SEA-BUILDERS
_The Story of Lighthouse Building--Stone-tower Lighthouses, Iron Pile
Lighthouses, and Steel Cylinder Lighthouses_
A sturdy English oak furnished the model for the first of the great
modern lighthouses. A little more than one hundred and forty years ago
John Smeaton, maker of odd and intricate philosophical instruments and
dabbler in mechanical engineering, was called upon to place a light upon
the bold and dangerous reefs of Eddystone, near Plymouth, England.
John Smeaton never had built a lighthouse; but he was a man of great
ingenuity and courage, and he knew the kind of lighthouse _not_ to
build; for twice before the rocks of Eddystone had been marked, and
twice the mighty waves of the Atlantic had bowled over the work of the
builders as easily as they would have overturned a skiff. Winstanley,
he of song and story, designed the first of these structures, and he and
all his keepers lost their lives when the light went down; the other,
the work of John Rudyerd, was burned to the water's edge, and one of the
keepers, strangely enough, died from the effects of melting lead which
fell from the roof and entered his open mouth as he gazed upward.
Both of these lighthouses were of wood, and both were ornamented with
balconies and bay-windows, which furnished ready holds for the rough
handling of the wind.
[Illustration: Robert Stevenson, Builder of the Famous Bell Rock
Lighthouse, and Author of Important Inventions and Improvements in the
System of Sea Lighting.
_From a bust by Joseph, now in the library of Bell Rock Lighthouse._]
[Illustration: The Bell Rock Lighthouse, on the Eastern Coast of
Scotland.
_From the painting by Turner. The Bell Rock Lighthouse was built by
Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, on the Inchcape
Reef, in the North Sea, near Dundee, Scotland, in 1807-1810._]
John Smeaton walked in the woods and thought of all these problems. He
tells quaintly in his memoirs how he observed the strength with which an
oak-tree bore its great weight of leaves and branches; and when he built
his lighthouse, it was wide and flaring at the base, like the oak, and
deeply rooted into the sea-rock with wedges of wood and iron. The
waist was tapering and cylindrical, bearing the weight of the keeper's
quarters and the lantern as firmly and jauntily as the oak bears its
branches. Moreover, he built of stone, to avoid the possibility of fire,
and he dovetailed each stone into its neighbour, so that the whole
tower would face the wind and the waves as if it were one solid mass
of granite. For years Smeaton's Eddystone blinked a friendly warning to
English mariners, serving its purpose perfectly, until the Brothers of
Trinity saw fit to build a larger tower in its place.
In England the famous lighthouses of Bell Rock, built by Robert
Stevenson, Skerryvore, and Wolf Rock are all stone towers; and in
our own country, Minot's Ledge, off Boston Harbour, more difficult of
construction than any of them, Spectacle Reef light in Lake Huron, and
Stannard Rock light in Lake Superior are good examples of Smeaton's
method of building.
[Illustration: The Present Lighthouse on Minot's Ledge, near the
Entrance of Massachusetts Bay, Fifteen Miles Southeast of Boston.
"_Rising sheer out of the sea, like a huge stone cannon, mouth
upward._"--Longfellow.]
The mighty stone tower still remains for many purposes the most
effective method of lighting the pathways of the sea, but it is both
exceedingly difficult to build, and it is very expensive. Within
comparatively recent years busy inventors have thought out several new
plans for lighthouses, which are quite as wonderful and important in
their way as wireless telegraphy and the telephone are in the realm of
electricity.
[Illustration: The Lighthouse on Stannard Rock, Lake Superior.
_This is a stone-tower lighthouse, similar in construction to the one
built with such difficulty on Spectacle Reef, Lake Huron._]
One of these inventions is the iron-pile or screw-pile lighthouse, and
the other is the iron cylinder lighthouse. I will tell the story of each
of them separately.
The skeleton-built iron-pile lighthouse bears much the same relation
to the heavy stone tower lighthouse that a willow twig bears to a great
oak. The latter meets the fury of wind and wave with stern resistance,
opposing force to force; the former conquers its difficulties by
avoiding them.
