon.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

8/26 There was a catch, and Herman Melville spotted it. "Whalebone" is not bone at all but baleen: the flexible plates that hang from the upper jaw of some whales and sieve food from the water. It sits in the head. The King, not the Queen, got the corset material.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

7/26 Why the tail for the Queen? William Prynne, a 17th-century lawyer and pamphleteer, had an answer: "Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone." Whalebone stiffened the corsets and bodices of fashionable ladies.

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Bart⚓️ @bartgonnissen.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

6/26 The division was older and odder. Henry de Bracton, a 13th-century royal judge who wrote the great Latin textbook of English law, put it like this: "de balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam". Of a whale, the King has the head and the Queen the tail.

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