Curiosities of Civilization

by Andrew Wynter

Various attempts have been made to increase the illuminating power of the burners. In 1832 Lieutenant Drummond proposed the use of the oxy-hydrous light, and as far as the intensity of light was concerned the new agent was perfectly successful, the Drummond light at seventy miles’ distance appearing nearer to the spectator than the ordinary reflector light at twelve miles. But it was found impossible to maintain a steady light by this system, and it was therefore abandoned. Since then Professor Holmes has been making experiments with the magnetic electric light. The apparatus is said to consist of a series of very powerful magnets, around the poles of which the helices are made to revolve by means of a steam-engine. A powerful magnetic current is thus produced, which passing through carbon pencils shows a splendid light. The great difficulty of this and of other similar propositions to obtain the light by passing the current through two points, is to so regulate them that they shall always remain at the same distance apart, for any variation would immediately affect the intensity of the light. This desideratum has not yet been accomplished, neither do we think it possible of accomplishment. Professor Way has, however, we imagine, solved the problem by substituting a running stream of mercury in place of these points.

A moment’s inspection of the grim wreck chart leads us to reflect whether the care taken to warn mariners of their danger is not in many cases the immediate cause of their seeking it. If we note, for instance, the lighthouses fringing St. George’s and the English Channel, we are struck with the extraordinary fact that there we find the greatest congregation of those dismal dots which indicate loss of life and property, and it would seem as though ships like moths were attracted and destroyed by the light. Such, no doubt, is often the case. Ships bound up Channel make for the nearest light, and from that shape their course until they meet with the next light. They feel their way, as it were, in the dark night by the handrail of these guides, and sometimes stumble on the very rocks that support the beacons themselves—the fog, as in the case of the Dunbar, allowing them to get within and under the danger flash. The disasters produced by this system of groping about sunken rocks and bluff headlands has led Mr. Thomas Herbert of the Trinity House to propose the lighting of the Mid Channel. His system is to moor floating lighthouses, of a form which secures a steadiness sufficient for the purpose, and he is thus enabled to place a row of most powerful lights at little comparative expense up the very centres of the two great channels of English commerce, and indeed of the commerce of the world. A ship on entering the Channel would immediately make for the westernmost of this line of “Fairway lights,” instead of looking out for the Lizard, and once having made it, the course would be free of all possible danger. Eight floating light towers extending from the westernmost one, forty miles south-west of Scilly, to Dungeness, would add enormously to the security of this wreck-strewn sea. The outermost of these lights Mr. Herbert proposes should be put in telegraphic communication with the shore, by which means merchants and consignees would be made acquainted with the arrival of vessels full a day earlier than at present. By this means also Greenwich time could be laid on to the station, and enable the anxious captain to verify the correctness of his chronometer up to the latest possible moment. Such a station might further serve as a depôt for water and fresh provisions, so much required by vessels detained by contrary winds in the Chops of the Channel, and to provide which ships are now annually sent out by the Admiralty. Without expressing any decided opinion upon this scheme, it seems to us to possess sufficient plausibility to warrant inquiry. If there should be no insurmountable practical objection,—and we have heard practical men speak well of it,—there can be little doubt that it would dissipate in no small degree the dangers of the Channel, without interfering with the present lights, which would always be useful for the coasting trade.