A completed screw-pile lighthouse has the odd appearance of a huge, ugly
spider standing knee-deep in the sea. Its squat body is the home of
the keeper, with a single bright eye of light at the top, and its long
spindly legs are the iron piles on which the structure rests. Thirty
years ago lighthouse builders were much pleased with the ease and
apparent durability of the pile light. An Englishman named Mitchell
had invented an iron pile having at the end a screw not unlike a large
auger. By boring a number of these piles deep into the sand of the
sea-bottom, and using them as the foundation for a small but
durable iron building, he was enabled to construct a lighthouse in a
considerable depth of water at small expense. Later builders have used
ordinary iron piles, which are driven into the sand with heavy sledges.
Waves and tides pass readily through the open-work of the foundation,
the legs of the spider, without disturbing the building overhead.
For Southern waters, where there is no danger of moving ice-packs,
lighthouses of this type have been found very useful, although the
action of the salt water on the iron piling necessitates frequent
repairs. More than eighty lights of this description dot the shoals of
Florida and adjoining States. Some of the oldest ones still remain in
use in the North, notably the one on Brandywine shoal in Delaware Bay;
but it has been found necessary to surround them with strongly built
ice-breakers.
Two magnificent iron-pile lights are found on Fowey Rocks and American
Shoals, off the coast of Florida, the first of which was built with so
much difficulty that its story is most interesting.
[Illustration: The Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, Florida.]
Fowey Reef lies five miles from the low coral island of Soldier Key.
Northern storms, sweeping down the Atlantic, brush in wild breakers over
the reef and out upon the little key, often burying it entirely under a
torrent of water. Even in calm weather the sea is rarely quiet enough to
make it safe for a vessel of any size to approach the reef. The builders
erected a stout elevated wharf and store-house on the key, and brought
their men and tools to await the opportunity to dart out when the sea
was at rest and begin the work of marking the reef. Before shipment,
the lighthouse, which was built in the North, was set up, complete from
foundation to pinnacle, and thoroughly tested.
At length the workmen were able to remain on the reef long enough to
build a strong working platform twelve feet above the surface of the
water, and set on iron-shod mangrove piles. Having established this base
of operations in the enemy's domain, a heavy iron disk was lowered to
the reef, and the first pile was driven through the hole at its centre.
Elaborate tests were made after each blow of the sledge, and the
slightest deviation from the vertical was promptly rectified with block
and tackle. In two months' time nine piles were driven ten feet into the
coral rock, the workmen toiling long hours under a blistering sun. When
the time came to erect the superstructure, the sea suddenly awakened and
storm followed storm, so that for weeks together no one dared venture
out to the reef. The men rusted and grumbled on the narrow docks of the
key, and work was finally suspended for an entire winter. At the very
first attempt to make a landing in the spring, a tornado drove the
vessels far out of their course. But a crew was finally placed on the
working platform, with enough food to last them several weeks, and there
they stayed, suspended between the sea and the sky, until the structure
was complete. This lighthouse cost $175,000.
The famous Bug Light of Boston and Thimble Light of Hampton Roads, Va.,
are both good examples of the iron-pile lighthouse.
Now we come to a consideration of iron cylinder lighthouses, which are
even more wonderful, perhaps, than the screw-piles, and in constructing
them the sea-builder touches the pinnacle of his art.
Imagine a sandy shoal marked only by a white-fringed breaker. The water
rushes over it in swift and constantly varying currents, and if there
is a capful of wind anywhere on the sea, it becomes an instant menace
to the mariner. The shore may be ten or twenty miles away, so far that a
land-light would only lure the seaman into peril, instead of guiding
him safely on his way. A lightship is always uncertain; the first great
storm may drive it from its moorings and leave the coast unprotected
when protection is most necessary. Upon such a shoal, often covered from
ten to twenty feet with water, the builder is called upon to construct a
lighthouse, laying his foundation in shifting sand, and placing upon it
a building strong enough to withstand any storm or the crushing weight
of wrecks or ice-packs.
