Many of the most picturesque lighthouses in the United States establishment are on the rocks and islands off the coast of Maine. Notable for its beauty is the one on Matinicus Rock. The first lighthouse thereon, erected in 1827, was a cobblestone dwelling with a wooden tower at each end. Twenty years later this was replaced by a granite dwelling with semicircular towers, which has since developed into an establishment requiring the services of a keeper and three assistants. Matinicus Rock rises fifty feet above the sea, and presents what seems a precipitous front to the ocean, but there is no more rugged, dangerous coast along the seaboard of Maine than here, and when a gale rages the waves pound the rock as if bent upon washing it away, the thunder of the green-gray wall that beats against it, sounding, at such times, like the cannonade of a hundred heavy guns. Life on Matinicus for years past has been a never ending struggle between man and the elements, and this lends peculiar interest to the history of the light and its watchers, bound up with which is a love story at once tender, wholesome, and true. Captain Burgess, keeper of the rock from 1853 to 1861, had a daughter Abby, a maiden as comely as she was brave, whom he often left in charge of the lights while he crossed to Matinicus Island. On one occasion rough weather for three weeks barred his return to the rock, and during all that time, Abby, then a girl of seventeen, not only tended the lights, but cared for her invalid mother and her younger brothers and sisters.
In 1861 Captain Grant succeeded Captain Burgess on Matinicus, taking his son with him as assistant. The old keeper left Abby on the rock to instruct the newcomers in their duties, and she performed the task so well that young Grant fell in love with her, and asked her to become his wife. Soon after their marriage she was appointed an assistant keeper. A few years later the husband was made keeper and the wife assistant keeper of White Head, another light on the Maine coast. There they remained until the spring of 1890, when they removed to Middleborough, Mass., intending to pass the balance of their days beyond sight and hearing of the rocks and the waves. But the hunger which the sea breeds in its adopted children was still strong within them, and the fall of 1892 found them again on the coast of Maine, this time at Portland, where the husband again entered the lighthouse establishment, working in the engineers' department of the first lighthouse district. With them until his death lived Captain Grant, who in the closing months of 1890, being then aged eighty-five, retired from the position of keeper of Matinicus light, which he had held for nearly thirty years.
Not less lonely, but far more perilous than the life of the keepers of a light like that on Matinicus is the lot of the crew of the South Shoal lightship, whose position twenty-six miles off Sankaty Head, Nantucket Island, makes it the most exposed light-station in the world. Anchored so far out at sea, it is only during the months of summer and autumn that the lighthouse tender ventures to visit it, and its crew from December to May of each year are wholly cut off from communication with the land. It is this, however, that makes the South Shoal lightship a veritable protecting angel of the deep, for it stands guard not only over the treacherous New South Shoal, near which it is anchored, but over twenty-six miles of rips and reefs between it and the Nantucket shore—a wide-reaching ocean graveyard, where bleach the bones of more than a half thousand wrecked and forgotten vessels.
The lightship is a stanchly built two-hulled schooner of 275 tons burden, 103 feet long over all, equipped with fore-and-aft lantern masts 71 feet high, and with two masts for sails, each 42 feet high. The lanterns are octagons of glass in copper frames, so arranged that they can be lowered into houses built around the masts. In the forward part of the ship is a huge fog bell, swung ten feet above the deck, which, when foggy weather prevails, as it frequently does for weeks at a time, is kept tolling day and night. A two-inch chain fastened to a "mushroom" anchor weighing upward of three tons holds the vessel in eighteen fathoms of water, but this, so fiercely do the waves beat against it in winter, has not prevented her from going adrift many times. She was two weeks at sea on one of these occasions, and on another she came to anchor in New York Harbor. Life on the South Shoal lightship is at all times a hard and trying one, and, as a matter of fact, the crew are instructed not to expose themselves to danger outside their special line of duty. This, however, does not deter them from frequently risking their lives in rescuing others, and when, several years ago, the City of Newcastle went ashore on one of the shoals near the lightship, all hands, twenty-seven in number, were saved by the South Shoal crew and kept aboard of her over two weeks, until the story of the wreck was signalled to a passing vessel.
Nor are the South Shoal crew alone among lighthouse keepers in displays of heroism outside the duties required of them. Isaac H. Grant holds a silver medal given him by the Government for rescuing two men from drowning while he was keeper at White Head; and Keeper Marcus Hanna, of the Cape Elizabeth station, Maine, received a gold medal for the daring rescue of two sailors from a wreck during a severe storm, while Frederick Hatch, keeper of the Breakwater station at Cleveland was awarded the gold bar. The last mentioned badge of honor is granted only to one who has twice distinguished himself by a special act of bravery. It was given Hatch in the winter of 1898. A wreck occurred at night, just outside the breakwater. The eight people aboard made their way to the breakwater pier, but the heavy seas swept several of them back, and one lost his life. Pulling to the pier in a small boat, Keeper Hatch took off the captain's wife; but she was hardly in the boat before it was swamped and capsized. The woman was utterly exhausted and almost a dead weight; but though nearly overcome himself, Hatch, at the risk of his life, maintained his hold upon her until he could reach a line thrown from the light-station, with which he and his helpless burden were drawn to the lighthouse steps. Before that, and while a member of the life-saving crew at Cleveland, Hatch had helped to rescue twenty-nine persons from two vessels on two successive days during a terrific gale.