Lighthouses

The Scillies were the home of at least one religious fraternity in pre-Reformation days; and surely, when we consider the situation of these islands, we may accept it as probable that the inmates of such houses—following the usual rule—displayed some kind of nocturnal light to aid vessels coming from the west or from Ireland. But this is only surmise; the first we hear of a project for erecting a lighthouse on the Scillies is in 1661. The Trinity House then condemned the scheme, but twenty years later itself proposed an exactly similar thing, and obtained from the crown a patent to carry it out and to gather toll for its support. It so happens that at this latter date Sir John Clayton had also suggested a lighthouse in the Scillies, and he naturally wrote a stinging letter to the Trinity Board, taxing them with activity in the good work only when they feared that some one else would undertake it; but with that we need not trouble ourselves. The corporation, as we have said, got the patent and built the lighthouse. Some of the incidents in its building, and in the first few years of its existence, are interesting and characteristic, and illustrative of the life and spirit of Western England.

One of the first steps that the Trinity House took in the work was to write to Sir William Godolphin, then Governor of the Scillies, asking him to recommend to the surveyors being sent out, persons of local knowledge whose word could be relied on and who were not wreckers. This was certainly a wise step, for the surveyors found, on arriving, that most of the islanders regarded them ‘with an evil eye,’ and cared for lighthouses no more than they did for ‘crowners’ inquests.

By the middle of May, 1681, all was ready for the surveyors’ start: plans and drawings of the proposed lighthouse were prepared, and government so far assisted in the undertaking that it gave the Trinity House opportunity of purchasing any materials required from the naval stores at Plymouth; it also furnished the surveyors with one of her majesty’s yachts to convey them to Scilly.

The lighthouse to be erected was to be certainly substantial—brick-built, circular, four storeys high, with walls six feet thick at the base, and all timber used was to be ‘of the best English heart oak.’ Its solidity has paid, for the lighthouse at St. Agnes, Scilly, of to-day is, in the main, that put there more than two hundred years ago.

Altogether it was quite the most important lighthouse undertaking on which the Trinity House had as yet embarked, and it was with considerable anxiety that it awaited the arrival of the surveyors’ first report; this reached the board on July 20, and told that all had so far gone well, and that a site for the building had been selected at ‘Agnes,’ some three miles from ‘the Bishop and Clerk rocks.’ The superintendent of the works was not over-pleased with his lodging, which, though the best the island afforded, he considered dear at half-a-crown a week, for it was, he said, but ‘little better than a hogsty.’

Before the end of September the board heard of the completion of the lighthouse, and that a fire had been lit upon it, which was plainly seen from the Land’s End. Eighty chaldrons of coal were ordered from Swansea, and the regular lighting was fixed for October 30 next, due notice to that effect being given in the Gazette, and at Billingsgate and the Custom House, whilst letters announcing the fact were also written to the English merchants in the Canaries, Spain, and Portugal. Last, but not least, collectors were appointed at the different southern ports to collect the dues from incoming or outgoing ships.

The old receipts for the payment of such dues are interesting, from the representation they give of the lighthouse in question. The light was given, as the reader will notice, from a coal fire enclosed in a lantern, having a funnel in the roof: this is the earliest instance of one of these enclosed coal fires. It was not successful, as we know, for the smoke collected in the lantern and dimmed the light, and the fire needed constant attention to keep it bright; it was, however, continued here for a long time, because it was economical.

But the Trinity House, before the year was ended, had to consider a difficulty in connection with the Scilly lighthouse much more serious than an insufficient or dim light—it had to consider the conduct of an unfaithful servant. It had wisely declined to appoint as keeper any one born and bred in islands where it was well known that the inhabitants preyed on human life and lured mariners to shipwreck; but it unfortunately did not suspect danger from one who had only gone out to live there since the lighthouse had been in progress, and this want of suspicion led to the appointment of a man who before three months had elapsed proved himself to have become a wrecker.

One dark and rainy night, just before Christmas, 1680, the fire on the Scilly lighthouse, which home-coming vessels had been told to expect, did not shine forth. On came a richly laden ship, sure of her position and safety, as no light was visible, and only when too late was warned by the sound of the waves as they broke upon the rocks, of her proximity to the reefs that lie around the Scillies. To attract attention and bring help she discharged her cannon, and then, but not till then, the fire on the lighthouse shot up bright and clear. Doubtless the keeper and his accomplices had watched the lights of the approaching vessel, and allowed the fire to slumber till she was actually upon the rocks: then, in the hope, perhaps, of escaping condemnation, should the matter reach the ears of his employers, he fanned his fire into flame. But his ruse did not succeed, nor could it well have done so, since he was found, but a few hours after, in company with the greedy band of wreckers on the rocks, and much of his plunder was subsequently discovered hidden in the heap of coal that stood ready for use beside the lighthouse.

Similar troubles ensued with subsequent keepers, though no such flagrant case was discovered; but it was often needful to caution those engaged in looking after the lighthouse to avoid ‘meddling with wrecks,’ which, despite the presence of a lighthouse, seem to have been not infrequent, and to avoid ‘drinking’ and the company of wreckers. There is other evidence that for a long time to come the keepers were too much hand and glove with the inhabitants of the islands to avoid suspicion. Altogether this first lighthouse that the Trinity House had built for fully fifty years, and certainly the most elaborate one, cost the board a good deal of annoyance and a good deal of money; so much of the latter, that the Duke of York, then master, was asked soon after its erection graciously to ‘forego’ his annual allowance on account of the poverty of ‘the House,’ which he graciously did.