It was less than twenty years ago that sea-builders first ventured to
grapple with the difficulties presented by these off-shore shoals. In
1881 Germany built the first iron cylinder lighthouse at Rothersand,
near the mouth of the Weser River, and three years later the Lighthouse
Establishment of the United States planted a similar tower on
Fourteen-Foot Banks, over three miles from the shores of Delaware Bay,
in twenty feet of water. Since then many hitherto dangerous shoals have
been marked by new lighthouses of this type.
[Illustration: Fourteen-Foot Bank Light Station, Delaware Bay, Del.]
When a builder begins a stone tower light on some lonely sea-rock, he
says to the sea, "Do your worst. I'm going to stick right here until
this light is built, if it takes a hundred years." And his men are
always on hand in fair weather or foul, dropping one stone to-day and
another to-morrow, and succeeding by virtue of steady grit and patience.
The builder of the iron cylinder light pursues an exactly opposite
course. His warfare is more spirited, more modern. He stakes his whole
success on a single desperate throw. If he fails, he loses everything:
if he wins, he may throw again. His lighthouse is built, from foundation
caisson to lantern, a hundred or a thousand miles away from the reef
where it is finally to rest. It is simply an enormous cast-iron tube
made in sections or courses, each about six feet high, not unlike the
standpipe of a village water-works. The builder must set up this tube on
the shoal, sink it deep into the sand bottom, and fill it with rocks
and concrete mortar, so that it will not tip over. At first such a
feat would seem absolutely impossible; but the sea-builder has his own
methods of fighting. With all the material necessary to his work, he
creeps up on the shoal and lies quietly in some secluded harbour until
the sea is calmly at rest, suspecting no attack. Then he darts out with
his whole fleet, plants his foundation, and before the waves and the
wind wake up he has established his outworks on the shoal. The story of
the construction of one of these lighthouses will give a good idea of
the terrible difficulties which their builders must overcome.
Not long ago W. H. Flaherty, of New York, built such a lighthouse at
Smith's Point, in Chesapeake Bay. At the mouth of the Potomac River the
opposing tides and currents have built up shoals of sand extending eight
or ten miles out into the bay. Here the waves, sweeping in from the open
Atlantic, sometimes drown the side-lights of the big Boston steamers.
The point has a grim story of wrecks and loss of life; in 1897 alone,
four sea-craft were driven in and swamped on the shoals. The Lighthouse
Establishment planned to set up the light just at the edge of the
channel, and 120 miles south of Baltimore.
[Illustration: The Great Beds Light Station, Raritan Bay, N. J.
_A specimen of iron cylinder construction._]
Eighty thousand dollars was appropriated for doing the work. In August,
1896, the contractors formally agreed to build the lighthouse for
$56,000, and, more than that, to have the lantern burning within a
single year.
By the last of September a huge, unwieldy foundation caisson was framing
in a Baltimore shipyard. This caisson was a bottomless wooden box, 32
feet square and 12 feet high, with the top nearly as thick as the height
of a man, so that it would easily sustain the weight of the great iron
cylinder soon to be placed upon it. It was lined and caulked, painted
inside and out to make it air-tight and water-tight, and then dragged
out into the bay, together with half an acre of mud and dock timbers.
Here the workmen crowned it with the first two courses of the iron
cylinder--a collar 30 feet in diameter and about 12 feet high. Inside of
this a second cylinder, a steel air-shaft, five feet in diameter, rose
from a hole in the centre of the caisson, this providing a means of
entrance and exit when the structure should reach the shoal.
Upon the addition of this vast weight of iron and steel, the wooden
caisson, although it weighed nearly a hundred tons, disappeared
completely under the water, leaving in view only the great black rim of
the iron cylinder and the top of the air-shaft.
On April 7th of the next year the fleet was ready to start on its
voyage of conquest. The whole country had contributed to the expedition.
