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 “If
you are subjected to miserable discomforts, or even if you suffer,
it must be regarded as all right and simply a part of life; like
sailors, you must never dwell too much on the dangers or sufferings,
lest others question your courage.”
In the above quote, Revenue Cutter Service officer David Henry
Jarvis wrote in his diary journaling the Overland Relief Expedition,
considered one of the most spectacular rescues in the history of the
Arctic. Jarvis' exploits in Alaska and the Arctic Circle made him
one of the Service's best-known officers of the famous Bering Sea
Patrol.
Born in Berlin, Maryland, in 1862, David Jarvis
received an appointment to the Revenue Cutter Service School of
Instruction, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Starting school only a
few years after its establishment, he came under the tutelage of
famed cutterman John Henriques. Henriques had sailed the high seas
for 40 years, rounded treacherous Cape Horn, and commanded cutters
in Alaska before founding the School of Instruction, forerunner of
the Coast Guard Academy. Under Henriques' guidance, Jarvis learned
shiphandling skills, seafaring and the responsibilities of command.
Jarvis's early career gave no indication that he would become
famous for his Arctic exploits. In 1883, he received a third
lieutenant's commission and assignment to the cutter Hamilton,
stationed at Philadelphia. During his time aboard Hamilton, the
cutter's cruising area extended from New Jersey to North Carolina,
including the Delaware Bay. Two years later, Jarvis transferred from
the Hamilton to the Civil War-era cutter gunboat E.A. Stevens based
in New Bern, North Carolina.
In 1888, Jarvis received orders
to the Pacific Coast where he would spend the remainder of his
Service career. In early April, he reported aboard the cutter Bear,
stationed in San Francisco. Jarvis made the first of many cruises on
the Bering Sea Patrol aboard Bear. Each of the patrols covered
between 15,000 and 20,000 miles with heavy seas and bone-chilling
temperatures. Conditions on these patrols were harsh, dangerous, and
deadly–a fact demonstrated by Bear crewmembers buried at Dutch
Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands. Bering Sea veterans had a ditty to
describe these conditions.
“Hear the rattle of the windlass as our anchor comes
aweigh; we are bound to old Point Barrow and we make our
start today; keep a tight hold on your dinner, for outside
the South Wind blows; and unless you're a sailor, you'll be
throwing up your toes.”
After returning from his
first Bering Sea Patrol, the Service transferred Jarvis to
the cutter Thomas Corwin, also based in San Francisco. For
the next few years, Jarvis served aboard the Corwin and San
Francisco based cutter Richard Rush, before returning to the
Bear in 1891.
During Jarvis's years aboard Bear,
neither roads nor railroads existed in Alaska, so cutters
were the primary Federal presence in the territory. Cutters
had to adopt an exhaustive list of missions, becoming true
interagency support vessels for Alaska. During Jarvis's
return cruise in 1891, Bear secured witnesses for a murder
case; transported Alaska's governor on a tour of Alaska's
islands; shipped a U.S. Geological survey team to Mount
Saint Elias; carried lumber and supplies for school
construction in remote locations and the Arctic; delivered
teachers to their assignments; carried mail for the U.S.
Postal Service; enforced seal hunting laws in the Pribilof
Islands; supported a Coast & Geodetic Survey team; provided
medical relief to native populations; served life-saving and
rescue missions; and enforced Federal law throughout the
waters and shorelines of Alaska.
On that same cruise,
Jarvis was on hand when Bear imported reindeer from Siberia
to starving native peoples in Alaska. Native Alaskans relied
heavily on whaling and fishing when the territory came under
U.S. control. However, after foreign whaling, fishing and
sealing vessels entered Alaskan waters, fish and game began
to diminish, causing large-scale malnutrition and starvation
in native villages and settlements. To solve the problem,
Bear delivered 16 live deer and hundreds of bags of native
moss for feed from Siberia to the Aleutian Islands to test
the animals' ability to travel by sea. In its 1892 cruise,
the crew of cutter Bear brought over a larger shipment of
the animals to the Seward Peninsula and set up a reindeer
station at Port Clarence. In the coming years, cutters
transported thousands of reindeer. In the early 20th
century, the Alaskan reindeer herds would total 600,000 head
with 13,000 native Alaskans relying on the herds for life's
essentials.
Bering Sea cutters patrolled the waters
of the Pribilof Islands seizing seal poaching vessels of all
nationalities. And, during Jarvis's 1892 cruise, Bear was on
hand when military action nearly erupted between the U.S.
and Great Britain over seizure of British sealing vessels.
Oversight of seal hunting laws proved the cutters' law
enforcement value and the Revenue Cutter Service eventually
took responsibility for enforcing all Alaskan game laws.
Also, during Jarvis's cruises on Bear, the cutter supported
the regular “court cruise,” in which the crew transported
judges, public defenders, court clerks, and marshals for
criminal cases located around Alaska.
During Jarvis's
Bering Sea patrols, the Service's humanitarian support of
Alaska not only included better nutrition for native
communities, but control of illegal liquor distribution used
to exploit native people in the Alaska Territory. Native
people called Jarvis's Bear “Omiak puck pechuck tonika” or
“the fire canoe with no whiskey.” The Service's humanitarian
support of Alaska was assistance on a sweeping scale, but
the cutters assigned to Alaska also aided individuals on the
maritime frontier. As one Coast Guard historian wrote about
Bear: “In assisting private persons, neither class, race,
nor creed made any difference to the Bear; degree of stress
was the sole controlling factor.”
