THE 1800s -(Cont'd) 



The Fish Commission Steamer Fish Hawk, designed by Charles W. Copeland, naval architect 

 of the Lighthouse Service Board, was completed in 1879 by Pusey and Jones Company of 

 Wilmington, Delaware. The 157-foot, 484-ton, coal-burning steamer was the first vessel specifically 

 constructed for the Fish Commission and served as a floating hatchery for the production of such 

 fish as shad, herring, and striped bass. Her hatching equipment consisted of 36-inch cone-shaped 

 containers each capable of holding over seven million shad eggs. Built primarily as a "hatchery" 

 ship the Fish Hawk was not suitable for offshore work but was intensively used in dredging and 

 trawling in the coastal water of New England. Her long (47 years) career was briefly interrupted 

 during World War I, when, for one year, the Navy assumed control and she was assigned to duty in 

 New London, Connecticut to assist in the development of sonic submarine detection devices. 



In 1879, Lieutenant Commander George Washington DeLong embarked upon a disastrous 

 Arctic expedition aboard the 142-foot sieameT Jeanne tte. Attempting to sail their ship through the 

 Bering Straits, reach Wrangel "Land" and then sled "overland" to the Pole, the Jeannette was 

 caught in the polar ice pack in September 1879. For almost two years, she drifted along the 

 Siberian coast until finaUy crushed in June 1881. DeLong, and part of his crew, on their long trek 

 to the Siberian coast succeeded in reaching the mouth of the Lena River only to die of starvation 

 in November 1881 . DeLong's journal, in which he made regular entries until his death, solved the 

 problem of Wrangel Land by determining it to be an island (Wrangel Island, U.S.S.R.). Some three 

 years after the Jeannette's loss, several articles of the ship's crew were found on an ice floe on the 

 southwest coast of Greenland. This discovery gave new support to the theory of a continuous 

 ocean current passing along the then unknown polar regions. 



The Navy, lacking actual surveying ships, encouraged ships-of-the-line to make special 

 surveys and explorations at every opportunity. Records for the year 1881 indicate that the vessels 

 from which hydrographic information was received at the old Hydrographic Office, comprised 

 nearly all the active Navy ships. Of particular note was the 137-foot screw gunboat Patox, attached 

 to the Asiatic Squadron; in 1881 she was assigned to Lieutenant Commander F. M. Green who was 

 in charge of the Hydrographic Office's Department of Longitudes. By the close of 1881 Green and 

 his party had established the geographical positions of a number of prominent places on the east 

 coast of Asia and in the East India Islands. These same records of 1881 contain the following 

 anguished statement: 



"In spite of the repeated and urgent appeals of the Hydrographer, the Chief of 

 the Bureau of Navigation, and the Secretary of the Navy, for reasonable 

 appropriations for carrying out the work of the Office, the policy of Congress 

 seemed to be to place the American naval and merchant marine under the 

 humiliating necessity of depending upon the hydrographic offices of foreign 

 powers for the means of safely navigating the oceans. A comparison of the issues 

 of the British and the French hydrographic offices with those of our own for 

 this year shows that, while the British published two thousand seven hundred 

 and fifty-five and the French three thousand one hundred and fifty-seven 

 engraved charts, the United States sent out but two hundred and five." 



In 1882 two significant efforts occurred-the first U.S. magnetic chart of the world was 

 published by the Navy Hydrographic Office, and the first new U.S. oceanographic research ship 

 was built. The 234-foot, 1,074 ton, iron-hull, twin-screw, U.S. Fish Commission Steamer 

 Albatross, designed by Charles W. Copeland and built by Pusey and Jones Company, was the first 

 ship to be built especially for marine research by any government. The Navy Department 

 contracted for her construction with a Congressional appropriation of $148,000, and the crew was 

 composed of Naval personnel. Her construction was supervised by Commander Zera L. Tanner 

 who then commanded her for over 12 years. The Albatross was the first government ship fitted 



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