Project Gutenberg has some wonderful old books available online. This one, The Sea Rover, by Rufus Rockwell Wilson, penned in 1906, has a chapter called "The Lighthouse Keeper." It's good reading for anyone interested in maritime history, especially lighthouses. I've reprinted the chapter here. Enjoy!
CHAPTER VIII
THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER
Heroes, also, are the men who build and tend our lighthouses, and
there are few finer stories than that which tells of the erection of Tillamook
Rock lighthouse, probably the most exposed structure in the world. Tillamook is
a basaltic rock, rising abruptly from the deep waters of the Pacific a mile off
the Oregon coast, and eighteen miles south of the mouth of the Columbia River.
Projecting to seaward, it receives the full force of the stormiest waves of the
Pacific, which often break with appalling violence on its summit, ninety feet
above the level of the sea, boats being able to reach it only when the sea is
calm.
Four workmen in October, 1879, were landed on the rock with their
tools, fuel, provisions, a stove, and canvas for a tent. They were in a
few days joined by five others, who brought with them a small derrick. The
foreman of the party lost his life in attempting to land, and the lot of the
survivors was one of great discomfort and constant danger. To prevent being
blown or washed away, they tied the canvas to ring-bolts driven into holes
drilled in the rocks, and then quarried out a nook in which they built a
shanty, which they also bolted to the rocks. Next a flight of steps was
quarried up the steep side of the cliff, and the work of cutting down and
leveling the summit began.
The weather often compelled a suspension of work for days at a
time, and in January came a tornado which lasted for nearly a week. During this
storm the shanty of the workmen was repeatedly flooded with water and their
supplies were swept into the sea. They were able at the end of a fortnight to
make those on the mainland acquainted with their condition, and fresh supplies
were passed to them over a line cast from the rocks to the deck of a schooner, which had come as near as safety would
permit.
When May, 1880, came, the dome of the rock had been cut down to a
height of eighty-eight feet from the surface of the sea, and a spot leveled for
the lighthouse. A small engine and more derricks were now landed, and with them
came three masons, who in June laid the corner-stone of the lighthouse. The
stones were made ready for laying on the mainland, and a fresh supply conveyed
to the rock whenever the weather would permit. First, a square, one-story house
for the keepers was built, and above this was raised a tower forty-eight feet
high, raising the light 136 feet above the sea level. Sixteen months after work
was begun the lamp was lighted for the first time, and has since prevented
scores of wrecks. Over the beacon raised amid such difficulties, three keepers
stand sentinel, and their lot is an exciting as well as a lonely one. A few
winters ago a terrific storm broke upon the rock, and the water poured in
torrents through the holes cut in the dome of the lighthouse
to give ventilation to the lamps. Stout wire screen shutters protected the
lantern and broke the force of the water hurled against the glass. But for this
it would have been battered in, and the heavy plates might have killed the man
attending the lamps.
Tillamook is known in the service and to mariners as a light of
the first class, since lighthouses are roughly divided into three classes:
First, those on outlying headlands and deep-sea rocks, the distinguishing
features of a country's coastline, and the first to give the mariner warning of
his nearness to land. The second grade of lights show him his way through the
secondary shoals and rocks, and the third grade, or harbor lights, take him
safely into port. There are fifty-two first-class lights on the coasts of the
United States. New Jersey and Massachusetts have each a double light; and
Florida, by reason of the treacherous reefs which girt its coast, has as many
first-class lights as any other two States put together.
A majority of the lights of the first-class are housed in tall
stone or brick towers, and a number of them stand upon very high ground. The
light on Cape Mendocino glows from an eminence of 423 feet above the level of
the sea, and is visible for twenty-eight miles. There are ten other lights
whose elevation averages from 204 to 360 feet above sea level, and which are
visible from twenty-one to twenty-six miles. The light at St. Augustine, Fla.,
is a fine example of its class. The strong and massive tower of brick rises 150
feet from the ground, and the light is reached by winding stairs. The apparatus
for the light is twelve feet high and six feet through, and the lenses alone
cost thousands of dollars. A powerful lamp in the centre of the apparatus sends
its rays in all directions, the lenses being arranged at such angles as to
gather the light and to send it out in parallel rays in the course desired. The
cost of the St. Augustine lighthouse was $100,000.
