THE WRECK OF THE FIRST MINOT’S LEDGE LIGHTHOUSE.
A somewhat similar history belongs to some of the lighthouses on this side of the Atlantic. The first one regularly set up in the United States was that on the north side of the entrance to Boston harbor, erected in 1716; but many others go back to Colonial days—that on Sandy Hook, for instance. Perhaps the most interesting history is attached to the light on Minot’s Ledge, in Boston harbor. This is a dangerous reef, concealed at high water and so exposed that the problem of lighting it was much the same as that presented at Eddystone, Bell Rock, Dhu Heartach, and other well known islets on the British coast.
The first lighthouse on Minot’s Ledge was built in 1848, and was an octagonal tower resting on the tops of eight wrought-iron piles sixty feet high, eight inches in diameter, and sunk five feet into the rock.
These piles were braced together in many ways, and, as they offered less surface to the waves than a solid structure, the lighthouse was considered by all authorities upon the subject to be exceptionally strong. Its great test came in April, 1851. On the fourteenth of that month, two keepers being in the lighthouse, an easterly gale set in, steadily increasing in force.... On Wednesday, the sixteenth, the gale had become a hurricane; and when at times the tower could be seen through the mists and sea-drift, it seemed to bend to the shock of the waves. At four o’clock that afternoon an ominous proof of the fury of the waves on Minot’s Ledge reached the shore—a platform which had been built between the piles only seven feet below the floor of the keeper’s room. The raging seas, then, were leaping fifty feet in the air. Would they reach ten feet higher?—for if so, the house and the keepers were doomed. Nevertheless, when darkness set in the light shone out as brilliantly as ever, but the gale seemed, if possible, then to increase. What agony those two men must have suffered! How that dreadful abode must have swayed in the irresistible hurricane, and trembled at each crashing sea! The poor unfortunates must have known that if those seas, leaping always higher and higher, ever reached their house, it would be flung down into the ocean, and they would be buried with it beneath the waves.
A SCREW-PILE OCEAN LIGHTHOUSE.
To those hopeless, terrified watchers the entombing sea came at last. At one o’clock in the morning the lighthouse bell was heard by those on shore to give a mournful clang, and the light was extinguished. It was the funeral knell of two patient heroes.
Next day there remained on the rock only eight jagged iron stumps.
Thus, everywhere, and in all latitudes, the beacons and wooden towers and huge pyramids of long ago have given place to slender spires of solid masonry, holding powerful signals perhaps hundreds of feet above the waves, and visible as far as the curve of the earth’s surface will permit. Yet in place of the sturdy bonfire of oak, or the huge iron cage full of coals, there is only a single lamp, whose rays are gathered by deep reflectors into a compact bundle of unwasted rays, and doubled and redoubled by rows of magnifying lenses until they can dart to the furthest horizon in a strong beam of steady light. No longer does the mariner trust to his wife to kindle the tar-barrel to guide him home. He knows that nowhere is his government more watchful of its subjects than in its lighthouse service, and that he may trust to having that bright signal to welcome him in the darkness, as well as he can trust his own eyes to see it. The United States alone expends over $2,500,000 annually in looking after her lighthouses, lightships, and buoys.