Cleveland, O., furnished the iron plates for the tower; Pittsburg sent
steel and machinery; South Carolina supplied the enormous yellow-pine
timbers for the caisson; Washington provided two great barge-loads of
stone; and New York City contributed hundreds of tons of Portland cement
and sand and gravel, it being cheaper to bring even such supplies from
the North than to gather them on the shores of the bay.
Everything necessary to the completion of the lighthouse and the
maintenance of the eighty-eight men was loaded aboard ship. And quite a
fleet it made as it lay out on the bay in the warm spring sunshine. The
flagship was a big, double-deck steamer, 200 feet over all, once used in
the coastwise trade. She was loaded close down to her white lines, and
men lay over her rails in double rows. She led the fleet down the bay,
and two tugs and seven barges followed in her wake like a flock of
ducklings. The steamer towed the caisson at the end of a long hawser.
In three days the fleet reached the lighthouse site. During all of this
time the sea had been calm, with only occasional puffs of wind, and the
builders planned, somewhat exultantly, to drop the caisson the moment
they arrived.
But before they were well in sight of the point, the sea awakened
suddenly, as if conscious of the planned surprise. A storm blew up in
the north, and at sunset on the tenth of April the waves were washing
over the top of the iron cylinder and slapping it about like a boy's
raft. A few tons of water inside the structure would sink it entirely,
and the builder would lose months of work and thousands of dollars.
From a rude platform on top of the cylinder two men were working at the
pumps to keep the water out. When the edge of the great iron rim heaved
up with the waves, they pumped and shouted; and when it went down, they
strangled and clung for their lives.
The builder saw the necessity of immediate assistance. Twelve men
scrambled into a life-boat, and three waves later they were dashed
against the rim of the cylinder. Here half of the number, clinging like
cats to the iron plates, spread out a sail canvas and drew it over the
windward half of the cylinder, while the other men pulled it down with
their hands and teeth and lashed it firmly into place. In this way the
cylinder shed most of the wash, although the larger waves still scuttled
down within its iron sides. Half of the crew was now hurried down the
rope-ladders inside the cylinder, where the water was nearly three feet
deep and swashing about like a whirlpool. They all knew that one more
than ordinarily large wave would send the whole structure to the bottom;
but they dipped swiftly, and passed up the water without a word. It was
nothing short of a battle for life. They must keep the water down, or
drown like rats in a hole. They began work at sunset, and at sunrise the
next morning, when the fury of the storm was somewhat abated, they were
still at work, and the cylinder was saved.
[Illustration: A Storm at the Tillamook Lighthouse, in the Pacific, one
mile out from Tillamook Head, Oregon.]
The swells were now too high to think of planting the caisson, and the
fleet ran into the mouth of the Great Wicomico River to await a more
favourable opportunity. Here the builders lay for a week. To keep the
men busy some of them were employed in mixing concrete, adding another
course of iron to the cylinder, and in other tasks of preparation.
The crew was composed largely of Americans and Irishmen, with a few
Norwegians, the ordinary Italian or Bohemian labourer not taking kindly
to the risks and terrors of such an expedition. Their number included
carpenters, masons, iron-workers, bricklayers, caisson-men, sailors, and
a host of common shovellers. The pay varied from twenty to fifty cents
an hour for time actually worked, and the builders furnished meals of
unlimited ham, bread, and coffee.
On April 17th, the weather being calmer, the fleet ventured out
stealthily. A buoy marked the spot where the lighthouse was to stand.
When the cylinder was exactly over the chosen site, the valves of two of
the compartments into which it was divided were quickly opened, and
the water poured in. The moment the lower edge of the caisson, borne
downward by the weight of water, touched the shoal, the men began
working with feverish haste. Large stones were rolled from the barges
around the outside of the caisson to prevent the water from eating away
the sand and tipping the structure over.
In the meantime a crew of twenty men had taken their places in the
compartments of the cylinder still unfilled with water. A chute from the
steamer vomited a steady stream of dusty concrete down upon their heads.