Each lighthouse must have peculiarities of its own, so that both
by night and by day the mariner can distinguish it from its neighbors, and
thus guard against the mistakes that might otherwise prove fatal. The first
result desired is accomplished by the use of fixed, revolving, blended, flash
and intermittent lights, and as the timing of the second and the two latter
classes is capable of great variety, it will be seen that the elasticity of the
system is ample to meet all possible needs. To secure the second result desired
the lighthouses are painted in different colors, and the application of the
colors is varied in each instance. Some retain their natural colors, while
others are painted black and white, or red and white; here broad horizontal
bands alternating, and there slender spiral ones setting off the background of
a sharply contrasting color. Again, the shape of the houses is varied, some
being circular and others cone-shaped, some tall and others short, some square
and others octagonal, while in many cases the shape and color of the keeper's
dwelling nearby also help to make distinction easy. Thus the character of the
light guides the sailor by night, and by day the form and
color of the lighthouse give him welcome knowledge of his whereabouts.
The first lighthouses in this country were beacons, made by piling
up stones, from the summit of which "firebales of pitch and ocum"
were burned in iron baskets at night. It is a far cry from that time to this,
and the construction of the lighthouse of the present day is, as has already
been shown, a task demanding mechanical skill and engineering ability of the
first order. A lighthouse on the mainland has few difficulties involved in its
construction, but where the foundation is an isolated rock, a submerged reef,
or a sandy shoal, the best resources of the engineer and mechanic are called
into full play.
The lighthouse most difficult to build is that on the submerged
rock or partly submerged rock. Race Rock Light, in Long Island Sound, belongs
to this class. Portions of Race Rock are three and others thirteen feet under
water. Diving-bells were used to level the foundations for the lighthouse, and
the masonry and concrete under water were laid in the same way. The United
States has two other lighthouses built on submerged rocks, Minot's Ledge in
Boston harbor, and Spectacle Reef, on Lake Huron. The first lighthouse on
Minot's Ledge was built above stout iron rods driven into the rocks. In April,
1851, there was a severe gale which lasted five days. On the third night of the
storm the house was blown down and light and keeper went out together. Four
years later a second structure was begun, this time with a foundation of
masonry and concrete. Minot's is barely awash with the lowest tide, and so rare
were the opportunities for work that three years were required to prepare the
rock for the first course of stone, which was laid in 1857. In 1860 the
structure was completed and has ever since stood proof against wind and storm.
Spectacle Reef lighthouse, near Mackinac, was built with the aid
of a coffer-dam. A large wooden cylinder was constructed by banding long staves
tightly together and towed out to the rock, where it was set up on the
surface and the stones driven down into the uneven places. Then the crevices
were filled with cement and the water pumped out. After this the rock was
leveled and the limestone courses rapidly raised one above another. Spectacle
Reef light stands eleven miles from land, and its base is seven feet under
water.
Where there is a shifting shoal, whose unstable character no degree
of mechanical or engineering skill can overcome, resort is had to the
lightship. The United States has twenty-five of these vessels. Seven of them
are employed off Massachusetts Bay to mark the Vineyard and Nantucket shoals,
and a line of equal number lies along Long Island Sound stretching from
Brenton's Reef to Sandy Hook. Four more are stationed off the New Jersey and
Delaware coasts, one off Cape Charles, three off North Carolina, South Carolina
and Georgia, and two off Louisiana and Texas. The life of a lightship crew, as
will be told in another place, is a laborious and often a dangerous one.
The United States is divided into sixteen lighthouse districts,
each one with its inspector and engineer. The former, drawn from the navy,
inspects the lights under his jurisdiction at least every three months; the
latter, a member of the Corps of Engineers, superintends the building, removal
or renovation of the towers. Both are responsible to the Lighthouse Board, a
body appointed by the President and composed of veteran naval officers of high
rank, who are no longer fitted for active duty at sea.
