The worst navigator in the world can lead a happy life five hundred miles at sea with plenty of blue water under the keel. He may be fifty miles from where he thinks he is, but he has lots of room for mistakes. But making landfall is another matter. Then, even the best navigator in the fleet sometimes begins to think about a billet in the Ninth Naval District, where the latest wrinkle in piloting is still believed to be the barking dog method.
The art of piloting—although not necessarily practiced by pilots—is the guiding of a ship by earthly lights or other aids to navigation, as opposed to celestial navigation by star sights and sun lines. Aids to navigation are natural or man-made structures strung along the edge of the earth to show the mariner his way. They may be anything: a headland, a tree, a simple spar buoy bobbing in a seaway, or the 8,000,000 candlepower Liston Range Light in Delaware Bay.
There are forty thousand miles of United States seacoast and nearly as many navigational aids. They tend to cluster, of course, where traffic is the thickest. The approach to New York harbor is marked by fourteen lighthouses, two lightships, seven fog signals, and any number of buoys and smaller lights. The navigator, or pilot, has only to spot these aids and identify them to determine his correct position.
The queens among these aids are the mono-eyed monsters called lighthouses. Their story joined the stream of history soon after the story of man. The first creditable aid to navigation glowed about 300 b.C. from a burning pile of faggots perched on a stone tower on the island of Pharos, which lies off the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The light itself was called Pharos and the word today is the word for “lighthouse” in the Romance languages. Standing well over 400 feet, it was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World and took twenty years to complete. Its light burned for over 1500 years until the tower was razed, presumably by an earthquake.
Whether Alexander the Great, or his general, Ptolemy, the reigning monarch, sponsored this fire tower to the tune of a million dollars, remains obscured. But we know who built it. The architect, named Sostratos, carved his name and an inscription into the solid rock. He knew when he did it that whoever was in power would not let it stay, even as present day politicians somehow manage that their labels alone shall show on any public improvement. So Sostratos covered his plaque with cement and inscribed a fancy blurb for the king. Years later, when ruler and deputy molded in their tombs, the cement cracked and fell away—and finally the world got the word.
From the time of the Pharaohs until the Romans began lighting up the coasts of Britain, lighthouse progress remained cradled in the Mediterranean. There were about seventeen ancient towers used as lighthouses scattered from the Black Sea westward.
The only survivor of this period, the Tower of Hercules, still stands at Coruna on the northwest coast of Spain. The Spanish government has restored the tower, encased it in granite, and placed it back in commission. Another of this original group, the Tour d’Orde at Boulogne on the north coast of France, was built around 40 A.D.; restored by Charlemagne in 811, it stood until 1644.
When Roman power decayed, charity took up the burden. The coasts of England were lighted from monasteries and church steeples. When the monasteries were banned, private enterprise stepped in and took over. Individuals sought petitions from the king, set up the lights, and collected tolls from the ships that entered and left the harbors. This was a lucrative business and sometimes a double source of income. Not all owners were above dousing their lights on the chance that an especially rich cargo might be strewn on the rocks.
After St. Agnes Lighthouse was completed on the Scilly Isles, the natives who applied for the job as keeper were turned down because they were all known wreckers. The man brought in, however, proved no more allergic to loot than the inhabitants. When the word was passed one night that a likely ship was approaching, he let his fire nearly die. When the ship had foundered and fired her cannon as a distress signal, he fanned the fire to show a bright light. He might have died a rich old man had not the authorities found some of the cargo under his coal pile.
There were laws, of course, and a governing body known as Trinity House. It was founded by Henry VIII, who, besides being a man of many wives, was also known as the Father of English Navigation. The Trinity House charter began: “Out of the sincere and complete love and devotion which we have for the very glorious and indivisible Trinity . . . His Majesty grants and gives license for the establishment of a corporation, or perpetual brotherhood. . . . ”
This seems to be as far as anyone read, for the brotherhood was mainly composed of shipowners who took the license to see that additional lights on which they might be required to pay additional tolls were kept at a minimum. They felt it more profitable to lose a ship now and then, along with the crew’, than to pay the rate of about two cents a ton for the cargo they moved in and out of port. They were even instrumental in affecting the destruction of the first Lizard Lighthouse on the grounds that it was unnecessary, although its successor today guards the entrance to the English Channel.
The forgotten men were those who manned the ships. Fishermen and farmers felt it their right to make a living from shipwrecks. Land along a rocky coast was worth far more than that in the fertile valleys behind it. One old gaffer put it down for history when he said: “I don’t see why there’s no prayers for foul weather; we always prays for fair weather, but the foul weather makes us richer.”
In the town of Morwenstow, however, on the coast of North Cornwall, there was a Rector who looked out for his flock—as well as for himself. If a ship approached the beach during service, word was brought to the church whereupon he would inform the congregation, worship would cease, and all hands scramble. By virtue of his position, it was necessary for the parson to start from the pulpit, while his robes hobbled his speed to little more than a trot. Thus he was always last man out. This two point handicap worried the Cleric and he strove mightily towards a solution.
