Lighthouses

It was very good of the old abbot so to do; but in doing what he did, he was no better than a great many of his fellows. Marking dangerous reefs, and leading the mariner safely into port, were, formerly, the work of Christian charity; they were two of the many useful offices which the Church performed when there was no one else to carry them out, and for which we, who see the same things so much better done, often forget to bestow upon her even a word of praise or gratitude. Bells on rocks, marks on shoals and sands, and beacon lights used to be maintained by the great monasteries, or by their various offshoots, in this country; and those beacon lights, dim, flickering, and uncertain though they may have been, were the direct ancestors of the modern lighthouse.

We do not, of course, claim for Christian charity the credit of originating the idea of these warning signals for ships. Long before the dawn of Christianity, Lybians, Cushites, Romans, Greeks, and Phoenicians had protected navigation by the means of lighthouses—high columns, on the summits of which were placed fires of wood in open grates, or lamps lit by oil, all similar in style, though on a smaller scale, to the wonderful tower of white marble, erected at Alexandria, nearly three centuries before the birth of Christ, by Ptolemy Philadelphus at a cost of about £170,000 of our money.

Opinions differ as to whom should be ascribed the honour of paying for this mighty work; Alexander the Great and Cleopatra have been credited with it; but, on the whole, such reliable evidence as there is points more to Ptolemy as its projector. This being so, we may perhaps believe the story about the inscription that was placed upon the tower. The architect’s name was Sostratos, and he, desiring to be perpetually remembered in connection with the lighthouse, cut deeply into one of the stones these words: ‘Sostratos of Guidos, son of Dixiphanus, to the Gods protecting those upon the sea.’ Then—being assured that Ptolemy would permit no name save his own to be remembered in connection with the work—he coated over the inscription with a layer of cement, and placed thereon one wholly laudatory of Ptolemy and associating his name alone with the erection of the pillar. Time went by; monarch and architect had been gathered to their fathers, and at last the cement began to crack, and then drop away; bit by bit it vanished together with the writing upon it, and the letters on the true face of the stone beneath stood out clear and readable—then the world knew to whose skill was due this blessing to sailors and travellers!

But it is not needful to speak further of these more ancient lighthouses, or their builders; reference is made to them only to remind the reader of the antiquity of coast lighting as a system. These pages concern the lighthouses of our own country alone, and there is no evidence to prove or suggest that the shores of England were lighted prior to the Roman occupation. Indeed, of direct evidence of lighthouses being used by the Romans in Britain, there is exceedingly little. The system was extensively employed by them in Gaul, and the Tour d’Ordre at Boulogne—or ‘the Old Man of Bullen,’ as Elizabethan sailors called it—is mentioned as a lighthouse in the year 191 A.D.; so that it is hardly likely that the Romans would, for long, have left navigation around England unassisted by lights.

We may, therefore, accept the ruined tower at Dover, and some similar remains on the English and Welsh coasts, as remains of Roman lighthouses.

Whether or not, with the decay of the Roman power in England, lighthouses fell to ruin, we do not know; probably this was so, and probably, too, they were not resuscitated till Christianity had become firmly established here and was teaching men charity towards their fellow men. So early as the opening of the fourteenth century we find monks and hermits in England, and other maritime parts of Europe, doing their best to warn mariners of the dangers that lurked around their monasteries or hermitages, by means of lights maintained during the season of darkness.

To the north of the island of Jersey lie a cluster of sharp-pointed rocks, known as the Ecrehou. Sailors give them a wide berth when they can; as well they may, for their cruel spike-like reefs stretch far, and on calm days, when the water is not breaking upon them, they lie silently and treacherously in wait for the passing ship.

On the largest of these rocks there was, in the year 1309, a hermitage, or priory, served from the Norman abbey of Val Richer. Land in Jersey had, years before, been given to support two monks here who, by day, used to sing masses for the souls of those who had perished by shipwreck, and then, as night closed in, kindle, and keep burning till daybreak, as good and bright a light as they could upon their tiny building.

Here is a picture romantic enough, and research would, no doubt, enable us to paint many such. The ruined chapels that one so often sees to-day, perched upon a rocky crag or headland of our coast, were often, in all probability, lighthouses to the mariner of old.

But it is not necessary to leave too much to imagination. A great deal more can be said to prove that the maintenance of sea-lights was, in mediaeval England, really a religious office. Most of us have heard of (many have seen) the famous lighthouse on St. Catherine’s Point in the Isle of Wight. It was built only at the close of the last century, but hard by it, from the hermitage chapel on Chale Down, a light had been nightly kept, by the monks there serving God, for more than five hundred years. I shall tell the history of this lighthouse later on.

