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Lifesaving from Shore-based Stations

Source:
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History
Author(s):

Dennis L. Noble

Lifesaving from Shore-based Stations 

Saving lives in the maritime environment close to shore is accomplished from a variety of shore-based stations. In extreme weather conditions, the leading method is by coastal lifeboats. Other craft are used for quick responses in less than severe conditions. The modern boat for heavy weather is the coastal lifeboat, designed to recover people in distress in the harshest weather and sea conditions. It is characterized by being especially buoyant, highly stable, and less prone than other vessels to capsize, as well as by being self-bailing and self-righting. This boat type has its origins in the confluence of two major lines of development. One line of development was in local types of boats launched from shore, usually less than about 10 meters (30 feet) in length and capable of dealing with close inshore surf conditions. These vessels came to be called “surfboats.” The other major line of development has its origins in broader practical and humanitarian impulses that led to the creation of charitable, voluntary national and international agencies for lifesaving at sea. These agencies then began to promote the development of larger and technically specialized lifeboats capable of rescue operations in deeper coastal waters.

For the promotion of safe navigation, the development of rescuing lives from the sea is paralleled by the development of lighthouses, which date from ancient times, as well as by attempts to apply other types of technology to lifesaving operations. Among the first technologies to be applied was the use of artillery ashore to send lines to stricken vessels for transferring people ashore. Examples of such technologies are George Manby’s line-throwing mortar (1808); Henry Trengrouse’s, John Dennett’s, and Robert Cunningham’s line-throwing rockets (1807, 1832, 1840); Joseph Francis’s Lifecar (1847); Robert Kisbee’s breeches buoy and life ring (1832); the shoulder-fired Mousketon (1872); and the Lyle Gun (1878).

The first recorded use of boats dedicated to lifesaving is from 1737 in China, predating European usage by forty years. However, as early as the thirteenth century, China also had benevolent societies to escort ships through dangerous waters, provide shelter for the shipwrecked, and recover and attempt to resuscitate victims. In Europe at the same time, Birger Jarl, regent of Sweden (1250–1266), issued the first known law against pillaging and mistreating shipwreck survivors, while in 1357, Kökar monastery on the Baltic Sea’s Åland Islands became the first documented organization in Europe to provide aid to shipwrecked seamen. In 1691, King Pedro II of Portugal directed coastal forts to send out vessels to aid shipwrecks, and in the following year King Karl XI of Sweden established the Södra Dykerikompaniet for shipwreck salvage and to rescue the shipwrecked. In China, the Chinkiang Association for Saving Life was established. The first humane society in Europe specifically devoted to trying to save victims from drowning was established in the Dutch Republic in 1767, the Maatschappij tot Redding van Drenkelingen. Two years later the first attempt to establish dedicated lifeboats, using a barge-type vessel, was made in the West Frisian Islands. Following Britain’s establishment of the Royal Humane Society in 1774, the Liverpool Docks Trust established the first known successful lifeboat service at Formby, Merseyside, in 1776. Spain established the Guild of Lifesavers at Seville in 1777. In the United States, the Massachusetts Humane Society established in 1787 the first coastal “houses of refuge” for shipwreck survivors and in 1807 established the first lifeboat station at Cohasset, Massachusetts, while in 1797 permanent houses for refuge and surfboats were established on Sable Island, Nova Scotia.

In 1785, Lionel Ludkin of Long Acre, London, was awarded a patent for an unsinkable boat. Ludkin had converted a Norway yawl—a double-ended clinker-built boat—into a lifeboat by adding 22.9-centimeter (9-inch) cork fenders along the gunwales, with cork beneath the thwarts and in spaces at the bow and stern, along with a heavy iron keel. Ludkin’s design achieved the two most important characteristics in lifeboats: buoyancy and stability.

In 1789, after a series of shipwrecks at the mouth of the Tyne River in northeast England, a group of citizens sponsored a contest to design a lifeboat. William Wouldhave of South Shields sent in the winning model. This is the earliest known documented plan for a self-righting boat, and Wouldhave is credited with being the creator of the lifeboat. The model was a double-ender with a pronounced sheer, cork on the interior of the hull, a fairly straight keel, and airtight cases filled with cork at both ends. The judges of the contest, however, felt that the boat needed further refinement and awarded Wouldhave only half the prize. Two of the judges then modified the design and asked Henry Greathead, a professional boatbuilder in South Shields, to build it. The changes were in the keel, to give it more buoyancy, and the boat closely resembled Ludkin’s model.

