Searching for the Revenue Cutter Bear, 1979–2019

A chart from the first search for the Bear in 1979, by MIT’s Harold Edgerton and Coast Guard Academy cadets aboard the buoy tender Conifer. U.S. Coast Guard.

The Revenue Cutter Bear, one of the most celebrated ships in American history, sank under tow in the North Atlantic. Her story did not end there. Within about 15 years a new chapter began: the search for her wreck. Coast Guard historian William H. Thiesen told it.

1979: cadets and side-scan sonar

In the spring of 1979 a search team formed around 11 Coast Guard Academy cadets, four advisers, and Harold Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, inventor of side-scan sonar. For two weeks they used the Coast Guard buoy tender Conifer as a platform for the new technology, working from the accounts of the Coast Guard pilots who flew over the Bear the day she sank and of the skipper of the tug Irving Birch, which had been towing her.

The expedition marked the first practical use of side-scan sonar, combined it with the Coast Guard's new LORAN-C navigation system to run an underwater search, and recorded its work on videotape, then still new. But its data had problems: the team did not document where exactly it had searched, and its final report included no analysis of the sonar results afterwards.

2007: a secret submarine

A second search in 2007 used the U.S. Navy's deep-diving submersible NR-1. This time the documents, proposals and research were well kept, but getting information from the Navy was hard: it took four months just to find and speak to NR-1's commanding officer. Data passed to the Coast Guard included two CDs that later went missing, and since this was the secretive NR-1's last mission before she was decommissioned, her logs were unavailable afterwards.

The Navy’s deep-sea submersible NR-1, decommissioned in 2009. U.S. Navy.

NOAA joins the hunt

In recent years NOAA and the Coast Guard have teamed up with other partners, drawing on NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, Office of Coast Survey, Office of Ocean Exploration and Research and Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. The aims: survey the likely area, gather and preserve data, find and catalogue surviving Bear artefacts, and above all locate the wreck and seek National Register status for it.

The medium-endurance cutter Bear, named for the old ship, heading out to search for her. U.S. Coast Guard.

How the wreck was finally identified, and the evidence behind it, is told in Finding the Bear.

Sources

• William H. Thiesen, U.S. Coast Guard Atlantic Area, "Search for the Bear, 1979–2019," NOAA Ocean Exploration; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Images from the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy.