Lighthouses

Leaving the Humber, and coming southwards to the mouth of the Thames, we pass some of the earliest post-Reformation lighthouses erected—Winterton, where we have seen a light was proposed to be shown from the church steeple in 1585; Caister, Yarmouth, Corton, Lowestoft, Orfordness, and Harwich; at all which places, and many others, lighthouses were erected in the early part of the seventeenth century.

There was a lighthouse at Caister some few miles south of Winterton, set up about the year 1600; soon afterwards we have a quaint account of the way in which this was maintained. It did not aspire to the dignity of being a coal fire; the building was merely a meanly constructed wooden tower with a lantern at the top, lit with candles—or should have been lit with candles: but mark the italics—should. How was it actually illuminated? A contemporary report shall tell us. ‘Often but one candle of six to the pound ... or at the most two’ burnt in the lantern. This was insufficient: wrecks happened in consequence, and the shipowners grumbled louder than ever at having to pay dues. As stated before, the lighthouse at Caister was in the hands of the Trinity House, and it must be said to the credit of that body that on learning of the defects, it did its best to remedy them.

An inquiry was held, and revealed a sad laxity of duty in the appointed keeper. He ought to have lived at the tower, but he did not. Such a residence, when we consider the position of the Caister lighthouse, must have been solitary and dreary enough, and we can scarcely wonder that the keeper left his employment and went to labour more congenial. But he was dishonest over his retirement: he did not put his intention into writing, but went off without notice, and deputed ‘the preparing, lighting, and watching’ of the candles to an old and decrepid woman who dwelt some miles inland, and who, as might have been expected, was unable to perform her task with regularity. To reach the lighthouse, she had a lengthy walk; and in the teeth of an easterly gale she found this more than her strength could bear; thus on many a winter’s night she had to retrace her steps without accomplishing the object of her journey: so that often when most needed no light at all showed from the Caister lighthouse. A new keeper was appointed; he was to live at the lighthouse, to light his candles—three in number—at sunset, snuff them, and replenish them as needful till ‘fair day.’

Surely a lighthouse, well and regularly tended, was needed at Caister! There was not, there is not, a more dangerous bit of coast on the eastern shore of England. Caister sandbanks rival the dreaded Goodwins in their terrors for the luckless ship that is driven upon them. Now, with a good system of signalling from the adjacent lightships, and with two or three well-appointed lifeboats, the loss of life is often considerable, and many are the risks run by the lifeboat crews in their gallant efforts to rescue the shipwrecked. Here is the story of one such risk, and it is typical of dozens more that have happened since lifeboats have been placed near Caister.

It was just midnight on March 11, 1875, when the schooner Punch, on her voyage from Newcastle to Dublin, ran upon the shoals off Caister. It was a ‘dirty’ night, pitch dark, and blowing hard from the east. The sands, partially uncovered at low water, are quicksands as the tide flows, and a ship once fairly driven on them has little hope of getting off again; as for her crew—well, there is now this hope for them, that the lifeboat-men will see the signals of distress and hazard their lives to save them. The crew of the Punch knew what the grasp of Caister sands meant, and up flared their signal fires so soon as she struck. The waves, as though eager to secure for the greedy sands their prey, broke over the vessel in quick succession and dimmed the fire; but there was a plentiful supply of tar and oil on board, and their signals blazed up again. Then the lifeboat-men saw it and hastened to them. As their boat neared the sands her crew could see, by the fire flaring on deck, that the hulk was gradually sinking down, and that there was a stretch of uncovered sand still around the ship. Before their eyes, almost within speaking distance, the Punch would be sucked into the sand, and with her the half-dozen men on board! There was but one thing for it—anchor the lifeboat to the sand and jump on to the shifting mass. Leaving a couple of men in the lifeboat, her coxswain, heaving-line in hand, leaped overboard, followed by a number of his crew, and went staggering and stumbling towards the wreck—at one moment only ankle-deep in water and the next high up to their shoulders. And so they waded on for a hundred yards in the fury of the winter storm. They called to the crew, and the crew answered them. Think what the feelings of those sinking men must have been, their gratitude to their deliverers. One threw a line from the deck, and it was clutched by the foremost of the rescuers, and, a communication once established, the schooner’s crew were one by one hauled through the broken water over the quicksand to the lifeboat, and with them the lifeboat-men rowed to shore. Yes, to shore, but not to rest! They had barely got to their homes when the cry was raised again. ‘Another ship on the sands!’ It was morning then, and back to the lifeboat they hastened, and a second time rowed out. Alas! their journey was in vain. Help had come too late, and only masses of tangled rigging, planks, and broken spars floated over the sands—the ship and her crew lay buried within them.

Oddly enough, we do not hear of any early lighthouse at Yarmouth. In the official catalogue of lights on the Norfolk coast the date of the first lighthouse of the Yarmouth group is that at Gorleston, said to have been established in the ‘fifties.’ But there was a lighthouse here nearly two centuries before; and Molloy, in his treatise on sea-law, in 1676, refers to the ‘great and pious care’ by King Charles II in erecting a lighthouse at Gorleston, or ‘Goldston,’ as he spells it, ‘at his own princely charge,’ from which expression we are, I suppose to imagine that his Majesty kept up a lighthouse at his own expense: the thing seems improbable and requires confirmation before we can accept it as truth. Lighthouses in the neighbourhood at St. Nicholas Gatt were proposed and for a time established by Sir John Clayton between 1675 and 1678, and we find the seamen of Yarmouth still clamouring for them in 1692. In the seamen’s petition the loss to shipping, for want of them, is very clearly set forth; one petition says that as many as two hundred ships perished on the sandbanks there during the gale on one winter’s night.

A lightship now marks the dangers of Corton sands, some few miles further south of Yarmouth than St. Nicholas Gatt. But Corton was one of the places at which Sir John Clayton proposed to erect a lighthouse long before. When the Trinity House had crushed all his other lighthouse projects he offered the corporation something handsome to approve of a light at Corton only, but it would not: multiplicity of lights, it said, confused the navigator, and its own lighthouse at Lowestoft did all that was needed.

At Lowestoft, in 1778, were made the earliest experiments with reflectors; a thousand tiny mirrors were placed in the lantern, and with such success that the flame of the oil lamp appeared at sea, some four leagues off, like a huge globe of fire.

The lighthouse at Harwich is memorable for quite a different reason. It played—or rather was intended to play—an important part in English politics. When at the eleventh hour James II and his advisers were trying might and main to ward off the Dutchman’s coming, and when the Trinity House officials, acting under Pepys’ orders, were busily engaged in removing buoys and altering the position of familiar coast marks, the small, or lower, lighthouse at Harwich was an object of consideration. It was—so went forth the order—to be ‘removed’ and set up in another place.’ But how? The operation could not be rapidly performed, for the building was a solid bit of masonry, and all depended on haste. A happy idea at last struck some one: the Dutch ships would be as easily misled by an erection of canvas, and that, ‘with the utmost secrecy,’ could be stretched on a timber frame, carried to the place appointed, and set up in less than an hour, whilst a charge or so of gunpowder would at the same time level the real lighthouse.

Whether this was ever done we do not know: the Trinity House records which tell the first part of the story are silent as to that point; but if it was, it certainly did not serve the object in view, for the Dutch ships, when they came, steered a very different course, and, as we all know, landed in quite another part of England.