A pump drenched them with an unceasing cataract of salt water. In this
terrible hole they wallowed and struggled, shovelling the concrete
mortar into place and ramming it down. Every man on the expedition, even
the cooks and the stokers, was called upon at this supreme moment
to take part in the work. Unless the structure could be sufficiently
ballasted while the water was calm, the first wave would brush it over
and pound it to pieces on the shoals.
[Illustration: Saving the Cylinder of the Lighthouse at Smith Point,
Chesapeake Bay, from being Swamped in a High Sea.
_When the builders were towing the unwieldy cylinder out to set it in
position, the water became suddenly rough and began to fill it. Workmen,
at the risk of their lives, boarded the cylinder, and by desperate
labours succeeded in spreading sail canvas over it, and so saved a
structure that had cost months of labour and thousands of dollars._]
After nearly two hours of this exhausting labour the captain of the
steamer suddenly shouted the command to cast away.
The sky had turned black and the waves ran high. All of the cranes were
whipped in, and up from the cylinder poured the shovellers, looking as
if they had been freshly rolled in a mortar bed. There was a confused
babel of voices and a wild flight for the steamer. In the midst of the
excitement one of the barges snapped a hawser, and, being lightened of
its load, it all but turned over in a trough of the sea. The men aboard
her went down on their faces, clung fast, and shouted for help, and it
was only with difficulty that they were rescued. One of the life-boats,
venturing too near the iron cylinder, was crushed like an egg-shell, but
a tug was ready to pick up the men who manned it.
So terrified were the workmen by the dangers and difficulties of the
task that twelve of them ran away that night without asking for their
pay.
On the following morning the builder was appalled to see that the
cylinder was inclined more than four feet from the perpendicular. In
spite of the stone piled around the caisson, the water had washed the
sand from under one edge of it, and it had tipped part way over. Now was
the pivotal point of the whole enterprise. A little lack of courage or
skill, and the work was doomed.
The waves still ran high, and the freshet currents from the Potomac
River poured past the shoals at the rate of six or seven miles an hour.
And yet one of the tugs ran out daringly, dragging a barge-load of
stone. It was made fast, and although it pitched up and down so that
every wave threatened to swamp it and every man aboard was seasick,
they managed to throw off 200 tons more of stone around the base of the
caisson on the side toward which it was inclined. In this way further
tipping in that direction was prevented, and the action of the water on
the sand under the opposite side soon righted the structure.
Beginning on the morning of April 21st the entire crew worked steadily
for forty-eight hours without sleeping or stopping for meals more than
fifteen minutes at a time. When at last they were relieved, they came up
out of the cylinder shouting and cheering because the foundation was at
last secure.
The structure was now about thirty feet high, and filled nearly to the
top with concrete. The next step was to force it down 15-1/2 feet
into the hard sand at the bottom of the bay, thus securing it for ever
against the power of the waves and the tide. An air-lock, which is a
strongly built steel chamber about the size of a hogshead, was placed
on top of the air-shaft, the water in the big box-like caisson at the
bottom of the cylinder was forced out with compressed air, and the men
prepared to enter the caisson.
No toil can compare in its severity and danger with that of a caisson
worker. He is first sent into the air-lock, and the air-pressure is
gradually increased around him until it equals that of the caisson
below; then he may descend. New men often shout and beg pitifully to be
liberated from the torture. Frequently the effect of the compressed air
is such that they bleed at the ears and nose, and for a time their heads
throb as if about to burst open.
In a few minutes these pains pass away, the workers crawl down the
long ladder of the air-shaft and begin to dig away the sand of the
sea-bottom. It is heaped high around the bottom of a four-inch pipe
which leads up the air-shaft and reaches out over the sea. A valve in
the pipe is opened and the sand and stones are driven upward by
the compressed air in the caisson and blown out into the water with
tremendous force. As the sand is mined away, the great tower above it
slowly sinks downward, while the subterranean toilers grow sallow-faced,
yellow-eyed, become half deaf, and lose their appetites.