It will be remembered that in the autumn of the year 1707 Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s vessel, and the fleet accompanying it, were cast away on the Scillies, Sir Cloudesley and many others perishing. On that occasion the keeper of the lighthouse took time by the forelock, and, quite as soon as news of the disaster reached London, there came from him an assurance as to the ‘goodness’ of his light when the wreck occurred. The board made no answer till it had heard some of the sailors who escaped, and these all agreed that, on the occasion, the light was dim in the extreme, owing they believed, to ‘the foulness of the glass.’

The admiral’s body was carried by the tidal current to Porth Hellick, and there found burial till it was exhumed and removed to its present more dignified resting-place in Westminster Abbey. If you go to Porth Hellick, the fisher-people round about will show you the very spot of his temporary burial—not a blade of grass grows upon it! If you ask them they will tell you the reason. A Cornish sailor, on board the admiral’s ship, warned the officer in command of the nearness of the rocks of Scilly, and bid him beware. This was intolerable, and the man, though he had ventured, from his local knowledge, to tell his superior of approaching danger, was judged by Sir Cloudesley guilty of a gross breach of discipline, and ordered forthwith to be hanged at the yardarm. Here he was hanging when the vessel struck the rocks. Of course tradition says that the disaster was but a due punishment of the admiral for his injustice and a response to the curses of the sailor, who had before his execution repeated the 109th Psalm, and made its imprecations applicable to those at whose hands he was dying. Sir Cloudesley, so the story goes on, was not drowned in that shipwreck, but was washed ashore, exhausted from exposure, close to the spot in question. On his finger glistened a diamond set in a most precious ring: the man who found him could not resist this wonderful heaven-sent gift, and, lest the wearer should hinder him from getting it, battered out of him the little remaining life he possessed, and buried him in the sand.

There is a common Cornish superstition that over a sinner’s grave the grass will not grow; and that is why the ground which covered the admiral’s body still lies bare. Mark the deliciously national sentiment displayed in the story. The murdered man, not the murderer, is the sinner! It was no crime in the wrecker’s law to slaughter a man, or a woman either, on whose body was valuable jewelry or costly raiment; the worth of that jewelry or raiment was regarded, as Sir John Killegrew told Carleton, as ‘God’s grace’ sent to them!

If you dip into Cornish legend you will see this illustrated over and over again. And more: not only was it no murder to kill the living man or woman who might hinder you from gathering in the harvest of the sea—the harvest that God sent you: it was no murder to kill the revenue officer who tried to stop you in gathering the harvest your illicit trade sent you. The graves of some of these officers used, a couple of generations ago, to be shown in the Cornish churchyards, bare of grass, and the reason was that those who lay beneath them were murderers—murderers because in doing their duty to their king and country they had brought to the scaffold some notorious smuggler who likely enough, as a wrecker, had slaughtered some half-drowned victim of shipwreck to strip his body!

But this is a digression; let us resume our narrative of St. Agnes lighthouse.

As a result of the lax keeping of the lights, Whiston’s mad proposals were made to Parliament in 1716; he suggested that from one of the Scilly Islands there should be discharged into the air, at intervals throughout the night, huge fire-balls, to warn mariners of their whereabouts. But people only laughed at his suggestions, and nothing came of them.

Later on we hear that the ‘badness’ of the Scilly lights was ‘the talk of the Exchange’; and indeed it seemed that each successive keeper fell more or less into the evil habits of his predecessor: the idle life led many into drunken habits, and that probably accounts a good deal for the lax keeping. ‘You drink so much,’ wrote the Trinity House Secretary to one keeper, ‘that you are not fit for business.’ This was in 1740, and the particular keeper was no doubt the man referred to by Robert Heath—a writer on the Scilly Islands in 1750—as having kept his fire so badly that often it was scarcely visible on the neighbouring island of St. Mary. ‘Some,’ continues Heath, ‘think that often this keeper left his fire unlit all through the night,’ or else kept it so low that by daybreak nothing but lifeless embers filled the grate.

However, things mended soon after this: the Trinity House placed better-class keepers at St. Agnes—men of better education and less likely to be contaminated by the ill-example of the inhabitants of the islands; and after the closed-in coal fire had been changed, in 1790, for a powerful oil lamp, we hear no more complaints about the Scilly lights. The then owner of the islands bought the cradle, or grate, in which the coal fire had burned, and turned it into a flower-stand, which he placed in the wonderful gardens at Tresco, where it may still be seen—certainly it is an interesting relic.

The lighthouse at St. Agnes remained the most westerly in England till the year 1858, when that on the Bishop’s rock was erected; it is a massive structure of grey granite. A much less solid erection—similar in construction to that upon ‘the Smalls,’ of which I shall presently speak—was all but completed some eight years before; but on the night of February 6, 1850, the whole affair was demolished by the force of a storm which snapped off the iron supports that had been fixed into the rock, as though they had been so much matchwood.