During his time
aboard Bear, Jarvis had become a Bering Sea veteran, with
extensive geographic and cultural knowledge of the Alaskan
frontier including fluency in the native languages. By 1896,
he had reached the senior officer rank of first lieutenant
and served as Bear's executive officer. That same year,
famed Bering Sea Captain Michael “Hell Roarin' Mike” Healy
ended 10 years as commanding officer of the Bear. The
veteran cutterman described the pressures of serving as
captain on a Bering Sea cutter: “to stand for 40 hours on
the bridge of the Bear, wet, cold and hungry, hemmed in by
impenetrable masses of fog, tortured by uncertainty, and the
good ship plunging and contending with icy seas in an
unknown ocean.”
By 1897, Capt. Francis Tuttle took
command of Bear. Later that year, eight whaling ships became
trapped in pack ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. Concerned
that the ships' 265 crewmembers would starve to death, the
whaling companies appealed to President William McKinley to
send a relief expedition. In 1884, Bear had led the U.S.
Navy's famous Greeley Relief Expedition to save the starving
men of an Arctic expedition led by Army Lt. Adolphus
Greeley. Now, under orders from McKinley, Bear would lead a
second major rescue mission into the Arctic.
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The Coast Guard 1897 Overland
Relief Expedition approaches whalers trapped in the Arctic ice. (U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo)
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In November 1897, soon after completing its annual
Alaskan cruise, Bear took on supplies at Port Townsend,
Washington, and returned to the coast of Alaska. This would
be the largest of several mass rescues of American whalers
undertaken by Bear during the heyday of Arctic whaling. And,
it was the first time before modern icebreakers that a ship
risked sailing above the Arctic Circle during the harsh
Alaskan winter. To lead the so-called Overland Relief
Expedition, Tuttle placed executive officer Jarvis in charge
of a rescue team that included Second Lt. Ellsworth Bertholf,
U.S. Public Health Service Surgeon Samuel Call and three
enlisted men.
With no chance of the cutter pushing
through the thick ice to Point Barrow, Tuttle put the party
ashore at Cape Vancouver, Alaska. He tasked the men with
driving a herd of the Service's newly introduced reindeer to
the whaling ships. Using sleds pulled by dogs and reindeer,
the expedition set out on snowshoes on Thursday, Dec. 16,
1897. So began a rescue effort unusual in the annals of
Coast Guard history. It would require Jarvis and his men to
cover 1,500 miles over snow and ice rather than the usual
Service elements of coastal waters and open ocean.
On
Tuesday, March 29, 1898, after 99 days of endless struggle
against the elements, the relief party completed the
journey. The expedition delivered 382 reindeer to the
starving whalers with no loss of human life. When Jarvis and
Call finally arrived at Barrow, Jarvis recounted:
“when we greeted some of the officers of
the wrecked vessels, whom we knew, they were stunned; it was some
time before they could realize that we were flesh and blood. Some
looked off to the south to see if there was not a ship in sight, and
others wanted to know if we had come up in a balloon. Had we not
been so well known, I think they would have doubted that we really
did come in from the outside world.”
In his journal, Jarvis later recounted the final days of the
expedition:
“Though the mercury was -30 degrees, I was wet
through with perspiration from the violence of the work. Our sleds
were racked and broken, our dogs played out, and we ourselves
scarcely able to move, when we finally reached the cape [at Pt.
Barrow] . . . .”
For the Overland Expedition, McKinley
recommended Jarvis, as well as Bertholf and Call, for a specially
struck Congressional Gold Medal. In the aftermath of the Expedition
and the concurrent Spanish-American War, McKinley wrote to Congress:
“The year just closed has been fruitful of noble achievements in
the field of war, and while I have commended to your consideration
the names of heroes who have shed luster upon the American name in
valorous contests and battles by land and sea, it is no less my
pleasure to invite your attention to a victory of peace.”
After returning home from the Overland Expedition, Jarvis assumed
command of Bear, as would Bertholf, who in 1915 rose through the
ranks to become the first commandant of the modern Coast Guard.
Later, while still an officer, Jarvis became a special government
agent in Nome, Alaska, and served there when a smallpox epidemic
struck the community.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt
assigned Jarvis as customs collector for the District of Alaska. In
1905, Jarvis was promoted to captain and, that same year, he retired
from the Service after a nearly 25-year career. After his
retirement, he pursued private business ventures in Alaska,
including the development of copper districts and the building of a
railroad by a syndicate of New York bankers. During this period,
Roosevelt also offered Jarvis the governorship of Alaska. Jarvis
died in 1911, six years after leaving the Revenue Cutter Service.
 David Henry Jarvis spent the majority of his career in the
waters of Alaska. During that time, he was associated with famous
cutters, such as the Corwin, Rush and Bear; and Service luminaries
such as Henriques, Healy and Bertholf. Jarvis became an important
figure in his own right not only in the history of the Service, but
also in the settlement of Alaska. A high-endurance Coast Guard
cutter has borne his name, as does Mount Jarvis in Alaska's Wrangell
Mountains.
Today, the Service awards the Capt. David H. Jarvis
Leadership Award every year to a Coast Guard officer who
demonstrates outstanding leadership skills and motivates and
inspires personnel to strive for excellence. Jarvis was a member of
the long blue line and his memory lives on in the history and
heritage of the U.S. Coast Guard and the State of Alaska.
By William H. Thiesen, Atlantic Area Historian, USCG
Provided
through
Coast
Guard
Copyright 2015
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