THE HUMBER TO THE THAMES
Leaving the Humber, and coming southwards to the mouth of the Thames, we
pass some of the earliest post-Reformation lighthouses erected—Winterton,
where we have seen a light was proposed to be shown from the church
steeple in 1585; Caister, Yarmouth, Corton, Lowestoft, Orfordness, and
Harwich; at all which places, and many others, lighthouses were erected
in the early part of the seventeenth century.
There was a lighthouse at Caister some few miles south of Winterton, set
up about the year 1600; soon afterwards we have a quaint account of the
way in which this was maintained. It did not aspire to the dignity of
being a coal fire; the building was merely a meanly constructed wooden
tower with a lantern at the top, lit with candles—or _should_ have been
lit with candles: but mark the italics—_should_. How was it actually
illuminated? A contemporary report shall tell us. ‘Often but one candle
of six to the pound ... or at the most two’ burnt in the lantern. This
was insufficient: wrecks happened in consequence, and the shipowners
grumbled louder than ever at having to pay dues. As stated before, the
lighthouse at Caister was in the hands of the Trinity House, and it must
be said to the credit of that body that on learning of the defects, it
did its best to remedy them.
An inquiry was held, and revealed a sad laxity of duty in the appointed
keeper. He ought to have lived at the tower, but he did not. Such a
residence, when we consider the position of the Caister lighthouse, must
have been solitary and dreary enough, and we can scarcely wonder that the
keeper left his employment and went to labour more congenial. But he was
dishonest over his retirement: he did not put his intention into writing,
but went off without notice, and deputed ‘the preparing, lighting, and
watching’ of the candles to an old and decrepid woman who dwelt some
miles inland, and who, as might have been expected, was unable to perform
her task with regularity. To reach the lighthouse, she had a lengthy
walk; and in the teeth of an easterly gale she found this more than her
strength could bear; thus on many a winter’s night she had to retrace
her steps without accomplishing the object of her journey: so that often
when most needed no light at all showed from the Caister lighthouse. A
new keeper was appointed; he was to live at the lighthouse, to light his
candles—three in number—at sunset, snuff them, and replenish them as
needful till ‘fair day.’
Surely a lighthouse, well and regularly tended, was needed at Caister!
There was not, there is not, a more dangerous bit of coast on the eastern
shore of England. Caister sandbanks rival the dreaded Goodwins in their
terrors for the luckless ship that is driven upon them. Now, with a good
system of signalling from the adjacent lightships, and with two or three
well-appointed lifeboats, the loss of life is often considerable, and
many are the risks run by the lifeboat crews in their gallant efforts
to rescue the shipwrecked. Here is the story of one such risk, and it
is typical of dozens more that have happened since lifeboats have been
placed near Caister.
It was just midnight on March 11, 1875, when the schooner Punch, on her
voyage from Newcastle to Dublin, ran upon the shoals off Caister. It was
a ‘dirty’ night, pitch dark, and blowing hard from the east. The sands,
partially uncovered at low water, are quicksands as the tide flows,
and a ship once fairly driven on them has little hope of getting off
again; as for her crew—well, there is now this hope for them, that the
lifeboat-men will see the signals of distress and hazard their lives to
save them. The crew of the Punch knew what the grasp of Caister sands
meant, and up flared their signal fires so soon as she struck. The
waves, as though eager to secure for the greedy sands their prey, broke
over the vessel in quick succession and dimmed the fire; but there was
a plentiful supply of tar and oil on board, and their signals blazed up
again. Then the lifeboat-men saw it and hastened to them. As their boat
neared the sands her crew could see, by the fire flaring on deck, that
the hulk was gradually sinking down, and that there was a stretch of
uncovered sand still around the ship. Before their eyes, almost within
speaking distance, the Punch would be sucked into the sand, and with
her the half-dozen men on board! There was but one thing for it—anchor
the lifeboat to the sand and jump on to the shifting mass. Leaving a
couple of men in the lifeboat, her coxswain, heaving-line in hand, leaped
overboard, followed by a number of his crew, and went staggering and
stumbling towards the wreck—at one moment only ankle-deep in water and
the next high up to their shoulders. And so they waded on for a hundred
yards in the fury of the winter storm. They called to the crew, and the
crew answered them. Think what the feelings of those sinking men must
have been, their gratitude to their deliverers. One threw a line from
the deck, and it was clutched by the foremost of the rescuers, and, a
communication once established, the schooner’s crew were one by one
hauled through the broken water over the quicksand to the lifeboat,
and with them the lifeboat-men rowed to shore. Yes, to shore, but not
to rest! They had barely got to their homes when the cry was raised
again. ‘Another ship on the sands!’ It was morning then, and back to the
lifeboat they hastened, and a second time rowed out. Alas! their journey
was in vain. Help had come too late, and only masses of tangled rigging,
planks, and broken spars floated over the sands—the ship and her crew lay
buried within them.
