FAMOUS POLICE CUTTER.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 27 October 1924, Page 2

FAMOUS POLICE CUTTER.

LAW IN ARCTIC SEAS. A thousand miles north of Unalaska the American Coast Guard cutter, Bear, lies caught in the ice, with two propellers gone and a score of dents in her sides. Her crew of seventy picked officers and men, under Commander C. S. Cochran, have received orders by wireless to bring her back, if they can, to San Francisco, where, to their sorrow, she will be broken up. Thus, after her fifteenth. voyage into the Far North, will end one of the most famous vessels in the world. The standing mission of this former Dundee whaler, which since 1883 has flown the American flag as a Government vessel, has been “'to aid all peoples, to assist commerce, and open lines of communication.” She has enforced revenue, criminal, and civil laws, saved settlers along the wild coast of Alaska from pirate raids, quelled mutinous crews, protected the seal industry, carried the mails to every village not reached by the Behring Sea Patrol,’ acted as adviser and guardian of native populations, and has a common carrier, cared for shipwrecked sailors, and for stranded miners and oil f> respecters, and acted as a court of aw. One Of her officers has always been appointed a United States Comniisioner with power to try and impose sentences in minor, cases, and another has always held a warrant as a United States Marshal. The Bear was acquired by the Government for rise in relief of the Greely Arctic and brought back the survivors. She has fulfilled other missions of the sort, the last three years ago, when she brought out and rescued in the Polar regions the crew and captain of Pa old Amundsen’s steamer Maud, i In 1897 she rescued the crews of half a dozen tv halers caught in an ice-jam ' off Point Barrow. In 1914, at the request of the Canadian Government, the Bear rescued the ' survivors of the Canadian Polar Expedition, which had been wrecked in the steamer Karluk, near AVrangel ; Island. At the request of the British Governj ment, the Bear in 1922 sought a stone ■which, failing honourable sepulchre in somewhere near Point Barrow to mark the northernmost point in Alaska reached by the British ship Blossom while engaged lipon effoudS&Btupeeo ou (. engaged in making charts of the coastline and ocean bottom —charts which are. in use to this day. The Bear set the stone up in a coni spicuous place, with a suitable inscrip- ; tion as directed. It' was’the bear that took the first reindeer to Alaska, which now boasts - 35,000 of these animals.

And now this stout vessel, her task well done, must meet the alternative to which, failinf honourable spulchre in Davy Jones’ Locker, all good ships must come—destruction on the scrap heap .