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The Massachusetts Humane Society
The Massachusetts Humane Society, modeled on Britain’s
Royal Humane Society, was established by an act of Congress in 1796.
The Massachusetts Humane Society was an all-volunteer, purely humanitarian
organization; all early efforts were directed at saving lives rather
than ships or cargo. Initially funded entirely by private donations
from Boston physicians and shipping merchants, the Humane Society
began by erecting Huts of Refuge, equipped with blankets, firewood,
and food rations, along treacherous Massachusetts shorelines. The
first three huts were positioned in Scituate, Hull, and Lovells
Island (adjacent to “the Narrows” through which all
shipping passed prior to 1902) after 13 people froze to death on
Lovells in the early 1800’s after surviving a shipwreck. The
Huts were positioned in locations that allowed shipwreck victims
who had made their way to shore to aide in their own salvation and
avoid dying of exposure.
Eager to expand its service to shipwreck victims, the
Humane Society built its first lifeboat station, [photo] in Cohasset,
Massachusetts, in 1807, equipping it with a 30-foot, cork-lined
lifeboat. Thirty-four years later, in 1841, the MHS had expanded
to include 81 stations with 18 boats along the coastline. [image]
The service endeavored to locate huts and lifeboat stations at the
most treacherous locations, and painted the huts bright red, in
hopes of their being readily seen by survivors. While the preponderance
of Humane surfmen were of European descent, the crews reflected
their communities, and, for example, the Martha's Vineyard Gay Head
crew [photo] was composed entirely of Wompanoag men.
The Great Storm of 1888
It was common practice for Humane Society crews from neighboring
towns to band together to effect rescues in the worst storms. One
of the most formidable storms on record, the great storm
of November
25-26 1888, [story]involved crews from Hull, Scituate, an
d Cohasset
working tirelessly for over 36 hours to save crews from six vessels
off the coast of Hul
l and Cohasset. Local citizens compared the
storm to the blow that had toppled the original Minot's Light [image]
nearly 50 years earlier. Through the extraordinary work of the local
volunteer lifesavers, 29 lives were saved.
The Surfboat Nantasket
Perhaps the event of greatest lastin
g significance resulting from
the infamou
s November 1888 storm was
the launch of the surfboat
Nantasket, which, for the next 41 years defined the capabi
lities
of
lifesaving in the United States. Joshua James and his brother
Samuel designed Nantasket (the most renowned lifeboat in
America) [image] specifically for the storm wat
er
s off Hull’s
Nantasket Beach. Radically shaped, much larger than the other MHS
surfboats of
its day, with a bluff bow and disappearing stern --
for beating out against waves and surfing home safely -- Nantasket
is credited with saving 17 men in one rescue alone, three miles
off shore in 1889. In 1909, a Massachusetts Humane Society document
listed the Nantasket as the “largest and finest in
the Society’s fleet.” In 1935, after a storm drove her
through the wall of the Coast Guard’s original Windmill Point
boathouse, the Chief retired her to the Mariners Museum in Newport
News, where she remained until being returned to Hull, [image] and
the Lifesaving Museum, in 1985. |