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Coast Guard announces discovery of lost US Revenue Cutter Bear


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A historic Coast Guard ship that once performed daring rescue missions in frigid Arctic waters and was later lost off Nova Scotia has been found, ending a 42-year search for its resting place in the north Atlantic.

The discovery of the US Revenue Cutter Bear was celebrated in Boston Thursday, where the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced its recovery.

“Today I’m pleased to announce that, with a reasonable degree of certainty, we have found the final resting place of the historic Revenue Cutter Bear,” said Admiral Nancy Hann, deputy director for operations of the NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations. “Identifying the final resting place of the Revenue Cutter Bear is just another example of NOAA and the Coast Guard joining forces to do more collectively than either of us could do individually, and showing how we work together to advance our collective missions.”

The ship’s captain, Michael Healy, who in 1848 was sent from Georgia to Massachusetts to join his brothers at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, was the first Black commander of a US government vessel, officials said. He helmed the Bear for nine years, starting in 1885, a brave protector of a dangerous sea.

“While law enforcement officials in the Old West laid down the law in a town or a stretch of land, Captain Healy laid down the law for the territory of Alaska and the Bering Sea—an expanse of water and land roughly the size of the lower 48 states,” said William Thiesen, a Coast Guard historian. “And while the sheriffs of the Old West used a horse and gun for law enforcement, Healy commanded an armed U.S. ship, the Bear, that cruised between 20 and 30,000 miles in its annual Bering Sea patrol.”

The 198-foot cutter Bear was purchased by the U.S. government in 1884, Hann said, going on to patrol the Arctic for 41 years. There, the ship rescued survivors of the Arctic expedition led by Lt. Adolphus Greely, a member of the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps, according to the Coast Guard historian’s office.

After service in two World Wars and countless safety and mercy missions, the Bear was decommissioned in 1944. It sank on March 19, 1963 as it was being towed to Philadelphia where it was to become a floating museum and restaurant.

“During the transit, the ship in tow encountered heavy seas, causing the wooden vessels’ plank seams to open to the sea. She slowly sank below the waves,” said Thiesen. “Some believe that the venerable Bear chose to end her career on her way at sea, rather than suffer the indignity of becoming a floating restaurant.”

Search teams had worked since 1979 to find its wreckage. In 2019, the Coast Guard and NOAA used sonar equipment to scan 62 square miles of seabed where the Bear was believed to have gone down, said Joe Hoyt, national coordinator for the maritime heritage program in NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.

Through sonar images, NOAA determined there was a ship wreck on the seafloor, but needed more precise images to verify if it was the Bear, Hoyt said. Search teams returned to the site this past June with remote operating vehicles capable of recording live feed hundreds of feet below the water’s surface.

“We collected about 30 hours of footage of the site, that we then poured over and tried to compare to historic plans, the ship’s plans, what we know of the vessel, and photographs, to try to find features that aligned,” Hoyt said.

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