Background
He was born on October 29, 1889 in Vineyard Haven, Massachussets, United States, the son of Edward Jones Smith, a whaling captain, and of Sarah Elizabeth Pease.
(Excerpt from The Marion and General Greene Expeditions to...)
Excerpt from The Marion and General Greene Expeditions to Davis Strait and Labrador Sea, Vol. 2: Under Direction of the United States Coastal Guard, 1928-1931-1933-1934-1935; Scientific Results; Physical Oceanography The report is based on the observations of the M am'on expedition, 1928, and amplified by the cruises of the General Greene to the Labrador Sea, 1931 and 1933 to 1935. In View of the similarity and intermixture between the waters north of Newfoundland and those around the Grand Banks, it has been deemed advisable to add an exposition of the latter based upon the researches of the International Ice Patrol, the observations of which are published in Coast Guard Bulletins 1 - 25. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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explorer military oceanographer
He was born on October 29, 1889 in Vineyard Haven, Massachussets, United States, the son of Edward Jones Smith, a whaling captain, and of Sarah Elizabeth Pease.
He attended Vineyard Haven elementary schools and New Bedford High School. In 1910, after one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he entered the U. S. Coast Guard Academy (then the U. S. Revenue Cutter Service School) in New London, Connecticut. He graduated and was commissioned an ensign in 1913. Later he pursued graduate studies at Harvard University. In 1924 he received an M. A. from Harvard.
Smith won a fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation to study oceanography at the Geophysical Institute of Bergen, Norway, from August 1924 to August 1925. He earned a Ph. D. from Harvard in 1934.
During the next after U. S. Coast Guard Academy Smith served on Coast Guard cutters based in East Coast ports. From August 1917 to January 1919 he was a navigator in the Atlantic Patrol Force on convoy escort duty between England and Gibraltar.
After returning to the United States, Smith served on cutters in Boston and Newport News, Va. , on routine patrol duty before being assigned to the cutter Seneca in November 1919. When the Seneca was assigned to the International Ice Patrol in the North Atlantic in the spring of 1920, Smith served as a scientific observer and navigator. From this point on, Smith was engaged in research in the Arctic and in the general field of oceanography. He continued with the International Ice Patrol until August 1924.
During his off-duty hours he wrote reports based upon his Ice Patrol research. He spent three months at the British Meteorological Office in London, collecting data that proved to be of value to the Coast Guard in its Ice Patrol work. When Smith returned to the United States and the Ice Patrol in late 1925, he brought back extensive knowledge of modern methods of oceanography and was in a position to put these methods into use.
From 1926 to 1928 he was at sea for long periods. When one vessel was returning to port, he often transferred at sea to the patrol ship that replaced it. His friends called him "Iceberg. " From January 1928 to June 1936, Smith was officially assigned to the Coast Guard destroyer force operating against smugglers, but he was able to spend much of his time on detached duty with the Ice Patrol.
During the summer of 1928 he commanded the Marion expedition to the iceberg-producing areas of the Labrador Sea, Davis Strait, and Baffin Bay, off the west coast of Greenland.
His scientific report on that expedition was prepared in 1934. In July 1931, Smith was the American scientific observer on the six-day, 8, 000-mile flight of the Graf Zeppelin in the Arctic north of Eurasia. His report on this voyage was published by the American Geographical Society.
As the United States moved closer to war in 1941, Smith was assigned to the Greenland Patrol, first to command the northeast portion but, after October 1941, the entire patrol. In 1942 he was promoted to rear admiral and began to build a fleet of armed trawlers, using Boston fishing boats modified to carry deck guns. In November 1943, Smith was given command of Task Force 24 of the Atlantic Fleet and set up a network of weather and rescue ships across the North Atlantic to support military flights to England.
In 1945, Smith became commandant of the Third Coast Guard District (New York) and captain of the port of New York. In 1946 he took on added responsibility for all search and rescue operations in the western North Atlantic. He headed the official inquiry into the loss of the Constance in Nantucket Sound in 1949, and his handling of the inquiry became a model for future such investigations.
After his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1950, Smith was director of the Woods Hole (Massachussets) Oceanographic Institution until 1956. From 1956 until his death in Falmouth, Massachussets, Smith was affiliated with the New York public-relations and fund-raising consultant firm of Marts and Lundy.
(Excerpt from The Marion and General Greene Expeditions to...)
Smith was a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Arctic Institute of North America, the Aero-Arctic Society, and the Propeller Club of New York.
On July 24, 1924 he married Isabel Brier; they had three sons: Porter, Stuart, and Jeremiah.