If you were traveling by ship along the Eastern seaboard in 19th-
century America, you would be traveling America’s busiest commercial and
passenger sea lane. And if you were off North Carolina’s Outer Banks, you
would be traveling America’s most dreaded sea lane — one that mariners had
come to call “the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” site to some 650 lost
ships driven by winds, stranded on shoals, and broadsided by waves until
splintered to bits. Lost too: captains, their crews, and their passengers, who
could neither swim (thought at the time to prolong drowning) nor survive the
currents and cold water whose depths could go from 125 fathoms to just two in
only a few yards.
If you were traveling between 1881 and 1900 close to North
Carolina’s Pea Island coast, however, you were also being watched — by a team
of six “surfmen” under the direction of their “keeper,”
Richard Etheridge. Etheridge and crew, members of the U.S. Life-Saving Service
(or LSS, a precursor of the Coast Guard), would have been patrolling their
lonely, narrow, six-mile stretch of beach 24 hours a day, seven days a week,
on foot over wet sands in every type of weather on the lookout for ships at
sea and in distress. When they sited such a ship, Etheridge and his men sprang
into action.
From Station 17, their home away from home nine months out of the
year, away from wives and families, they hauled, in addition to a
“surfboat,” a “beach apparatus” drawn by mules and
weighing half a ton. Once the cart was within proper range of the stranded
ship, the crew, with military precision, unloaded the Lyle gun (itself
weighing 250 pounds), loaded its barrel, prepared the shot (a 20-pound
projectile with a whip line attached), removed hundreds of yards of rope from
its “faking” box, erected a wooden support for the rope, and dug a
two-and-a-half-foot pit in which to plant an anchor. Elapsed time: five
minutes or under, according to the countless drills the keeper conducted on a
constant basis. When all was ready, Etheridge commanded “Fire!” and
the projectile was launched on a trajectory quickly calculated to meet the
wreckage site. His men then sent a pulley device along the line, then a hawser
with a “breeches buoy” attached. One crew member climbed into the
buoy, and the remaining crew, rope to shoulder, worked relay-style, front to
rear, to pull the buoy to and from victims of the wreck.
Those saved and brought to shore on this stretch of Pea Island
were lucky. Their lives had been in the hands of the most disciplined crew in
the LSS. The keeper of that crew, Richard Etheridge, a former slave, a former
Union soldier in the Civil War, had trained them, all of them African
Americans, to be nothing less. Their story is told, and told fully for the
first time, in a fascinating book called Fire on the Beach
(Scribner).
“We were first-year grad students in Virginia,” author
David Wright says when asked how he and his college buddy and coauthor, David
Zoby, first learned of Richard Etheridge, “a tremendously competent
military leader,” Wright adds, “and tremendously competent
surfman,” Wright enthusiastically adds. (Documents back Wright on both
counts.)
A decade ago, Zoby was going for his MFA in poetry. He’d grown up
in Virginia and spent summers with his family on the Outer Banks. He thought
he knew the history of the Outer Banks. Wright was getting his MFA in fiction,
with a side interest in cultural studies, African-American studies in
particular.
“David came across a photograph in the North Carolina
Aquarium with a caption that read ‘Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island
Surfmen,'” Wright explains. “He had no idea this crew existed and he
didn’t know much about the Life-Saving Service. He came back to school and
asked me if I knew anything about it. I’m from West Texas. I didn’t even know
where the Outer Banks were! But we started poking around and found that almost
nothing on Etheridge had been done. And what little was out there was
wrong.
“We were told there were no documents on Etheridge, that
they didn’t exist. We’d have to do an oral history if we did anything. We knew
Etheridge had to be the central figure, but even the Coast Guard magazine,
which had carried an article about Pea Island in the ’30s, talked about
Etheridge as being ‘free,’ as being part Native-American, not a former slave.
But his whole involvement in the Civil War … it opened up for us the whole
story, including Reconstruction. I was expecting to tell a sea tale. It turned
out to be a social history. It was ideal. A black unit with a black leader
saying, in effect, we are in charge of our own destiny.”