Perhaps the most frequent cause of wreck, especially on our own coast, is negligence on the part of the master. If we analyze the cases of collision that occurred in the year 1857, we are surprised to find that by far the larger portion of them occur in the open sea, and in clear bright weather. Out of 277 collisions, involving total and partial loss, bad look-out was the cause of 88, and neglect of the rule of the road of 33 collisions. It is a saying among sailors that if the three L’s are attended to—Lead, Latitude, and Look-out,—a ship is safe; and no more apt saying could have been uttered. Simple as the casting of the lead is, it is almost invariably found, when the causes of wreck are inquired into, that this precaution has been neglected. The Ava mail-steamer was undoubtedly lost off Trincomalee, in February last, owing to this omission. The lead is not only capable of telling the soundings, which alone would warn the mariner of the approach of shoal water; but, when armed, it is capable of bringing a voice from the deep to say on what coast the ship may be. Had the masters of either the Reliance or Conqueror cast the lead, they would not only have known that their vessel were getting into shallow water, but that they were upon the French coast; for the lead brings up a coarser sand from the shores of our neighbours than from the opposite coast on the English side. The question of latitude is a question which tests the nautical knowledge of the captain. A man who can take celestial observations correctly is not very likely to be deficient in a knowledge of navigation. The differences between masters of ships in this respect are very marked. Captain Basil Hall tells us, in his “Fragments of Voyages and Travels,” that on a voyage from California to Rio, the first land he saw was on either side of him, upon the clearing off of a fog at the entrance of Rio de Janeiro. With no other guide than science he had hit his port without sighting land, after a voyage of many thousand miles. With this we may contrast a case given in the Report on Shipwrecks for 1836, in which the brig Henry, of Cork, bound to St. John’s, New Brunswick, with seventy passengers on board, was fallen in with by the Andromeda, of New York, in a starving condition; her master, by his own reckoning, being 800 miles to the westward of his true position. This man must have been one of those who, as the sailors say, “come in at the cabin windows, instead of working his way up through the hawse-holes.” Errors of this kind are not likely to occur so often as formerly, thanks to the working of the Mercantile Marine Act, which will, we think, prevent the recurrence of the grosser mistakes in navigation. No greater blessing was ever conferred on the merchant shipping of this country than a law which compels the holding an inquiry by competent persons in all cases of casualty. It is abused, as any measure is sure to be that rigidly sets its face against misconduct; but it has already done infinite good, and would do still more if its provisions were strictly enforced.

It is often supposed that the shifting of sandbanks is a cause of wreck, but there does not seem sufficient ground for this opinion. We have heard many marvellous stories relative to the shifting of the Goodwin, and of the sudden exposure in full preservation of the hulls of long lost ships. These tales are all poetical, though the edge of the bank may here and there give way and expose the ribs of some vessel long since sucked in. What change there is in the Goodwin, and it is of a very gradual nature, takes place on the western or inshore side: its eastern side is as steep as a wall, and retains the position it had when the first exact survey of it was made. The Brake Sand in the Downs off Ramsgate seems to have moved bodily inshore or to the westward, and there is a slight disposition to change in sands known by the names of the Leigh Middle and Yantlet Ground in Sea Reach, at the entrance of the river Thames. The Yarmouth and Lowestoff sands shift slightly. A channel, or gat as it is called, opens now in one place and now at another; but these variations are soon known and buoyed by the Trinity House. Changes take place at the entrance of the Mersey, but the surveyor of the river quickly marks the deviations and makes them known to the pilots. On the north-east coast of England more extensive alterations have taken place; a large portion of Holderness, in Yorkshire, has been washed away, and the sea has broken through Spurn Point, threatening to make it once more an island. At Landguard Point, at the entrance of Harwich harbour, the injudicious removal of a barrier of cement stone, by which the heavy stroke of the sea has been allowed free action on the shore, has caused the sand to be heaped up within the last half-century, until a shingle beach now rears its head seven feet above the level of high water; where, not many years since, a line-of-battle ship could have sailed into the harbour. Another remarkable increase of land is at Dungeness, where the shingle has extended at the average rate of three yards a year, since the beginning of the Christian era. But although of vast importance to the engineer in dealing with harbours, these changes are not productive of shipwreck.

The principal cause of shipwreck on the shores of the United Kingdom is undoubtedly the want of harbours of refuge. From the parliamentary returns it appears that the tonnage of vessels which entered and cleared from the ports of this country in 1857 amounted to 23,178,782 tons, or in round numbers 232,000 vessels. Even this falls short of the number of vessels that are constantly passing and repassing along our coasts, and which, on the springing up of a sudden gale, are liable to wreck, inasmuch as it only gives those which are carrying cargo. It does not include colliers and other vessels in ballast, nor ships of war, nor small coasters laden with stone, lime, &c., all of which would swell the amount to full 300,000 vessels.

We have already stated that the number of casualties to shipping on the coasts and within the seas of the United Kingdom has averaged 1,025 a year; that the loss of life has amounted to 830 a year, and that the destruction of property reaches a million and a half. It is not an uncommon occurrence for a single gale to strew the coasts with wrecks. In the three separate gales which occurred in the years 1821, 1824, and 1829, there were lost on the east coast of England, in the short space between the Humber and the Tees, 169 vessels. In the single gale of the 31st of August, 1833, 61 vessels were lost on the sands in the North Sea and on the east coast of England. In the tremendous gale of the 13th of January, 1843, as many as 103 vessels were wrecked off the coasts of the British Isles, and among them 13 large ships off the port of Liverpool alone. In the gale of 1846, 39 vessels got ashore in Hartlepool; and in the month of March, 1850, 134 vessels were stranded or came into collision. In the gale of the 25th of September, 1851, as many as 117 vessels were wrecked; and for each of the four first months of the year 1858 the Board of Trade returns show that there has been from 140 to 150 casualties, or from four to five a day. These facts are sufficient to prove the appalling loss of life and of property, and the absolute necessity which exists for establishing on the most exposed and frequented positions of our coasts that shelter which the sailor has a right to expect in the time of need.