The station of the third lighthouse district is on Staten Island,
between St. George and Tompkinsville. Here over a hundred men are constantly
employed and half a million dollars annually expended. From this station one
hundred and eighty-nine lighthouses and beacon lights and seven lightships are
maintained and supplied, while thirty-six day or unlighted beacons, thirteen
steam fog signals, six electric light buoys, and five hundred and seven other
buoys are looked after and kept in repair by the inspector and his
assistants.
Fog often obscures the rays of the most powerful light, and it is
then that the fog signal and the whistling buoy come into play. The most
effective fog signal is the American siren, a steam machine worked under
seventy pounds pressure, and from which a series of noises come forth that can
be heard from two to four miles. Certain intervals in the sounds designate the
nearest light and afford a welcome and often much-needed guide to the mariner
enveloped in a cloak of fog. This system of fog signals extends along the
entire seaboard, extra precautions being taken on the Northern Atlantic coast.
Mineral oil is the principal illuminant used in our lighthouses.
It is selected with the greatest care, and is subjected to three several tests
before being accepted. Gas has been tried as a lighthouse illuminant, but with
inferior success, and there are at the present time only three lighthouses in
which it is used. Experiments with electricity have also been only fairly
successful, its light blinding instead of giving aid to the pilot. The
lighthouse station on Staten Island is a busy place, and much work is done
there, but the wheels of industry are so well oiled and run so smoothly, that a
deep peace seems always to brood over the establishment. Day after day and year
after year the work, moving in well-marked channels, goes on with quiet and
certainty. Everywhere the neatness and order prevail that mark all departments
of the lighthouse service.
Indeed, in no branch of the government service is stricter
discipline and closer attention to duty insisted upon than is demanded from the
brave and devoted men who tend our lighthouses. The pay of these keepers ranges
from $1,000 to $100, the average, by an Act of Congress passed some years ago,
being $600. The Lighthouse Board, which controls the service, selects as
keepers the best men obtainable, preference being always given to men who have
served for lengthy periods in the army and navy.
Members of this class know what discipline means, and hard
experience has taught them that orders are to be obeyed to the letter. Many an
old veteran, whose scars tell of valiant service in the Civil War or on the
Western frontier, and many an old shipmaster or mate, whose weather-beaten face
bespeaks long years spent on the quarter-deck, as lighthouse keepers now do
duty on solitary and barren beacon rocks, where for months at a time, aside from
their own voices and those of their families, the roar and moan of the ocean,
as it beats against the breakers below, are the only sounds that are heard.
The life of the keeper—though many who follow it seem wholly
contented with it, and doubtless would not leave it for any other calling—is
thus a lonely and arduous one. Two breaches of the rules which govern the
keeper's conduct bring as a penalty immediate dismissal from the service. The
absence of a light for a single moment may bring disaster to life and property
on the seas, and neither excuse nor previous good conduct can save from instant dismissal the keeper who allows his light to go
out. He may plead that his wife or child was dying, but he is told that he must
subordinate his light to nothing. And he must not only keep his light burning,
but stay by it so long as the lighthouse stands. Some years ago an ice pack
lifted from its foundations, overturned and carried away the Sharp's Island
lighthouse in Chesapeake Bay. The two keepers had a staunch boat and could have
made their way to shore. Instead, they bravely chose to remain at their post of
duty, and for sixteen hours, without food or fire, drifted with the wreck at
the mercy of the ice cakes. When the wreck finally grounded the keepers carried
ashore all the movable portions of the light, the oil, and everything else they
could take with them.
At the same time the keepers of another light, fearing danger,
left their post and went ashore. They pleaded that the ice had rendered the
light useless for the time being, but this excuse had no weight with their
superiors. They had proven recreant to their trust and were dismissed from
the service, the places they had filled being given to the two keepers who had
refused to leave their post of duty, even when to remain seemed certain death.
