PART SECOND.
NOTES ON THE ILLUMINATION OF LIGHTHOUSES, WITH SHORT NOTICES OF THEIR EARLY HISTORY.
Early History. The early history of Lighthouses is very uncertain; and some ingenious antiquaries, finding the want of authentic records, have been anxious to supply the deficiency by conjectures based upon casual and obscure allusions in ancient writers, and by vague hypotheses drawn from the heathen mythology. Some writers have gone so far as to imagine, that the Cyclopes were the keepers of lighthouses; whilst others have actually maintained that Cyclops was intended, by a bold prosopopœia, to represent a lighthouse itself.[24] A notion so fanciful deserves little consideration; and accords very ill with that mythology of which it is intended to be an exposition, as seems sufficiently plain from a passage in the ninth Odyssey, where Homer (who flourished about 907 B. C.), after describing the darkness of the night, informs us that the fleet of Ulysses actually struck the shore of the Cyclopean island, before it could be seen.[25]
[24] This spirit of etymological conjecture has converted Cyclops, Proteus, Cneph, Phanes, Canobus, Chiron, Tithonus, Thetis, Amphitrite, Minotaurus, Chronus, Phrontis, and other demigods, into celebrated lighthouses, or, at all events, has imagined that those mythological personages were worshipped under the emblem of fire or light in buildings, which, at the same time, served as guides to the benighted mariner. On the faith, also, of similar obscure and finely drawn etymologies, various places, such as Calpe and Abyla, the opposite points of Africa and Europe, at the Straits of the Mediterranean, have been unhesitatingly recognized as the sites of celebrated light-towers; and the Latin words turris and columna have been supposed primarily to signify a lighthouse, the first being written Tor-is, the Tower of fire, and the Col-on, the Pillar of the Sun.
Ἔνθ’ ὄυτις τὴν νῆσον ἐσέδρακεν ὀφθαλμοῒσιν
Ὅυτ’ οὖν κύματα μακρὰ κυλινδόμενα ποτὶ χέρσον
Ἐισίδομεν πρὶν νῆας ἐϋσσέλμους ἐπικελσαι.
Odyss., ix., 146.
Nor does there appear any better reason for supposing, that under the history of Tithonus, Chiron, or any other personage of antiquity, the idea of a lighthouse was conveyed; for such suppositions, however reconcileable they may appear with some parts of mythology, involve obvious inconsistencies with others. It seems, indeed, most improbable, that, in those early times, when navigation was so little practised, the advantages of beacon lights were so generally known and acknowledged as to render them the objects of mythological allegory.