There is not much to say about the lighthouses along our southern coast between Dungeness and St. Catherine’s, in the Isle of Wight; but the lighthouse at this latter place has an interesting history.
What now remains of the ancient building tower, octagonal without but square within, which consists of four distinct stories; the two lower were entered from an annexe building, whilst the two upper were mere stages reached by ladders. The beam-holes may still be seen, and they show that this was the arrangement. Two entrances to the tower remain—low and narrow doorways, one exactly over the other; the upper being the narrower of the two. The basement is lit by a couple of square-headed windows, not very wide, with arched lintels in the inner face.
Such is the ancient lighthouse of St. Catherine’s as we see it to-day; certainly a picturesque ruin, and certainly possessed of interesting and romantic associations. The spot was already a hermit’s cell in the year 1312, when the Bishop of Winchester admitted Walter de Langeberewe to ‘the hermitage on the hill of Chale, dedicated to St. Catherine the Virgin.’ Whether or not it was then part of the hermit’s duty to light and trim a lamp in his hermitage to warn vessels of the presence of St. Catherine’s Point, hard by, we do not learn; but we know, now, that this was no unusual task for the occupant of a hermitage.
Two years after Walter’s admission, that is, in the winter of 1314, a ship—one of a fleet chartered by some merchants of Aquitaine to bring over a consignment of wine into England from the vineyard of a monastery in Picardy—went ashore near the hermitage, and soon the force of the waves dashed her to pieces, scattering her cargo, which was, most of it, washed ashore. Her crew escaped safely to land, and then gathered together as many of the casks as they could, which—thinking that the owners would imagine all had been lost with the ship—they proceeded to dispose of, for the best terms they were able to make, to the inhabitants round about.
But in process of time the true story of the wreck travelled over the Channel and reached the ears of the merchants of Aquitaine, who forthwith brought an action in the English courts against the sailors and those who had bought the shipwrecked cargo. In the end damages were awarded to the merchants, and the incautious purchasers supposed that the matter had been brought to a conclusion. But it was not so; the Church—the monks in Picardy—had been wronged, for the wine really belonged to them; the merchants had only the consignment of it; and so the pope interfered and held that the purchasers must atone for their illicit trading. He decided what form the atonement should take: Walter de Godeton, one of the largest buyers, was to establish in the hermitage of St. Catherine a priest who would offer continual prayer for those perished at sea, and he was also to build a tower adjoining the hermitage, from which a light should nightly be displayed to warn passing ships of the danger of St. Catherine’s Point. The ruin which we see to-day is evidence that this part of the papal direction was duly carried out. What was the subsequent history of this lighthouse, we do not know; but at the general sweeping away of hermitages and oratories this useful light seems no longer to have been maintained.
In the seventeenth century, and again in the eighteenth, schemes were set on foot for re-erecting a lighthouse near the ruined tower of St. Catherine’s, though none was actually established at the spot till just at the end of the last century. That is the date at which the lighthouse now standing there was erected—a lighthouse famous throughout the maritime world for the extraordinary brilliancy of its light, given by electricity.
Weymouth and Melcombe Regis were important ports during the Middle Ages, and it is possible, nay probable, that some system of guiding incoming vessels by night existed there in early times; but if it did, all trace of it is lost. Portland Hill seems a natural place for a lighthouse, yet the first we hear of one there is quite at the beginning of the last century, when Captain William Holman’s petition to erect one was submitted to the Trinity House.
The board considered that at the spot suggested the land was so high and the water so deep, ‘to the very shore,’ that lights were needless; adding that the duty proposed would add to the already heavy burdens borne by the shipowners. The report concludes with the argument, used before in other cases, that had lights been needed at Portland, the board would have suggested them. Not perhaps convinced with this method of argument, the corporation of Weymouth and the seamen of that port again urged the actual necessity for a lighthouse. Their petition and those that succeeded it were, however, ‘shelved.’
But the value of lighthouses was getting to be too widely appreciated for a scheme like that at Portland to be crushed, because it was thought that ‘navigation’ paid enough for light dues already. The seamen clamoured and raised public opinion on their side, and so the Trinity House thought the best thing to do was for itself to propose lighthouses at Portland, which it did, and obtained a patent on May 6, 1716.
The superior economy of the ‘closed’ fire-light was then, as we have seen in other instances, attracting attention, and the fire at the higher lighthouse at Portland was arranged on that plan; but it did no better there than elsewhere, and in 1731 we find the mariners ‘who used the western trade’ urging the Trinity Board to ‘open’ the fires on the lighthouses there, and allow the smoke to escape, instead of dimming and clouding the glass.
But probably ill-keeping had as much as anything to do with the badness of the lights, which was frequently a subject of complaint by nautical men. In 1752 we get a curious picture of the condition in which the lights were maintained: two brethren of the Trinity House, who had been sent to consider the position of a proposed lighthouse at the Lizard, thought well to inspect those at Portland, and approached them on a summer’s evening by sea. ‘It was,’ they say, ‘nigh two hours after sunset before any light appeared in either of the lighthouses.’ Then, in the lower light, there came a faint glimmer, which continued for about an hour, and ceased. Half an hour after, a light appeared in the upper lighthouse, and gave a very fitful light, only showing at intervals for the first hour, and then ‘gave a tolerable good light,’ though not so steady as the lower.
The two brethren asked the captain of their boat if this state of things was the rule or the exception, and received an answer that the ill-keeping was the rule; the lights never showed in time, and often not all through the night. It must be said to the credit of these two brothers that they suggested that the captain and his friends, who ‘used the coasting trade,’ should memorialize the Trinity House on the subject.
West of Portland, none of the other headlands from that, as far as Plymouth, were marked by lighthouses till within a hundred years ago—that is to say, as far as we know. What may have been the case before the dissolution of the monasteries cannot now be definitely ascertained; there are many ruined chapels along the coast between these two points, and there is a legend connected with that which stands on the hill above Torquay, to the effect that it was founded by a sailor who had been rescued from shipwreck near the spot, and who—as a thankoffering for safety—gave money to support a small band of monks from Torr Abbey to keep a light there for the benefit of ships going up and down the Channel.
But when we reach Plymouth we are practically opposite the best known lighthouse in England, the Eddystone. The history of this isolated building does not perhaps go back very far; yet it is certainly as interesting and full of incident as that of any of which we have yet spoken.