Drunkenness, when detected, also leads to removal from the service. That and
allowing one's light to go out are the two unpardonable sins in the eyes of the
lighthouse inspector.
Aside from his duties at night, the keeper finds plenty of work to
do. Promptly at a given hour in the morning the lights must be extinguished;
and during the day all put in order for the coming night. In the lantern room
the lenses must be kept free from speck or tarnish, and the reflectors, the
brass railings and the gun metal carefully burnished and polished to the last
degree of brightness. The oil tanks must also be filled and the wick trimmed.
Carelessness or negligence in any of these particulars is dangerous, for the
visits of the inspectors are always unannounced, and may occur at any moment.
Most important of all, the lamp must be lighted on time, for
a delay of even a few minutes will not escape notice. Each keeper is required
to record the time the lights appear in the stations within his range, and
tardiness in this particular is noted by watchful eyes, and at once reported.
At inaccessible stations, as a rule, from three to four keepers are employed.
In stormy months, when communication with the mainland is impossible, one or
more of the keepers may die or be disabled, and experience has taught that, to
insure safety, three men at least must be posted at every dangerous station.
No keeper is allowed to engage in any business which may interfere
with his presence at the lighthouse. However, there are some keepers who work
at tailoring, shoemaking, and similar trades; and there are others who are
preachers, school-teachers and justices of the peace. The keeper whose
lighthouse is located on land is encouraged to keep a garden, and a barn is
provided for his horses and cattle. Until a few years ago many keepers greatly
increased their incomes by taking boarders in the summer—life in a
lighthouse has a strong attraction for those fond of the romantic—but the Lighthouse
Board finally prohibited the renting of quarters to outsiders in buildings
owned and constructed by the Government, and this pleasant and convenient
source of revenue was cut off.
Whenever keepers are located at stations where the cost of
carriage exceeds the cost of fuel and rations, they are furnished at the
expense of the Government. This applies to the keeper of the lighthouse on a
big rock near Cape Ann. No sea-going vessel can come within a quarter of a mile
of his home, and it is impossible for a loaded boat to reach his abiding-place
in safety. The coal he uses is shipped in bags from Boston to as near the
lighthouse as the vessel can approach. The bags are then loaded into small
boats and taken to the edge of the shoal water, inside of which it is dangerous
to enter. From the boats the bags are carried ashore on the backs of the crew,
who wade through the shoals, clamber up the rocks with their burdens and
empty the coal in the lighthouse bin. Coal is worth thirty dollars a ton at Cape
Ann lighthouse. The keeper's other bulky supplies are delivered in the same
manner as his coal.
At all the lighthouses built on rocks and ledges the keepers have
to be supplied with fresh water from the mainland, that collected from rains in
cisterns and tanks being generally insufficient for their needs. Each
lighthouse keeper is supplied by the Government with a well-selected library of
fifty volumes. There are five hundred and fifty of these libraries, and they
are continually kept moving from station to station, the inspector, when he
makes his quarterly visit, bringing a fresh library, and taking the old one
with him, to his next stopping-place.
Captain Oliver Brooks, now living in honored and well-earned
retirement, besides being for thirty years keeper of the great light on
Faulkner's Island, five miles off the Connecticut coast in Long Island Sound,
was also one of the most remarkable men ever connected with the lighthouse
service. He had been a sea captain before he became a lighthouse keeper and was
a man of signal mechanical skill and marked inventive genius. His knowledge of
electricity, and of light and sound was thorough and exact, and the results of
many of his experiments, adopted by the Lighthouse Board, have contributed
greatly to the improvement of the service. All the apparatus with which he
conducted his experiments was constructed by him in a little workshop he had
fitted up in the lighthouse tower.
