Indigenous First Responders Are a Master Class in Marine Rescue – The Tyee

They’ve saved voyagers for centuries. Now, a federal partnership provides training, but rebuilding trust is crucial.

When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of the Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco, California, to Port Gamble, Washington, in 1896, faced two agonizing options: abandon ship into the roiling sea and head toward shore through a rock-riddled shoal or stay aboard and hope the hull would hold.

Capt. Atwood chose the latter and ordered his nine crewmen to lash themselves to the rigging to avoid slipping off the tilting deck and into the ocean’s frothing gullet. So bound, they waited until darkness slid into light. As the shoreline morphed into view on that November morning, the men got a sense of their position. The ship was pinioned to a reef, being rocked and hammered by the Pacific. The shore was tormentingly close, just 400 metres or so away, but the span too perilous to cross.