Thetis —
Teddy Roosevelt’s Guardian of Endangered Seabirds by William H. Thiesen, Historian, Coast Guard Atlantic Area
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At the time of the visit of the party, in the summer of 1911, heaps of the bodies of the slain still lay on the ground, mute witnesses of the sad fate that had overtaken these beautiful birds.
enry Henshaw was not only chief of the federal bureau overseeing threatened species over 100 years ago, he was also the nation’s leading ornithologist. In the quote above, he reported on the poaching and slaughter of wild seabirds on the remote and uninhabited Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. During the 1800s, the expansion of the United States led to the exploitation of wild lands westward across the continent and across the Pacific. America and its trading partners had a voracious appetite for wild animals for food, adornment, clothing, and sport, which threatened the very existence of many species inhabiting the land and waters of the United States. By the end of that century, however, the United States had also become a world leader in protecting species from poaching and unregulated catches.
—Henry W. Henshaw, Chief, US Bureau of Biological Survey, 1911 During that period, the US Revenue Cutter Service’s role protecting flora and fauna both onshore and in the water grew in geographic scope and variety of species. The service began protecting natural resources in 1822, when it was tasked with guarding federally owned forests in Florida for naval timber. When the United States acquired Alaska in 1867, it assumed the mission of protecting wildlife populations, such as the northern fur seal inhabiting the Bering Sea. In 1899, an Act of Congress transferred the one-time Arctic whaler-turnednaval vessel, USS Thetis, to the US Revenue Cutter Service. Thetis had been a naval vessel since 1884, when it was sent to rescue the ill-fated Greely Expedition at Ellesmere Island, located above the Arctic Circle. On 16 March, the Treasury Department notified the Revenue Cutter Service that the Navy would transfer to it the Thetis,
along with all of its boats, equipment, and gear. In April, the service ordered Thetis to its new homeport of Seattle. Ironically, the ship originally designed for hunting marine life spent rest of its service career enforcing regulations to protect it. In March 1904, Thetis’s annual Bering Sea patrol was interrupted when commanding officer Captain Oscar Hamlet received orders to proceed to Hawaii. These orders initiated Thetis’s mission to protect yet another animal from illegal poaching—wild seabirds. That year not only marked an expansion of the service’s mission to protect wildlife, it also marked the beginning of a long relationship between Hawaii and the United States Coast Guard. When the ship arrived in Honolulu in May, Captain Hamlet took on supplies and sailed for the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands chain, located hundreds
detroit publishing company photograph collection, library of congress
USS Thetis (c. 1884–1899) before the ship was transferred to the US Revenue Cutter Service.
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SEA HISTORY 180, AUTUMN 2022