But his fondness for the theoretical never caused him to neglect
in the slightest detail the practical side of his work, and he was, indeed, a
model keeper. Faulkner's Island lies directly in the path of all vessels
passing either in or out of the Sound, and its light is one of the most
important ones on our coasts, but there has not been a night in more than a
hundred years that it has not flashed out its warning to sailors. The island
was a barren and desolate spot when Captain Brooks settled there, but he
and his family turned it into a paradise. All of his large family of boys and
girls were born there, and there grew up to sturdy manhood and splendid
womanhood. One daughter was an authority on ornithology; another, a gifted
water-color artist, and every one of the children was a skilled musician, their
family concerts, in which not less than five different instruments were brought
into play, being treats to hear. All of the children had noble records as
life-savers, and many were the men, women and children they saved from death in
the treacherous waters surrounding their island home. It was not until his
youngest child had left the island that the captain gave up his place as keeper
to spend his last days on shore.
Even better known than Captain Brooks is the keeper of Lime Rock
light in Newport harbor. Should you chance to be in Newport on some pleasant
summer afternoon, walk out on the long wharf that runs from the mainland into
the west side of the harbor, and when you have reached its end, wave your
handkerchief toward the lighthouse opposite. Soon a woman will appear in the
door of the tall gray tower, and running down to the boat moored to the stone
wall, step into it, take the oars, and with graceful yet powerful strokes, pull
rapidly toward the wharf. As she approaches her erect back and evident strength
give the impression of youth, but as she turns the boat about to receive you
for a visit to the lighthouse you discover to your surprise that she is a woman
of middle age.
Your hostess is Ida Lewis, keeper of Lime Rock light and famous as
the American Grace Darling, a modest and kindly hearted heroine, whose skill
and daring have saved nearly as many lives as there are years in her own. In
fact, it was due in part to her record as a life-saver, that she was given the
place she now fills. Besides attending to her duties as keeper, there are other
cares that keep her busy; she is a careful housewife, keeps abreast of current
literature; and is a devoted churchwoman, spending her Sundays on shore
whenever possible. To her credit, no light in her district is as regularly or
perfectly attended to, nor does any other gain from the inspector so high a
report as Lime Rock light.
There are several other women light-keepers, but none of them has
ever had to face an experience as trying as that which a few years ago befell
the wife of Angus Campbell, keeper of the light on Great Bird Rock, a lonely
islet in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the farthest beacon to the harbors of
Nova Scotia. When the late fall comes and the tardy fishermen hasten away to
the mainland, the gulf turns to ice and hems the rock in with a clutch that
only the returning summer can loosen. There, in the autumn of 1896, Angus
Campbell took his newly wedded wife to share his loneliness. During the winter
James Duncan and George Bryson, two of Campbell's friends, journeyed to Great
Bird Rock to remain until spring. They were professional seal hunters, and a
great many seals play around on the ice and rocks at the foot of the big
cliff.
The men landed on the rock early in February. At that time there
was no open water within five or six miles of the lighthouse in any direction.
The men were landed on the ice and made their way up to where Campbell was
waiting for them. On February 27, Campbell and his visitors left the rock to go
in pursuit of the seals they had noticed on the ice the day before. His wife
saw them start across the ice and then returned to her household duties. They
had not been gone more than four hours, when the wind, which had been growing
colder and blowing steadily from the eastward, shifted to the southwest. The
southwest wind is the agency that dashes the ice fields against the cliff and
breaks them up. She thought that the men, being so much lower, might not have
noticed the wind, and she hoisted the danger signal. They must have seen it,
for she soon caught sight of them hurrying over the ice toward the rock.
They were within gunshot of the lighthouse, when the ice
cracked with a sound like thunder, and a long, blue line appeared, running east
and west, parallel with the lighthouse rock and with North Bird Rock, about
five miles to the westward. The big crack was followed by a general splitting
up of the ice floe. She saw the men standing just the other side of the open
water. She saw her husband wave his hands at her and she waved back. Then the
darkness came, like a great blanket dropped from the wintry skies, and men and
ice were blotted from her vision. But even in her sore distress she did not
forget the duty incumbent on the lighthouse keeper. She clambered up into the
lantern and lighted the great oil lamp, saw that it was filled, and attended to
the other duties she had seen her husband perform.
