BISHOP ROCK LIGHTHOUSE
On a cluster of rocks off the Scilly Islands near the entrance to the English Channel where converge the most important of all the world’s shipping lanes.
To transatlantic travellers perhaps the most familiar of these is the Ambrose Channel Lightship, that rolls and pitches at its anchor outside the entrance to New York Harbour. But the most famous lightship on the American coast is the one that marks Diamond Shoal, that infamous spot just off Cape Hatteras. Several times the Government has attempted to build a lighthouse on this shoal, but the attempts have invariably been frustrated by the sea. A lighthouse does mark the Cape, but Diamond Shoal runs out beneath the stormy water for about nine miles from the Cape, and it is this dangerous sand bank that the lightship guards. Four and a half miles out from the bank the lightship is anchored in a stretch of water that has hardly a peer on earth for the frequency and suddenness of storms. Here this little ship jerks at her anchor, pounded by great seas, tugged at by swift currents, swept by fierce winds. She rolls and pitches, shipping seas over this side and then that, and jerking—always jerking at her cable. There is no easy smoothness to her roll as there is with a free ship at sea. There is no exhilaration to her pitch as she rises over the seas and plunges to the troughs, for always the jerk of the cable interferes, and from one month’s end to the next the little crew endures the discomfort and the hard work, in order that ships may be warned away from the treacherous sand of Diamond Shoal.
These sturdy little ships do mark other things than dangers. In many cases they are the modern counterparts of the beach fires of those early peoples which lighted belated boats in to shore. To-day, however, those lightships which perform this task swing at their anchors outside the entrances to harbours, marking the channel through which the ships must pass on their way in from sea.
In this duty they are similar to the lighted buoys which, in recent years, have been put to so many uses, the lightships being, however, greatly more conspicuous and generally marking a spot well outside the entrance to the channel.
Buoys are of many uses and of many shapes and sizes, marking danger spots, submarine cables, sunken wrecks, channels, as well as temporary obstructions. Some are used for mooring ships in harbours, some carry bells or whistles for sounding warnings, some carry lights. Attempts have been made to standardize the shapes and markings of buoys in all countries, but many lands still maintain their own designs, and the officers of a ship visiting strange waters must acquaint themselves with the particular designs there in use.
FIRE ISLAND LIGHTSHIP
This lightship is anchored off Fire Island, near the southern coast of Long Island, U. S. A. Lightships sometimes mark shoals, and sometimes mark the entrances to harbours. They are always kept anchored in given spots and are merely floating lighthouses, although, of course, they are sometimes relieved by other lightships so that they may undergo repairs.
Buoys are of scores of different sizes and designs. They may be nothing more than tall painted poles of wood anchored to the bottom in shallow water and standing more or less vertically. These are called “spar” buoys, and are useful if ice is floating in the waters that they mark, for as the ice floats against them they give way, the ice passes over them and they serenely reappear, none the worse.