One Sunday he was handed a note which contained news that a ship was about to go on the rocks. He finished his prayers and walked towards the font at the rear of the church. All the good people supposed he was standing by to perform a christening. When he spoke, however, he was nearly through the door, minus his robes. “My Christian brethren,” said the reverend gentleman, “there’s a ship on the rocks below, this time we’ll all start fair!”
Trinity House was later overhauled in the days of Queen Elizabeth and set up as an organization beneficial to the mariner. But legend persists and hatred for the revenue officer remained no less fierce than in our own Ozark country. There is a Cornish superstition that grass will not grow on the grave of a sinner; the sinner being anyone who would deprive a man of his booty.
It seems an admiral was informed by a seaman that their ship was in too close to the shore. The man was hanged for insubordination. While he was still hanging, the ship struck the rocks. The admiral managed to swim ashore and was found exhausted on the sand by a wrecker who bashed out the remainder of his life and relieved the body of a costly diamond ring. Today no grass grows on the admiral’s grave because he hanged a seaman with good advice and came ashore with that which rightfully belonged to the man who found him there.
Lighthouse progress stayed in the doldrums. By the time the colonists had built Boston Light in 1716, there were still only seventy in the world. This was due mainly to cost, lack of engineering know-how, and the fact that lights were needed in only the most exposed and treacherous spots. It meant living in isolation for months. It meant sinking foundations into solid rock, often partly submerged, without dynamite or compressed air. It meant hauling chunks of stone weighing up to two tons in small craft and fitting the blocks into jig-saw patterns with hand-powered derricks and crow bars. It meant clinging to a ring bolt or cowering in the lee of an island; cold, wet, and hungry, while a gale blew itself out and perhaps tumbled long months of work into the gnawing currents of an unpredictable sea. And it often meant death.
England’s most famous light, the Eddy- stone, was built four times in sixty years. The engineer in charge of the survey for Tillamook Lighthouse, at the mouth of the Columbia, waited six months for seas calm enough to make an approach. It took a year to make a landing on the rock of Armen off Cape Finisterre at the northwest tip of Spain. Two years and twenty-three landings later only twenty-six hours work had been accomplished.
The first Minots Ledge Light, on the Cohasset Rocks twenty miles to the southeast of Boston, was stripped to a few twisted pilings in a four day gale of hurricane force, in April, 1851. Here men had drilled five foot holes into the solid rock in which they anchored eight-inch wrought iron poles. These they braced to a central pile and to each other. Around the pile they built a base twenty-five feet in diameter which supported a tower sixty-five feet high.
And it was all wiped out in a sustained blast of fury. The toll of the bell was the only evidence that the keepers were alive on the last dreary night. When the storm rolled back with morning twilight on the fifth day, the light had completely disappeared.
But such losses were slight when stacked against the losses suffered without the lights, and man kept doggedly at the job of putting up aids to navigation.
The lighthouse story finally surged to maturity in the last hundred years. With the expansion of trade, all the great maritime nations set engineers to designing and erecting necessary guide posts for the navigator. Scotland produced a whole family—the Stevensons. Since Robert Louis’ grandfather built the Bell Rock Light off the Firth of Tay, each generation has contributed some significant work.
The Stevensons were not only responsible for their homeland lights, they also designed the first towers for Japan. But their speciality was sea-rock lights. In Germany the problem was sand, and there other engineers sank a caisson forty feet beneath the North Sea on which they built a fifty thousand ton platform for the Rothersand Light off Bremerhaven. A similar job was repeated in Delaware Bay for the Fourteen Foot Bank Light.
But the long coasts of the United States presented the whole gamut of problems. For the coral off Florida, the screw-pile was adopted—poles, shaped like augers, were twisted into the sea bed. Lights at the mouths of certain rivers required specially reinforced foundations to buck the ice that formed upstream and jammed as it flowed seaward.
The tall towers of the East Coast could not be repeated along the Pacific for there the lights were built on cliffs. Too much elevation meant pushing the structure into the fog and blotting out the light. Cape Henry Light at Norfolk, Virginia, towers nearly two hundred feet and has about the same elevation above sea level, while Cape Mendocino Light squats on a north California bluff and throws out its beam four hundred twenty-two feet above the sea.
In spite of increased knowledge and skill, however, the engineers are still stymied off the North Carolina coast. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse and Diamond Shoals Lightship are still combined to do the work which a single light could do better. Attempts have been made—so far without success. It’s doubtful that a lighthouse will ever appear at the door step of Diamond Shoals Reef.
To the man responsible for thousands of tons of ship and cargo, this story of how the light got there is only secondary. During the quiet of a night watch he might inwardly give credit to those whose efforts, time, and lives put it there, but when he comes into the coast, his only concern is that a brilliant light shall show, warning him, and enabling him to determine his position from its characteristics.