Appropriately named Original, the boat was completed in 1790. It was a double-ender, clinker built. With a length of 9.1 meters (30 feet), it had a 7.6-meter (25-foot) keel, a 3.1-meter (10-foot) beam, and a height at each end of 1.75 meters (5.75 feet). The boat held plenty of cork, but it did not have airtight compartments; it was not self-righting and self-bailing, and it did not carry sails. All of this made Original really a large surfboat with great buoyancy. Despite these shortcomings, it served as a lifeboat for forty years and saved hundreds of lives.

By 1810, Greathead’s boats were in use at posts in the United Kingdom. In 1800 one of his boats was first used outside Britain when it was purchased for use at Oporto, Portugal. Soon, in about 1808, a boat on Greathead’s design was built in the Netherlands and placed in service at Terheyden. Lifesaving organizations at local ports purchased other of Greathead’s boats for use in Denmark, India, Poland, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, and the United States.

In 1802, Lloyds of London began a Lifeboat Fund to assist local societies. At the same time a movement began to replace local initiatives with a wider national approach. Nevertheless, some local organizations continued into the twentieth century. For example, in 1913 the United Kingdom still had fifteen local lifeboat organizations, but a national organization was begun in 1824 when the National Institute for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was established, renamed in 1854 the Royal National Life Boat Institution (RNLI). Also in 1824 the first local lifesaving organization in France was formed at Boulogne and other ports, while in the Netherlands, the Noord- en Zuid-Hollandsche Redding Maatschappij (NZHRM) was established in Amsterdam and the Zuid-Hollandsche Maatschappij tot Redding van Schipbreukelingen (ZHMRD) was established in Rotterdam. The two were united in 1991 as the Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij (KNRM). A combination of privately funded societies and government-funded national organizations followed. Among them were the Société Générale des Naufrages et de la Union des Nations established at Paris (1834), the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffsbrüchiger (DGzRS, 1865), the Canadian Lifesaving Service (1867), the Turkish Lifeboat Society (1869), the U.S. Life-Saving Service (1878, amalgamated with the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915), the Societa Italiana di Soccorso di Naufraghi (1871), the Imperial Russian Lifesaving Society (1875), the Sociedad Española de Salvamento de Náufragos (1880), the Imperial Japanese Life-Saving Institution (Dainippon Teikoku Suinan Kyusai Kai, DTSKK, 1889, and from 1948 the Nippon Suinan Kyusai Kai, NSKK), the Norsk Selskab til Skibbrudnes Redning (1892), the Svenska Sjöräddningssällskapet (1907), the Cuerpo de Voluntarios de los Botes Salvavidas de Valparaíso, Chile (1925), and the Indian Coast Guard (1978).

International organizations and formal exchanges of information began with the first meeting of the International Congress for Safety at Sea, held in Brussels in 1886, followed in 1908 by the International Congress on Maritime Lifesaving, held at Saint-Nazaire, and in 1924 by the First International Lifeboat Conference in London, which established the International Lifeboat Federation and which has typically met every four years since that time. In 1949 the Geneva Convention provided for the neutrality of lifeboats during wartime and authorized lifeboats to display the red cross.

Shortly after its founding in 1824 in Britain, the RNLI, with help from a number of nations, began to study lifeboat design and began to establish the lifeboat as a specific type of vessel. In 1826, Pellew Plenty of Newbury, east of Bristol, built the first of at least a dozen boats. Plenty’s design was also a double-ender, with a large beam amidships. It, too, contained a large amount of cork, plus air cases built along the inboard sides. As with previous boats, Plenty’s craft had a high degree of buoyancy, but his lifeboat was also self-bailing through the use of six drain tubes.