Despite the years, Wright knows that that “ideal” story
is still news to most Americans. He draws this comparison:
“Ask any schoolchild about the Pony Express and they can
tell you everything about it. But the Pony Express existed for only 13 months.
The LSS, which 100 years ago was tremendously important and a famous bit of
our culture — you could open up Scribner’s Monthly or Harper’s
Weekly and there would be stories on surfmen — now no one knows anything
about them. But the Pony Express really fit into the American mythology of the
West, the cowboy. Whereas these guys in the LSS were out on isolated stretches
of coast, walking the beach, and if they were doing their job well, they
weren’t doing much. Plus, from 1915 until the stations were decommissioned
after World War II, there were few famous rescues. Ships were metal-hulled,
motorized. You had radar, radio. The rescue crews just faded from the public
eye.”
Not from the eye of Alex Haley, a former Coast Guardsman himself
and a speaker at the christening in 1992 of a cutter named Pea Island.
Wright and Zoby have since been instrumental in petitioning the Coast Guard
for formal recognition of Etheridge and his crew, who outdid themselves in
bravery when, on October 11, 1896, they succeeded in rescuing every member
from the wreck of the downed ship the E.S. Newman.
On March 25, 1996, the Coast Guard did finally recognize the Pea
Islanders of Station 17 and awarded them posthumously a Gold Life-Saving
Medal. That medal went to them collectively, however, not individually, as
citations of merit normally do. Was this a means for the Guard not to dredge
up “bad history,” a history that Fire on the Beach reveals to
have been as rife with racial and political conflict as anywhere in this
country at the time and as it continued to be into the next century? Maybe so,
but the ceremony was “a wrong made right” in the eyes of a
descendant of one of Etheridge’s men and a surfman himself from 1935 to 1938:
William C. Bowser III.
Wright and Zoby already intend a sequel to Fire on the
Beach, one that carries the history of the Life-Saving Service on past
Etheridge’s death in 1900 and into the 20th century. And for that, the
coauthors know they’ve been fortunate to have Bowser still to talk to.
“The Virginia Pilot had done an article on Mr.
Bowser, who lives in Norfolk,” Wright says. “In 1993, we called him
from Richmond and introduced ourselves as young men who were interested in Pea
Island and maybe interested in doing a book. Mr. Bowser said, ‘I’ve been
waitin’ for ya. I’m an old man. Hurry.’
“It sent chills down our spines. We borrowed a car and drove
down to Norfolk that weekend with a tape recorder. We found his house and
knocked on his door. No answer. We were thinking, This is not possible. So we
go around to the back. There was a ladder, and we didn’t dare walk under it.
We knocked on the back door. No answer. Then we heard a voice from the roof:
‘Hey! You must be the Davids.’ It was Mr. Bowser. A gale had come through and
blown the shingles off his roof. He was 77 years old, and he was up there
reshingling it himself. He had great stories to tell. He introduced us to
other folks. Since then they’ve all passed except for Mr. Bowser, the last of
the black Outer Bankers to be raised a Pea Island surfman. It’s his legacy.
But, as Mr. Bowser said, by the 1930s, ‘We had the equipment and we knew how
to use it. But we and the equipment were like museum pieces.’ Horrible to say,
but he said he’d had a desire to ‘have’ a shipwreck. The chance to go out
there and serve. Technology, though, had passed him by.”
You say you’re from West Tennessee but you’ve heard of the Outer
Banks, you’re interested in its beaches, its storms, life there as lived?
You’re interested in 19th-century sea traffic up and down the Eastern
seaboard? Sea disasters and the mechanics of dying, the mechanics of saving a
life? Coast Guard history? African-American history? The Civil War?
Reconstruction? The “progressive” view of segregation, shared by
whites and blacks alike, before the advent of Jim Crow? Just plain heroics?
Read Fire on the Beach, social history at its readable best. Meet
coauthor David Wright when he’s in town on October 12th. You’ll be remembering
the 105th anniversary, almost to the day, of the saving of the E.S.
Newman crew by the crew of Life-Saving Service Station 17, Pea Island,
North Carolina. You’ll be honoring a keeper, a man by name of Richard
Etheridge.