So further improvements came—this time with the light itself and its illuminants. In Liverpool a man covered all bets that said he couldn’t read a newspaper from the light of a single candle thirty feet away. Several friends took him on. He rigged a concave mirror behind the burning taper, proved his point, and picked up the money.
A clock maker who had been one of the losers pondered over this idea. After several months he came out with a reflector for a lighthouse which was used until a Frenchman named Fresnel invented something better.
A reflector’s chief fault is that it throws the light in all directions. Fresnel built up a series of concentric glass prisms around a bulls-eye. Each prism was a little larger than the other. In this way the light was concentrated into a single beam which was thrown out on a horizontal plane. Fresnel’s light, with improvements, is in general use today.
After the open fire of faggots came coal and enclosed lights of candles and oil. Sperm oil, from whales, was used for a while, and the United States even subsidized a company to make colza-oil from the seeds of wild cabbage. Lard oil was used as a cheaper substitute, but it had a tendency to congeal in low temperatures. Then came “earth- oil,” or petroleum, which answered all the problems until science had time to make substantial refinements with acetylene, electricity, and mercury vapor.
In the beginning, every light was a steady white light. As the number grew, the mariner coming towards a crowded coast found he had no way of identifying one light from another. An English barber first got the idea that lights could be arranged in various positions or elevations to distinguish them apart. He patented the idea but little came of it. Then the Swedes came out with the scheme of hiding, or flashing, the light for a different number of seconds at each lighthouse. France took up this system, adopted it officially, and published an explanatory chart.
Today a light is designated by its characteristics,—that is, the manner in which it is shown and the duration of its stay. A fixed light is sometimes combined with a flashing light or a group of flashing lights. There are also occulting lights used singly or in groups.
To the mariner, the difference between a flashing and an occulting light is merely the duration of its period of light or darkness. With a flashing characteristic, the period of darkness is longer; while a longer period of observed light is true of an occulting characteristic.
As with human beings, hardly do any two lights have the same characteristics. There are pairs, true, but they are usually more than a hundred miles apart. The job of matching any two would be comparable to the job of finding a New York friend’s address by searching through the phone numbers of all the metropolitan directories.
What makes a light flash? The type of apparatus in use today is generally one in which the entire lantern revolves around the light. It is made up of panels or sections, each with its own bulls-eye and prisms. The number of panels and the speed at which they rotate determine the light’s characteristics.
Following another human trait, the lights took on weight as they grew in importance. The four twelve-foot panels of the Manora Point Lighthouse at Karachi, India, weigh nearly three and a half tons. After mounting in gun-metal frames and set on a turntable, such a lantern ran on rollers. But the friction set up was too great. Now they are usually set in a trough of mercury where they float like a cork. The total weight of equipment used in the Cape Race Light on the Newfoundland coast, including pedestal, turntable, trough and mercury, and lantern, is approximately twenty tons.
The most powerful lights are those on which a sailor might make a landfall. They are called first order lights in a classification or rating set-up of eight categories. The basis of this classification is determined by the light’s focal length, the distance from the center of the light to the inner surface of the lens. Coastal lights are usually of second or third order. Harbors use lights of the fourth or lesser orders.
Improvements kept coming. Today there are many lights which no human being goes near for three, six, or even twelve months at a time. And they don’t just continue to burn throughout the daylight hours. At each dusk, they cast out their beams as though some phantom hand had thrown the switch. Come dawn, they fade out as the natural light intensifies.
And no one growls about technology or labor being replaced because these lights are all located in places where no man wants to stay. They cover all the lonely stretches from the forbidding coasts of Norway and Sweden to Tierra de Fuego.
The principle involved is simple. If a piece of metal is covered with lampblack, it will absorb light; if burnished, it reflects light. Gustaf Dalen of Sweden went to work with this knowledge and came up with a light, or sun, valve.
He took a rod of lampblacked metal, placed it vertically and hooked the lower end to a valve which controlled the flow of acetylene gas. Alongside, he installed a pilot light. Around the rod he placed three other highly polished rods to intensify the reflection of the natural light.
Now, as darkness falls, the rod which has been absorbing light, contracts, This contraction forces the bar downwards, which opens the fuel valve. The pilot light sets off the gas and the lighthouse goes to work.
When daylight comes, the blackened rod begins to absorb the light which is intensified from the reflection of the polished bars. The rod expands, draws upward, and closes off the valve. Such a light has an added feature. Should a storm brew and the sky become leaden, the light will go on the second the rod contracts.
Wedged in between Sostratos and Dalén, the story of the lighthouse becomes a thick volume. And there are those who say that radar and loran have written the last chapter. But in spite of all the electronic gadgets on the bridge, the man coming in from the open sea will always look to the towers as a symbol of his livelihood. To him the lighthouse will always stand to lead with a kindly light—even as there will always be men who cast off from the shore to earn their bread upon the waters.