Finding the Bear: How NOAA and the Coast Guard Identified a Legendary Polar Ship's Wreck

The Revenue Cutter Bear leading the SS Corwin into the roadstead at Nome, Alaska, 1915. U.S. Coast Guard.

Few ships in American history are called "legendary" as often as the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear. She rescued the survivors of a disastrous Arctic expedition, patrolled Alaska's waters for decades, carried Admiral Byrd to Antarctica, and helped capture a German spy ship off Greenland. Then, in 1963, she sank under tow in the North Atlantic, and for decades nobody knew exactly where. In 2021, after a search going back to the late 1970s, NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard announced that they were "reasonably certain" they had found her.

A long career

Bear was built in Scotland in 1874 as a sealer and spent her first 10 years hunting seals off Newfoundland. The U.S. government bought her for the fleet sent in 1884 to rescue the Greely Expedition in the Arctic, and she won worldwide fame as the ship that saved its few survivors.

From 1885 she served as a Revenue Cutter in the Arctic — for an unprecedented 41 years — saving lives and enforcing the law along Alaska's remote coast. From 1886 to 1895 her captain was "Hell Roaring" Mike Healy, who in reality was the first person of African American descent to command a U.S. government ship, though he never said so in his lifetime, perhaps to avoid the prejudice he would have met. The Coast Guard cutter Healy, commissioned in 1999, now carries his name.

In the Overland Rescue of 1897, a small party from Bear led by Lieutenant David Jarvis drove a herd of 450 reindeer some 1,600 miles through the Arctic winter to Barrow, to feed 275 whalers stranded when eight ships were trapped in the ice. The Coast Guard's highest award for bravery is named for him.

After Navy service in the First World War and relief work in Alaska during the 1919 flu epidemic, Bear was decommissioned in 1929 and given to the City of Oakland, California, as a museum — and as the set for the 1930 film of Jack London's The Sea Wolf. Admiral Richard Byrd bought her for his second Antarctic expedition (1933–1935), and she sailed again for the U.S. Antarctic Expedition of 1939–1941. In the Second World War she joined the Navy's Greenland Patrol and helped capture a German spy vessel, the trawler Buskoe.

Decommissioned for good in 1944, Bear was sold in 1948 to a Canadian company that planned to make her a sealer again, then left on a wharf in Nova Scotia. In the early 1960s an entrepreneur from Pennsylvania bought her to become a museum and restaurant in Philadelphia. On the way there, in March 1963, she sank.

Bear sinking, March 1963. U.S. Coast Guard History Program.

Searching the seabed

In 2019 the Coast Guard cutter Bear, named after the old ship, mapped the seabed near the last position reported when she sank and found two targets, one of roughly the right size. In 2021 the buoy tender Sycamore returned with a remotely operated vehicle carrying high-resolution cameras, and despite difficult conditions filmed the "unidentified wreck" in detail. That August a team of historians and maritime archaeologists from NOAA and the Coast Guard reviewed more than an hour of video, still images and two sets of Bear's construction plans.

There was no name board and no inscribed bell. Trawl nets and time had battered the wreck, so a definitive identification was never likely. But the details added up.

The evidence

• The bow. Bear was built to push through ice, with a steel plate on her stem held by a steel band and a row of rectangular "staples". A photograph from her repairs in 1924–25 shows the staples in an uneven pattern — the top two thin and close together, the next two wider — and the wreck's bow shows the same pattern.
• The hull. Her lower hull was sheathed in several layers of heavy planks; the wreck's bow, its most intact part, has multiple layers of planking too — a construction only a ship built for polar ice would need.
• The stern. A cast-metal piece just beyond the wreckage, probably a propeller post, carries a pattern of bolt heads that matches a photograph of Bear being fitted with a new propeller in Boston in 1933.
• What is missing. The engine and drive gear were removed on May 8, 1944, nine days before Bear was decommissioned, and her 45 tons of ballast were later sold. The wreck has an empty engine compartment and no ballast at all. Riding high without either, the report speculates, the old ship may have flexed under tow until her seams opened.
• Size and place. Bear was 190 feet 4 inches long at the waterline, with a beam of 29 feet 9 inches. The wreck is about 13 feet shorter and 15 feet wider — consistent with fishing gear dragging parts away and spreading debris — and it was the only candidate in the surveyed area near her reported position.

Bear's forefoot under repair, about 1924–25: the steel plate, band and staples that matched the wreck. U.S. Coast Guard.

The rough dimensions of the wreck on the seafloor. NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.

Taken one by one, none of these would settle it; together, the team judged them more than enough.

Where she lies

The wreck lies about 90 miles due south of Cape Sable, Nova Scotia — in Canadian waters, far from the polar seas where Bear made her name. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans is evaluating a marine protected area that would include the site; though it would not recognize the wreck itself, it could spare it further damage from fishing gear.

Sources

• Brad Barr, NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries Maritime Heritage Program, "Yes Indeed, We Found U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear!," NOAA Ocean Exploration; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs from the U.S. Coast Guard; remote-vehicle images credited to NOAA and a contractor, and the redrawn construction plans, left out.