From antiquity we return to our own time, with the view of examining the present condition of our coast-defences, so far as they include the lighthouse, the lightship, the beacon, and the buoy.
To England belongs the praise, among modern nations, of having first understood all the importance of lighthouses, and of having made their erection, mode of illumination, and maintenance, a matter of national concern.
The direction of the Imperial lighthouses is confided to three Boards—one for each of the three kingdoms:—
1st, The Corporation of the Trinity House of Deptford Strand, who possess the control of all the English lighthouses;—
2nd, The Corporation of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, to whom is intrusted the management of the lighthouses of Scotland; and,—
3rd, The Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port of Dublin, who administer the coast-illumination of Ireland.
The history of the Trinity House is but imperfectly known, owing to the destruction of a considerable portion of its archives by fire in 1714. It was founded by a charter of Henry VIII.—who may almost be called the Father of English Navigation—on the 20th of March 1512, and received the appellation of the “Brotherhood of the Trinity House of Deptford of Strand and St. Clement,” This document opens with a curious declaration:—“Out of the sincere and complete love and devotion which we have for the very glorious and indivisible Trinity, and also for Saint Clement the Confessor, His Majesty grants and gives license for the establishment of a corporation, or perpetual brotherhood, to certain of his subjects and their associates, men or women.”
At the outset, the duty of the members of the guild seems simply to have been to pray for the souls of sailors drowned at sea, and for the lives of those who were battling against the tempest. After a while their functions increased in number, and, assuredly, in importance. The charters which they received from Elizabeth, James I., Charles II., and James II., placed in their hands the general control of the mercantile marine, and even, under certain conditions, of the royal fleet. The illumination of dangerous parts of the English coast necessarily became a portion of their mission of patriotic beneficence. But the reader must not suppose that no lighthouses burned along our shores until the Trinity House was established. Rude signal-lights and beacon-fires already blazed on rocky headlands, and at the mouths of the ports most frequented by our shipping; but a greater number of lighthouses became necessary, and on a more perfect system of organization, as English commerce in the seventeenth century assumed its extraordinary development.