Morning, when it came, gave no glimpse of her husband and his
companions, nor did the third or the fourth day bring them back to her. After
that the days grew into weeks, and the worse than widowed woman found herself
confined to lonely and racking imprisonment on the ice-locked rock. But
not for a single night did she fail to fill and light the lamp that had been
her hapless husband's charge. When the Government steamer touched at Great Bird
Bock, on May 5, 1897, the captain looked long and earnestly at the lighthouse
perched far above him, and wondered why there was not the customary greeting.
He saw no sign of life. There was the derrick rope swinging in the wind, but no
moving figures at the top of the cliff, as there were wont to be.
Closely scanning the rock, he saw at last a white, gaunt face at
the window. In a little while a thin, tottering figure crept to the brow of the
ledge, but it was some minutes before the tender's captain could recognize in
that wasted being the comely woman whom he had known as Angus Campbell's wife.
"Where is your husband?" he shouted.
"Angus is dead," came the answer, in a faint, palsied
voice, "and so are Jim Duncan and George Bryson."
An instant later the captain had swung himself into the
derrick ropes and was making his way up the rocks. When he reached the woman
she burst into tears and fell at his feet. Calmed at last, she told her story.
"How did you stand it?" asked the captain when she had
finished.
"God knows," was the reply. "I knew I had to keep
that light burning, and that I think kept me alive. That was all I had to do,
except watch the sea through my husband's glass. I got up night after night,
and I do not think I ever slept two hours at a time. There were plenty of
provisions, but I could not eat more than one meal a day, and sometimes I did
not eat that. I had some hope on the morning after the boys were carried out on
the ice floe, that they might be in sight and might be saved some way. But that
morning there was nothing to be seen but water and ice. Then hope was gone. I
knew there was nothing to do but wait for the spring. And I have done it. Every
day I have swept the horizon with the aid of the glasses. It was merely a
formality, after a while, but I kept on doing it. I do not know
why. At last life got to be like being buried alive. I had no interest in
living. I had no appetite, no thought of sleep. In all the time I do not
suppose I have slept two hours in succession, nor at any time eaten more than
one scanty meal a day. I was going crazy, and should have killed myself or died
of starvation in another week."
A few days later Mrs. Campbell was removed from the rock to her
former home in Prince Edward Island.
Many of the most picturesque lighthouses in the United States
establishment are on the rocks and islands off the coast of Maine. Notable for
its beauty is the one on Matinicus Rock. The first lighthouse thereon, erected
in 1827, was a cobblestone dwelling with a wooden tower at each end. Twenty
years later this was replaced by a granite dwelling with semicircular towers,
which has since developed into an establishment requiring the services of a
keeper and three assistants. Matinicus Rock rises fifty feet above the sea, and
presents what seems a precipitous front to the ocean, but there is no more
rugged, dangerous coast along the seaboard of Maine than here, and when a gale
rages the waves pound the rock as if bent upon washing it away, the thunder of
the green-gray wall that beats against it, sounding, at such times, like the
cannonade of a hundred heavy guns. Life on Matinicus for years past has been a
never ending struggle between man and the elements, and this lends peculiar
interest to the history of the light and its watchers, bound up with which is a
love story at once tender, wholesome, and true. Captain Burgess, keeper of the
rock from 1853 to 1861, had a daughter Abby, a maiden as comely as she was
brave, whom he often left in charge of the lights while he crossed to Matinicus
Island. On one occasion rough weather for three weeks barred his return to the
rock, and during all that time, Abby, then a girl of seventeen, not only tended
the lights, but cared for her invalid mother and her younger brothers and
sisters.
