Lighthouses, Disasters and Shipwrecks
Wrecks That Built Lights
Most lighthouses owe their existence, directly or indirectly, to a shipwreck. The connection is not always a single catastrophic event, but more often the accumulation of losses on a particular stretch of coast until the economic and political pressure for a light became irresistible. Insurers raised premiums. Merchants petitioned Parliament or Congress. Naval authorities counted the warships lost. Eventually money was found, an engineer was commissioned, and a tower was built where ships had been wrecking for decades or centuries.
The Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, have been called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The shallow sandbanks extend sixteen miles offshore, invisible below the surface, situated at the point where the cold Labrador Current and warm Gulf Stream run close to the coast. Vessels sailing the coastal route between northern and southern ports had to pass close to Cape Hatteras to avoid the worst offshore weather, bringing them within range of the shoals. By the time the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was first completed in 1803, hundreds of vessels had been lost there. The original tower proved too short to be effective — its light was too often obscured by cloud or invisible in the haze at sea level — and was replaced in 1870 by the current brick tower, at 64 metres the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States.
Hook Head lighthouse at the southern tip of County Wexford in Ireland is claimed to have had a light operating on its headland since the fifth century, when a monk named Dubhan is said to have maintained a beacon fire there to warn ships entering Waterford Harbour. The current tower dates from the twelfth century, making it among the oldest working lighthouse towers in the world. Its longevity reflects a sustained pattern of shipping past Hook Head, and sustained losses to vessels that misjudged the headland in poor visibility or were driven onto it by contrary winds.
The Forfarshire and Longstone
The wreck of the SS Forfarshire on 7 September 1838 on the Harcar rocks near Longstone lighthouse in the Farne Islands produced both a rescue that became nationally famous — Grace Darling's crossing in the open coble — and a closer examination of the navigational aids in the area. The Forfarshire was not lost because there was no lighthouse; Longstone was there and its light was burning. The vessel was lost because its steam engines failed and the gale drove it onto the rocks before sail power alone could carry it clear. The distinction matters: not every wreck in the vicinity of a lighthouse reflects a failure of the light. But the Forfarshire wreck, and its rescue, focused public attention on the dangers of the Farne Islands passage and contributed to subsequent improvements in the marking of those waters.
The wreck of HMS Birkenhead in 1852 off Danger Point on the South African coast — a disaster in which 455 soldiers stood in formation on deck as the ship sank to allow women and children to board the lifeboats, establishing the 'Birkenhead drill' as a byword for military discipline in extremis — contributed directly to the establishment of Danger Point lighthouse, lit for the first time in 1895. The cape had been a known hazard for Cape Route shipping throughout the period of heavy traffic between Britain and the East Indies.
When Lighthouses Were Destroyed
The disasters that struck the lighthouses themselves are less often told than the wrecks they presided over. Yet the record of towers struck by lightning, undermined by erosion, damaged by hurricane, and occasionally destroyed entirely is substantial, and each disaster usually produced a successor designed to avoid the failure of its predecessor.
The Eddystone rocks south of Plymouth, England, claimed four lighthouses before the current tower (Smeaton's rebuilt tower stands in Plymouth Hoe as a monument; the 1882 replacement by James Douglass stands on the rocks). The first tower, built by Henry Winstanley and completed in 1698, was a wooden structure of extravagant and impractical design. Winstanley had so much confidence in it that he reportedly wished to be inside it during the greatest storm imaginable. In November 1703, the Great Storm — one of the worst ever to strike Britain — destroyed both the tower and Winstanley, who was inside making repairs. The second tower, built by John Rudyerd, burned to the ground in 1755 when a lantern fire spread to the wooden structure; the keeper watching the fire reportedly swallowed a large quantity of molten lead from the lantern and survived long enough to report this, dying several days later.
The Great September Gale of 1938 destroyed the Minot's Ledge lighthouse off Cohasset, Massachusetts — not the original iron pile tower that had already been swept away in 1851 with its two keepers, but the granite replacement completed in 1860. The storm caused structural damage severe enough to require extensive repair, but the tower survived. The original 1851 iron structure had been recognised as inadequate almost from its completion; it swayed visibly in moderate storms, and the keepers who remained in it during heavy weather described it as terrifying. The two young Portuguese keepers killed when it was swept away in April 1851 had rung the station bell continuously through the storm as a fog signal. Their names — Antoine and Joseph — are commemorated on the current granite tower.
Earthquake and Storm
Coastal engineering is always a contest with time and energy. The Pacific coast of Japan presents particular challenges: frequent earthquakes and tsunamis, combined with typhoon season seas, have destroyed or damaged numerous lighthouses since Japanese lighthouse construction began in earnest in the 1870s under the supervision of the Scottish engineer Richard Henry Brunton. Brunton built more than forty lighthouses in Japan between 1868 and 1876, and several of these original towers survived the 1923 Kanto earthquake that devastated Tokyo and Yokohama, though others required reconstruction. The Nosappu lighthouse at the easternmost point of Hokkaido, one of Brunton's original structures, has been rebuilt twice.
In the Gulf of Mexico, hurricane damage has been a recurring feature of lighthouse history. The original lighthouse at Sand Island, Alabama, was replaced after storm damage in 1838, and the 1873 replacement tower was undermined by the same storm erosion that had destroyed its predecessor — the island itself lost roughly two-thirds of its area to storms between the 1850s and the 1870s. The tower eventually stood in open water as the island eroded away around its base.
The collapse of the first Cape Hatteras lighthouse in 1980 — not the famous 1870 tower, which stands, but a minor associated structure — and the near-loss of the Sankaty Head lighthouse on Nantucket to cliff erosion in the 2000s illustrate that the threats to lighthouse structures continue into the present day. Sankaty Head was moved back from the eroding cliff edge in 2007, one of several American lighthouses relocated by moving the entire structure on a temporary track system.
What Wrecks Left Behind
The wrecks that prompted lighthouses left more than policy consequences. They left physical remains on the seabeds and shorelines of the world's coasts, many of them now accessible to divers and to the researchers of underwater archaeology. The Diamond Shoals have yielded wrecks from every century of American navigation. The approaches to major ports — the Thames estuary, the approaches to New York, the shipping lanes past Cape Finisterre — are among the densest wreck sites in the world.
The lighthouse stands, in this context, as the fixed point in a landscape that has consumed an enormous quantity of human endeavour. Every active lighthouse marks a place where ships have been lost, and where the investment in a permanent warning light was judged sufficient to justify the cost of building, staffing, and maintaining it. Open the map shows the full extent of the network that emerged from these calculations — a map of navigational danger as much as a map of built structures.