A boatbuilder from Great Yarmouth, James Beeching, won a contest sponsored by the RNLI in 1851 for the best model of an improved lifeboat. Beeching’s boat was 9.8 meters (32 feet) in overall length and had a keel of 9.5 meters (31 feet), a beam of 3 meters (9.75 feet), and a draft of 1.1 meters (3.5 feet). It was fitted with seven thwarts and pulled by twelve oars, double banked. It was self-righting, with raised air cases on both ends. Self-bailing was accomplished by twelve relief tubes through the bottom. The boat carried two and a half tons of water ballast, was of lapstrake construction, and was furnished with an iron keel. It carried a lug foresail and mizzen, and Beeching claimed that it could carry up to seventy survivors in addition to the crew. This marks the first successful self-righting lifeboat and established the quality of self-righting as a requisite in lifeboat design for the next thirty-five years.

The RNLI felt that Beeching’s boat could be improved upon and directed James Peake, assistant master shipwright of Her Majesty’s Dockyard at Woolwich, to design a boat with all the best features of coastal lifeboats. The result was a boat 9.1 meters (30 feet) in length, with a 2.4-meter (8-foot) beam that was 1.9 centimeters (three-quarters of an inch) thick and a draft of slightly over 0.9 meters (3 feet). It had cork as ballast for the whole length of the boat beneath the flooring and an iron keel. Air cases in the bow and stern were raised to increase overall buoyancy, and there was no water ballast. The boat could right itself in five seconds and could completely self-bail through self-acting relief valves in fifty-five seconds. The Peake boat was designed to carry thirty survivors in addition to its twelve-man crew. The boat was pulled by ten oars, double banked, and its sail rig was similar to that of the Beeching design. Successful trials of the Peake design were held at Brighton on February 3, 1852. The standard wooden hull for coastal lifeboats for the RNLI became a combination of the best features of the Peake and Beeching designs. Since then, the basic hull design and construction of the RNLI’s coastal lifeboats have changed very little. There were modifications in length, and propulsion began changing. In 1890 a steam-powered lifeboat went into service, and in 1904 the RNLI experimented with the first gasoline-powered lifeboat.

In the United States, the first wooden coastal lifeboat came from England in 1873 for testing. The craft was adopted, and from the nineteenth century until well into the early decades of the twentieth it was assigned principally to the Great Lakes and the West Coast. Like the RNLI, the United States has generally kept the original design and began experimenting with gasoline-powered boats in 1909.

Technology has honed the basic design of the coastal motor lifeboat, along with its construction material and propulsion. In 1923, for example, the French used their first twin-screwed motor lifeboat. In Germany the first trial of a motor lifeboat took place at Laboe in Kiel Bay in 1911, and Germany built three diesel-powered motor lifeboats in 1926. In March 1963, the Dutch launched their largest motor lifeboat, the Javazee class, for service at the entrance to the port of Rotterdam. It was 21.3 meters (70 feet) by 4.6 meters (15.25 feet), powered by two 170-horsepower diesels, providing a top speed of 10.7 knots.

In 2005 the RNLI had seven classes of all-weather motor lifeboats, while the United States had two: the 14.3-meter (47-foot) and the 15.8-meter (52-foot) metal boats. There are only four craft of the latter class, all stationed in the Pacific Northwest.

[See also Ship’s Equipment.]

Bibliography

Anders, Bernd, Andreas Lubkowitz, and Hermann Wende. See-Not-Rettung: 125 Jahre Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffbrüchiger. Hamburg, Germany: Verl.-Haus die Barque, 1990.Find this resource:

Appleton, Thomas E. Usque ad Mare: A History of Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services. Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Department of Transport, 1968.Find this resource:

Bennett, Robert F. Surfboats, Rockets, and Carronades. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976. Describes the early boats and equipment of the predecessors of the U.S. Life-Saving Service.Find this resource:

Evans, Clayton. Rescue at Sea: An International History of Lifesaving, Coastal Rescue Craft and Organisations. London: Conway Maritime Press, 2003.Find this resource:

Noble, Dennis L. That Others Might Live: The U.S. Life-Saving Service, 1878–1914. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1994. Contains a chapter on the development of lifeboats within England and the United States.Find this resource:

Wilkinson, William D. American Coastal Lifeboat Development—An English Contribution. The Lifeboat 43 (Summer 1974): 178–179.Find this resource:

Wilkinson, William D. Nineteenth Century Coastal Lifeboats in the Collection of the Mariner’s Museum. In Wooden Shipbuilding and Small Craft Preservation. Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1976. Wilkinson is the foremost authority on coastal lifeboats in the United States.Find this resource:

Dennis L. Noble