Formerly in the reports of the shipwreck committees so many vague generalities were dwelt upon, that the House of Commons had no definite conclusions upon which to proceed. This is no longer the case. In the evidence laid before the select committee of the House, when inquiring into refuge harbours, in the year 1858, it is shown that there are certain districts in which wreck is the normal state. Nearly one-third of all the casualties take place on the east coast of Great Britain, and in 1857 it was more than one-half! Nay, it is all but demonstrated that the larger part of these occur within some seventy miles of coast, or between Flamborough Head and the Tyne. Here, then, the subject is narrowed to a point. The immediate vicinity of the coal ports must be the site of a harbour of refuge—some spot which all colliers, light and loaded, pass, whether it be in the bight of the bay (or the bag of the net), as Tees Bay, or whether it be farther to the southward, near Filey Bay. The exact locality may require careful consideration; but the question of situation on the east coast of England is now narrowed to a distance of fifty miles. One unexpected fact has come to light in the course of this investigation, namely, that of the colliers lost on this part of the coast, the proportion of loaded vessels to light is as 5 to 1.

On the coast of Scotland there is a sad want of deep-water harbours of refuge. From the Pentland Frith southward to Cromarty, a distance of 100 miles, there are none but tidal harbours, all inaccessible for twelve hours out of the twenty-four. It is the same from the Moray Frith round by Peterhead to the Frith of Forth, with the exception of the Tay. Yet it is along this coast that a great part of our Baltic trade, and all the Greenland, Archangel, Davis Strait, and much of the Canadian and United States trade must pass. In addition to this traffic, both of these coast districts are remarkable as the great scene of the herring fishery. Peterhead has its 250 fishing-boats, Fraserburgh and Buckie more than 400 sail; while farther north, off the coast of Caithness, more than 1,200 fishing boats, manned by 6,000 men, nightly pursue their calling, exposed to the proverbial suddenness of a North-sea gale. Here then, in some portion of this district, either at Peterhead, Frazerburgh, or Wick, a refuge harbour is imperatively required.

On the west coast of England, between the Land’s End and the south coast of Wales, including the Bristol Channel, shelter is absolutely needed. The trade of the Irish Sea, including Liverpool, Glasgow, and Belfast, and the great and increasing traffic of the coal ports of Newport, Cardiff, and Swansea, in addition to the trade of Bristol and Gloucester, urgently call for some refuge. For the former probably a harbour near the entrance of the Channel, as at St. Ives, would be the most useful; for the trade of the upper portion of the Bristol Channel, Clovelly on the south coast, Lundy Island in the centre, and Swansea Bay on the north, have been the sites particularly recommended in the evidence. On the coasts of Ireland, the rocks named the Skerries, near Portrush, on the north coast, Lough Carlingford on the east, and Waterford on the south, have been mentioned as places where good harbours may be obtained at but a trifling outlay.

It appears from good evidence that the existing tidal harbours around our coasts are susceptible of great improvements for the purposes of joining harbours of refuge in case of need. We think this supplementary view of the question one of much importance. It is shown that the small sum of 2,500l. a year, which the Scottish Fishery Board is empowered to grant annually, to meet double the amount raised from private sources, has been of much value, and has given rise to many piers and fishery harbours on the coasts of Scotland. A somewhat similar measure applied to harbours generally would be of the utmost value. There are many in which the loan of a small sum of money, at a low rate of interest, would confer a great benefit. The enormous parliamentary and other fees attendant on getting a Harbour Act are so ruinous, that many of the lesser harbours are kept in a state of decay from the impossibility of raising funds to restore them. We are glad to see that Mr. Henry Paull, M.P. for St. Ives, has given notice in the House of a bill to remedy this evil, and to enable some public department, such as the Admiralty and Board of Trade, to grant the necessary powers for raising funds to execute bonâ fide improvements. We cordially wish him success, and trust that he will persevere until his proposal has become the law of the land.