In 1861 Captain Grant succeeded Captain Burgess on Matinicus,
taking his son with him as assistant. The old keeper left Abby on the rock to
instruct the newcomers in their duties, and she performed the task so well that
young Grant fell in love with her, and asked her to become his wife. Soon after
their marriage she was appointed an assistant keeper. A few years later the
husband was made keeper and the wife assistant keeper of White Head, another
light on the Maine coast. There they remained until the spring of 1890, when
they removed to Middleborough, Mass., intending to pass the balance of their
days beyond sight and hearing of the rocks and the waves. But the hunger which
the sea breeds in its adopted children was still strong within them, and the
fall of 1892 found them again on the coast of Maine, this time at Portland,
where the husband again entered the lighthouse establishment, working in the
engineers' department of the first lighthouse district. With them until his
death lived Captain Grant, who in the closing months of 1890, being then
aged eighty-five, retired from the position of keeper of Matinicus light, which
he had held for nearly thirty years.
Not less lonely, but far more perilous than the life of the
keepers of a light like that on Matinicus is the lot of the crew of the South
Shoal lightship, whose position twenty-six miles off Sankaty Head, Nantucket
Island, makes it the most exposed light-station in the world. Anchored so far
out at sea, it is only during the months of summer and autumn that the
lighthouse tender ventures to visit it, and its crew from December to May of
each year are wholly cut off from communication with the land. It is this,
however, that makes the South Shoal lightship a veritable protecting angel of
the deep, for it stands guard not only over the treacherous New South Shoal,
near which it is anchored, but over twenty-six miles of rips and reefs between
it and the Nantucket shore—a wide-reaching ocean graveyard, where bleach the
bones of more than a half thousand wrecked and forgotten vessels.
The lightship is a stanchly built two-hulled schooner of 275 tons
burden, 103 feet long over all, equipped with fore-and-aft lantern masts 71
feet high, and with two masts for sails, each 42 feet high. The lanterns are
octagons of glass in copper frames, so arranged that they can be lowered into
houses built around the masts. In the forward part of the ship is a huge fog
bell, swung ten feet above the deck, which, when foggy weather prevails, as it
frequently does for weeks at a time, is kept tolling day and night. A two-inch
chain fastened to a "mushroom" anchor weighing upward of three tons
holds the vessel in eighteen fathoms of water, but this, so fiercely do the
waves beat against it in winter, has not prevented her from going adrift many
times. She was two weeks at sea on one of these occasions, and on another she
came to anchor in New York Harbor. Life on the South Shoal lightship is at all
times a hard and trying one, and, as a matter of fact, the crew are instructed
not to expose themselves to danger outside their special line of duty. This,
however, does not deter them from frequently risking their lives in rescuing
others, and when, several years ago, the City of Newcastle went ashore on one
of the shoals near the lightship, all hands, twenty-seven in number, were saved
by the South Shoal crew and kept aboard of her over two weeks, until the story
of the wreck was signalled to a passing vessel.
Nor are the South Shoal crew alone among lighthouse keepers in
displays of heroism outside the duties required of them. Isaac H. Grant holds a
silver medal given him by the Government for rescuing two men from drowning
while he was keeper at White Head; and Keeper Marcus Hanna, of the Cape
Elizabeth station, Maine, received a gold medal for the daring rescue of two
sailors from a wreck during a severe storm, while Frederick Hatch, keeper of
the Breakwater station at Cleveland was awarded the gold bar. The last
mentioned badge of honor is granted only to one who has twice distinguished
himself by a special act of bravery. It was given Hatch in the winter of
1898. A wreck occurred at night, just outside the breakwater. The eight people
aboard made their way to the breakwater pier, but the heavy seas swept several
of them back, and one lost his life. Pulling to the pier in a small boat,
Keeper Hatch took off the captain's wife; but she was hardly in the boat before
it was swamped and capsized. The woman was utterly exhausted and almost a dead
weight; but though nearly overcome himself, Hatch, at the risk of his life,
maintained his hold upon her until he could reach a line thrown from the
light-station, with which he and his helpless burden were drawn to the
lighthouse steps. Before that, and while a member of the life-saving crew at
Cleveland, Hatch had helped to rescue twenty-nine persons from two vessels on
two successive days during a terrific gale.
****The End****
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