So, too, in 1427, a hermit who had settled at Ravenspurn—close by the Spurn Point on the Humber—moved by the constant disasters to shipping that he witnessed, set to work to build a lighthouse to warn vessels entering the river of the dangers of the point; and of this lighthouse also I shall have more to say presently.

Then on the chapel of St. Nicholas, which stood above the harbour of Ilfracombe, there was maintained by the priests who served in the chapel a fire of wood, which was lighted, throughout the winter, at dusk, and by being constantly tended gave throughout the night a light that to ships at a distance seemed like a bright star, and guided them safely into port. The site of this chapel is yet called Lantern Hill, and a light is still shown there from a lighthouse at night during the winter months.

In one instance, at least, the work of coast lighting was performed by a religious guild: the Brethren of the Blessed Trinity of Newcastle-upon-Tyne—the Trinity House of Newcastle, as it is now called. In 1537 Henry VIII committed to this guild the general care of all matters connected with the navigation of the Tyne, and amongst other things which the guild had expressed its willingness to do, was to build two towers on the north side of ‘Le Shelys,’ one a certain distance above the other, to embattle these towers for due defence of the port, and to maintain on each ‘a good and steady light by night,’ for the guidance of passing ships. In 1746 these two lighthouses, one of which was movable, were still standing; they were illuminated only by a few candles, but were the sole lighthouses of which the River Tyne, at its entrance, could boast.

Then, to emphasize further the fact that, prior to the religious changes in the reign of Henry VIII, coast lighting was carried on as a work of Christian charity, we may call to mind the traditions, so often associated with the towers or steeples of parish churches on the coast, that those towers or steeples had once been lighthouses. Blakeney, in Norfolk, is one of these, Boston is another; from the summit of ‘Boston Stump’—as the marvellously high tower of the latter church is called—we are told that a light was formerly displayed by which sailors in the German Ocean could shape their course to enter ‘Boston Deeps’ in safety.

The dissolution of the monasteries swept away, almost at a blow, the men who tended these coast lights as a sacred duty, and it confiscated the property from the profits of which such lights had been maintained. Leland, when he travelled through England and Wales, after the dissolution had been some little time in progress, found few coast lights remaining: here and there he mentions them, but it is difficult, from his language, to decide whether those he refers to were still nightly lit, or whether he gained from the sailors and fisher-folk with whom he talked that they had been regularly lit shortly before.

That our coast, only a little previous to the dissolution, was well lit, and that lighthouses of some kind or other were not uncommon, we may gather from the writer of the Pilgrimage of Perfection, who, in the year 1526—when speaking of the benefit to the soul by frequent contemplation of death—says: ‘It depresseth all vanities, dissolution, and lightness of manners, and, like as the beacon lighted in the night, directeth the mariner to the port intended, so the meditation of death maketh man to eschew the rocks and perils of damnation’: and that, after the dissolution, all, or the great majority, of these lights were extinguished, we may certainly infer by a study of The Mariner’s Mirrour, compiled by Wagener, a Dutch navigator, in 1586, and translated into English two years later by Anthony Ashley. Wagener describes minutely every object on the sea-coast of England, but does not refer to any nocturnal lights, with the exception of those at Shields, which we have seen were established under peculiar circumstances and only just prior to the dissolution.

But the want of lighthouses must have been keenly felt by sailors; and those engaged in navigation, no longer able to get what was needed as charity, seem, after a while, to have suggested paying for it. One of the earliest post-reformation lighthouses suggested was that at Winterton, for which we hear proposals in 1585, just about the time that Wagener wrote his description of the English coast. Now what was the site which naturally suggested itself for establishing this light? Why, the top of the church steeple; where, likely enough, a similar light had formerly been maintained as an act of charity.

The proposal emanated from ‘the masters of her Majesties Navye,’ and was made on behalf of the seamen of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk; ‘there be,’ it says, ‘many perillous sandes in the sea, thwarte of Hasborrowe Winterton, and the towne of Great Yermouthe, wheruppon manye shippes and men are often perished in the night tyme.’

The danger of these sands might well be avoided ‘iffe a contynuall lighte were maynteyned uppon the steeple of Winterton,’ which might be easily done, without any ‘greate imposition or taxation,’ if every English ship trading by the coast, or to the East countries, paid some small contribution.

Nothing seems to have come of this proposal, and the next suggestion we hear of for a lighthouse at Winterton is one some twenty years later in 1607, made by the Trinity House to maintain a light, not on a church steeple, but in a building specially erected for the purpose.

Nor was this a solitary lighthouse scheme. We hear, just then, of another—a very mad one, it is true, but none the less interesting on that account—for a lighthouse on the Goodwins, of which I shall speak later. Probably there were many more such proposals before Queen Elizabeth and her council just then, for it is impossible to conceive that men, many of whom must have had personal experience of the benefits of coast lighting, would be content to sit down and do without them just because the religious changes had swept away the machinery that had before supported them.