Lightships Explained
The Problem That Created the Lightship
To build a lighthouse you need something to build on. Eddystone Rock, Bishop Rock and the Bell Rock are barely above the waterline at low tide, and building on them required feats of engineering that stretched the capacities of their constructors to the limit. But there were places where even this was impossible: shoals, sandbanks and underwater hazards at the entrances to major ports where the seabed was too soft for foundations, the water too deep for a solid base, or the area too prone to shifting to anchor anything permanent.
For these positions, maritime authorities from the early eighteenth century onward turned to the lightship: a purpose-built vessel, painted a distinctive colour, moored by heavy anchor chain over the hazard and equipped with a light, a fog signal and later a radio beacon. The ship could not avoid the conditions that made the station necessary, but it could be brought in for maintenance and returned. Its position could be adjusted if the sandbank shifted. If it was overwhelmed by a collision or storm, a relief vessel could take its place.
The world's first officially recorded lightship was stationed at the Nore, a sandbank at the mouth of the Thames in the Thames Estuary, in 1732. The vessel, established by a private operator named Robert Hamblin under a patent from Trinity House, carried a lantern on a mast and was anchored for roughly six months before drifting from its station in a gale. Trinity House took over management of the Nore station and established it as a permanent position; it remained occupied, by a succession of vessels, until 1983.
Design and Construction
Early lightships were converted merchant vessels, but the demands of permanent mooring in exposed waters soon drove the development of purpose-built hulls. A lightship needs to ride comfortably enough on its anchor chain that the light is not too violently disturbed, which means a hull with sufficient displacement to damp wave motion but not so deep a draft that it cannot be towed easily. The bow and stern must be symmetrical, or nearly so, since the vessel swings on its chain to face the weather; an asymmetrical hull that behaved differently on different headings would produce erratic motion and vary the height of the light above the sea.
The light itself was typically mounted on a lantern mast, sometimes on a tripod-mast arrangement that allowed it to be lowered for maintenance without requiring work at height in a seaway. Early lights used oil lamps, later vapour lights, and eventually electric lamps drawing power from a generator. The fog signal equipment — bells, horns and later diaphones and electric horns — was mounted on deck and required both the power plant and the crew to operate it.
Lightship crews were small by merchant navy standards, typically eight to twelve men on a vessel of 200 to 600 tons, with a relief rotation that brought fresh crews out by tender every few weeks. The conditions were unpleasant: at anchor in a seaway, a lightship rolls and pitches in a pattern different from a vessel under way, combining the motion of the sea with the restraint of the anchor chain in a way that produced chronic seasickness in many crew members who were otherwise experienced sailors. The lack of any ability to manoeuvre — to turn head-to-sea in a storm or to run before a wave — meant that the crew could only endure conditions rather than respond to them.
The Major Lightship Stations
The most important lightship stations were those that marked the approaches to major ports or the corners of dangerous headlands. In British waters, the Varne and Sandettie lightships marked shoals in the Dover Strait. The Goodwins lightship occupied a station near the Goodwin Sands, the notorious shoal off the Kent coast that has wrecked more ships than anywhere else in British waters. Further north, the Haisborough station off the Norfolk coast and the Outer Gabbard off Suffolk marked the approaches to Harwich and the southern North Sea route.
In American waters, the pattern was similar. The Nantucket Shoals lightship, stationed at the convergence of the North Atlantic steamer lanes south of Cape Cod, was one of the most important aids to navigation in the world: virtually every transatlantic vessel passed within sight of it. The ship occupied this station, in successively larger and better-equipped vessels, from 1854 until its replacement by a large navigational buoy in 1983. The last Nantucket lightship, LV-112, is preserved at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York.
The Ambrose lightship at the entrance to New York Harbour occupied its station from 1908, marking the outer approach to the channel dredged for the deep-draft liners of the early twentieth century. It was replaced by a Texas-tower lighthouse in 1967. The vessel is also preserved, at the South Street Seaport, and forms part of one of the largest collections of preserved lightships in the world.
The Crews and Their Lives
The social history of lightship crews has been less thoroughly documented than that of lighthouse keepers, partly because there were fewer of them and partly because the service attracted less public attention. The isolation was real but different in character from a rock lighthouse: lightship crews were separated from the shore by water but could see the shipping lanes, the coast in clear weather, and each other. The crew mess was a social space in a way that a two-person lighthouse on a remote rock was not.
Trinity House lightship crews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were typically drawn from the merchant navy, with a premium paid for the discomforts of the service. The superintendent on each vessel held a position roughly equivalent to a lighthouse principal keeper, responsible for the machinery, the log and discipline aboard. American lightships were crewed by the Lighthouse Service and later the Coast Guard, and the hierarchies and regulations of both organisations applied at the station.
Collisions were the most distinctive hazard of lightship duty. Because a lightship could not manoeuvre, any vessel that failed to identify or avoid its position in poor visibility would strike it. The Nantucket lightship was struck and sunk by the White Star liner Olympic in 1934, killing seven of its eleven crew. The East Goodwin lightship was struck by a vessel in 1940 during the fog of war and sank with the loss of its crew. These disasters were not uncommon in the history of the service; the men who served on lightships accepted them as part of the occupation.
The Coming of the Large Navigational Buoy
The lightship's decline began in the 1960s and 1970s with the development of the large navigational buoy, or LANBY — a discus-shaped unmanned float fitted with a light, foghorn and radio beacon that could be moored on the same chain as a lightship but required no crew. The LANBY offered the key advantages of the lightship — mobility, mooring in soft-seabed locations, maintainability — at a fraction of the operating cost. It did not provide as stable a platform as a staffed vessel and its light was lower above the water, reducing range, but for stations where the critical factor was the mark's position rather than its range, these compromises were acceptable.
Trinity House began replacing lightships with LANBYs and super-buoys in the late 1970s. The last Trinity House lightship station, the South Goodwin, was converted to an automated buoy in 2009. The Irish Lights authority followed a similar timeline, removing its last stationed lightship from the Coningbeg station off the Wexford coast in 1994. The United States Coast Guard decommissioned its last active lightship, LV-WAL-524, from the Ambrose station in 1967.
Preserved Lightships
A significant number of lightships have been preserved as museum vessels, heritage attractions or residential vessels. In the United Kingdom, the Lightvessel 93 at Harwich, operated by the Harwich Maritime Heritage Trust, is open to visitors during harbour events. The North Carr lightship at Dundee, which served the dangerous North Carr Rock off the Fife coast, is preserved as a static exhibit. The Planet lightship at Liverpool's Merseyside Maritime Museum is part of a collection that traces the history of the Mersey approaches.
In the United States, several lightships are listed as National Historic Landmarks, including the Huron lightship at Port Huron, Michigan, the Chesapeake lightship at the Baltimore Maritime Museum, and the Portland lightship (WAL-604) at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. Open the map to find preserved lightships that can be visited, along with the offshore stations they once occupied — the now-unmarked positions at the edges of the navigational network where crews once spent months at anchor, keeping the light burning through weather that would have kept any sane mariner in port.