Oddly enough, we do not hear of any early lighthouse at Yarmouth. In the
official catalogue of lights on the Norfolk coast the date of the first
lighthouse of the Yarmouth group is that at Gorleston, said to have been
established in the ‘fifties.’ But there was a lighthouse here nearly
two centuries before; and Molloy, in his treatise on sea-law, in 1676,
refers to the ‘great and pious care’ by King Charles II in erecting a
lighthouse at Gorleston, or ‘Goldston,’ as he spells it, ‘at his own
princely charge,’ from which expression we are, I suppose to imagine that
his Majesty kept up a lighthouse at his own expense: the thing seems
improbable and requires confirmation before we can accept it as truth.
Lighthouses in the neighbourhood at St. Nicholas Gatt were proposed and
for a time established by Sir John Clayton between 1675 and 1678, and we
find the seamen of Yarmouth still clamouring for them in 1692. In the
seamen’s petition the loss to shipping, for want of them, is very clearly
set forth; one petition says that as many as two hundred ships perished
on the sandbanks there during the gale on one winter’s night.
A lightship now marks the dangers of Corton sands, some few miles further
south of Yarmouth than St. Nicholas Gatt. But Corton was one of the
places at which Sir John Clayton proposed to erect a lighthouse long
before. When the Trinity House had crushed all his other lighthouse
projects he offered the corporation something handsome to approve of a
light at Corton only, but it would not: multiplicity of lights, it said,
confused the navigator, and its own lighthouse at Lowestoft did all that
was needed.
At Lowestoft, in 1778, were made the earliest experiments with
reflectors; a thousand tiny mirrors were placed in the lantern, and with
such success that the flame of the oil lamp appeared at sea, some four
leagues off, like a huge globe of fire.
The lighthouse at Harwich is memorable for quite a different reason.
It played—or rather was intended to play—an important part in English
politics. When at the eleventh hour James II and his advisers were trying
might and main to ward off the Dutchman’s coming, and when the Trinity
House officials, acting under Pepys’ orders, were busily engaged in
removing buoys and altering the position of familiar coast marks, the
small, or lower, lighthouse at Harwich was an object of consideration.
It was—so went forth the order—to be ‘removed’ and set up in another
place.’ But how? The operation could not be _rapidly_ performed, for the
building was a solid bit of masonry, and all depended on haste. A happy
idea at last struck some one: the Dutch ships would be as easily misled
by an erection of canvas, and that, ‘with the utmost secrecy,’ could be
stretched on a timber frame, carried to the place appointed, and set up
in less than an hour, whilst a charge or so of gunpowder would at the
same time level the real lighthouse.
Whether this was ever done we do not know: the Trinity House records
which tell the first part of the story are silent as to that point; but
if it was, it certainly did not serve the object in view, for the Dutch
ships, when they came, steered a very different course, and, as we all
know, landed in quite another part of England.
[Illustration: MODEL OF THE FIRST LIGHTSHIP.
_From the Trinity House Museum._]