“We doubt not but that whoever takes up this will be so merciful as to cause it to be sent to Thos. Williams, Esq., Trelethin, near St. David’s, Wales.”
Again, a quarter of a century later, the watch was kept by two keepers; and for four months the weather shut them off from all communication with the land. The method of talking by signals was not developed anywhere into the complete system it has now become, and does not appear to have been in use at all among the lighthouse people; but in the course of a week or two after the storm had set in, it was rumoured at several of the western ports that something was wrong at the Smalls. Passing vessels reported that a signal of distress was out, but that was all they knew. Many attempts to approach the rock were made, but fruitlessly. The boats could not get near enough to hail, they could only return to make the bewildered agent and the anxious relatives of the keepers more bewildered and more anxious by the statement that there was always what seemed to be the dim figure of a man in one corner of the outside gallery, but whether he spoke or moved, or not, they could not tell. Night after night the light was watched for with great misgiving whether it would ever show again. But the light failed not. Punctually as the sun set it seemed to leave a fragment of its fire gleaming in the lantern glasses, which burnt there till it rose again, showing this much at least, that some one was alive at the Smalls; but whether both the men, or which, no anxious mother or loving wife could tell. Four months of this, and then, in calmer weather, a Milford boat brought into the agency at Solva one light-keeper and one dead man.
What the living man had suffered can never now be known. Whether, when first he came distinctly to believe his comrade would die he stood in blank despair, or whether he implored him on his knees, in an agony of selfish terror, to live; whether when, perhaps for the first time in his life, he stood face to face, and so very close, to death, he thought of immediate burial, or whether he rushed at once to the gallery to shout out to the nearest sail, perhaps a mile away;—at what exact moment it was that the thought flashed across him that he must not bury the body in the sea, lest those on shore should question him as Cain was questioned for his brother, and he, failing to produce him, should be branded with Cain’s curse and meet a speedier fate—is unrecorded. What he did was to make a coffin. He had been a cooper by trade, and by breaking up a bulk-head in the living room, he got the dead man covered in; then, with infinite labour he took him to the gallery and lashed him there. Perhaps with an instinctive wisdom he set himself to work, cleaned and re-cleaned his lamps, unpacked and packed his stores. Perhaps he made a point of walking resolutely up to the coffin three or four times a day, perhaps he never went near it, and even managed to look over it rather than at it, when he was scanning the whole horizon for a sail. In his desperation it may have occurred to him that as his light was a warning to keep vessels off, so its absence would speedily betray some ship to a dangerous vicinity to his forlornness, whose crew would be companions to him even though he had caused them to be wrecked. But this he did not do. No lives were risked to alleviate his desolation, but when he came on shore with his dead companion he was a sad, reserved, emaciated man, so strangely worn that his associates did not know him.
The immediate result of this sad occurrence was, that three men were always kept at the lighthouse, and this wise rule pertains in the public service.
Among the minor miseries of life at the Smalls would be such things as a storm, in which the central flooring was entirely displaced, the stove thrown from its position “into the boiling surf below, and the time-piece hurled into a sleeping berth opposite the place it usually hung.”
Midway between a rock lighthouse and a shore station, both as to structure and as to the experiences of life in it, is that mongrel breed amongst edifices, the Pile Lighthouse. There are many sands at the mouths of tidal rivers where the water is not deep enough, nor are the channels sufficiently wide to make a light-vessel suitable, and which yet need marking, and marking, too, at a spot where not only the ordinary foundations of masonry, but even the pile foundations used for many purposes, would be at fault. Here it is that two very ingenious plans have been of service. The one is to fit the lower extremity of piles with broad-flanged screws, something like the screw of a steam-vessel, and then setting them upright in the sand, screw them down with capstans worked from the decks of dumb lighters. These bottom piles once secured, the spider legs are bolted on to them, and the spider bodies on the top; a ladder draws up, and a boat swings ready to be lowered. The other mode of meeting the difficulty of mud or loose silt and sand, is by hollow cylinders, which, placed upright on the sand, have the air exhausted from the inside of them, and on the principle that nature abhors a vacuum (at all events in cylinders), the weight of the atmosphere on the sand outside forces it up into the exhausted receiver, and the pile sinks at a rate which, until one gets accustomed to it, is rather surprising. Here, as in the screw pile, the foundation once established, the superstructure, whether of straight shafts or spider legs, is only a matter of detail.
These, then, be the variations of lighthouse structure: rock lighthouses, solitary giants rising from the ocean deeps; pile lighthouses, stuck about the shallow estuaries on long red legs, like so many flamingoes fishing; safer, but with less of dignity and more of ague;—and lastly, the real bonâ fide shore lighthouse, with its broad sweep of down, its neat cottages, and trim inclosures. If my Lord Grenville had had any thought of occupying the residence that he calculated to eliminate from the king’s good-humour, we take it there is very little doubt on which class in the foregoing category he would have fixed his choice.
The remaining contribution to the complement of the lighting service is the light-vessel. There are, unfortunately, too many outlying dangers on our coasts where it is either impossible to fix a lighthouse, or where, from the shifting character of the shoal, it is necessary to move the light from time to time. Of these the most notable are the Goodwin Sands. There are constantly propositions for lighthouses on the Goodwin; and some men, mortified that dry lands once belonging to the men of Kent should be water-wastes for ever, have proposed boldly to reclaim them, believing that the scheme would pay, not merely by the acreage added to the county, but by the buried treasures to be exhumed. At present they are marked with three light-vessels, one at each end and one in the middle. There are other floating stations still farther remote from land; and at one—the Seven Stones, between the Scilly Islands and the main—the vessel is in forty fathoms water. These light-ships ride by chains of a peculiarly prepared and toughened iron; and in heavy weather the strain on the moorings is relieved by paying out fathom after fathom, until sometimes the whole cable (at the Seven Stones, 315 fathoms) is in the water. These vessels, of course, are manned by sailors, and the discipline is that of shipboard; but here, as on shore, the burden of the main story meets us at the first clause of the instructions—“You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising,” unless you break adrift, and then, if you have shifted your position before you could bring up with your spare anchor, you are to put them out and wait till you can be replaced.
Among the curiosities of lighthouse experience are these two. The one that it is an occupation in which the modern claim for feminine participation has been forestalled. There is at this moment a woman light-keeper, and as she retains her employment it may be inferred that she does her duty properly. The other is an odd fact, namely, that so far back as the last century the rationale of the cod-liver oil fashion was foreshadowed at the “Smalls.” As in the wool-combing districts of Yorkshire, where the wool is dressed with oil, consumption and strumous affections of the like character are rare, so it is said that people going out to the “Smalls” as keepers, thin, hectic and emaciated, have returned plump, jocund, and robust, on account of living in an unctuous atmosphere, where every breath was laden with whale oil, and every meal might be enriched with fish.
The French, from economical reasons, early gave their attention to the use of seed oils, and the first developments of the moderator lamp of the drawing-room are exclusively French. There were many difficulties in the way of applying it to lighthouses until it had been greatly simplified, because the fact of the carcel lamp being a somewhat complicated piece of machinery was against its use in places where, if anything went wrong, it might be a month or two before the weather would admit of the light-keepers being relieved, and give them an opportunity of exchanging old lamps for new. The thing was done at last by a simple but very beautiful adjustment of the argand reservoir, under which the prime condition for all good combustion was attained, namely, that the oil just about to be burnt, should be rarefied and prepared for burning by the action of the heat of that which is at the moment being consumed. And so great is the quantity of oil used in the three kingdoms, that this change from sperm to rapeseed oil must have made a saving of many thousands a year.