When Smith's Point Light was within two feet of being deep enough the
workmen had a strange and terrible adventure.
Ten men were in the caisson at the time. They noticed that the candles
stuck along the wall were burning a lambent green. Black streaks, that
widened swiftly, formed along the white-painted walls. One man after
another began staggering dizzily, with eyes blinded and a sharp burning
in the throat. Orders were instantly given to ascend, and the crew, with
the help of ropes, succeeded in escaping. All that night the men lay
moaning and sleepless in their bunks. In the morning only a few of them
could open their eyes, and all experienced the keenest torture in the
presence of light. Bags were fitted over their heads, and they were led
out to their meals.
[Illustration: Great Waves Dashed Entirely Over Them, so that They had
to Cling for Their Lives to the Air-Pipes.
_In erecting the Smith Point lighthouse, after the cylinder was set
up, it had to be forced down fifteen and a half feet into the sand. The
lives of the men who did this, working in the caisson at the bottom of
the sea, were absolutely in the hands of the men who managed the engine
and the air-compressor at the surface; and twice these latter were
entirely deluged by the sea, but still maintained steam and kept
everything running as if no sea was playing over them._]
That afternoon Major E. H. Ruffner, of Baltimore, the Government
engineer for the district, appeared with two physicians. An examination
of the caisson showed that the men had struck a vein of sulphuretted
hydrogen gas.
Here was a new difficulty--a difficulty never before encountered in
lighthouse construction. For three days the force lay idle. There seemed
no way of completing the foundation. On the fourth day, after another
flooding of the caisson, Mr. Flaherty called for volunteers to go down
the air-shaft, agreeing to accompany them himself--all this in the face
of the spectacle of thirty-five men moaning in their bunks, with their
eyes burning and blinded and their throats raw. And yet fourteen men
stepped forward and offered to "see the work through."
Upon reaching the bottom of the tower they found that the flow of gas
was less rapid, and they worked with almost frantic energy, expecting
every moment to feel the gas griping in their throats. In half an hour
another shift came on, and before night the lighthouse was within an
inch or two of its final resting-place.
The last shift was headed by an old caisson-man named Griffin, who bore
the record of having stood seventy-five pounds of air-pressure in the
famous Long Island gas tunnel. Just as the men were ready to leave the
caisson the gas suddenly burst up again with something of explosive
violence. Instantly the workmen threw down their tools and made a dash
for the air-shaft. Here a terrible struggle followed. Only one man could
go up the ladder at a time, and they scrambled and fought, pulling down
by main force every man who succeeded in reaching the rounds. Then one
after another they dropped in the sand, unconscious.
Griffin, remaining below, had signalled for a rope. When it came down,
he groped for the nearest workman, fastened it around his body, and sent
him aloft. Then he crawled around and pulled the unconscious workmen
together under the air-shaft. One by one he sent them up. The last was a
powerfully built Irishman named Howard. Griffin's eyes were blinded, and
he was so dizzy that he reeled like a drunken man, but he managed to
get the rope around Howard's body and start him up. At the eighteen-inch
door of the lock the unconscious Irishman wedged fast, and those outside
could not pull him through. Griffin climbed painfully up the thirty feet
of ladder and pushed and pulled until Howard's limp body went through.
Griffin tried to follow him, but his numbed fingers slipped on the steel
rim, and he fell backward into the death-hole below. They dropped the
rope again, but there was no response. One of the men called Griffin by
name. The half-conscious caisson-man aroused himself and managed to tie
the rope under his arms. Then he, too, was hoisted aloft, and when he
was dragged from the caisson, more dead than alive, the half-blinded men
on the steamer's deck set up a shout of applause--all the credit that he
ever received.
Two of the men prostrated by the gas were sent to a hospital in New
York, where they were months in recovering. Another went insane. Griffin
was blind for three weeks. Four other caisson-men came out of the work
with the painful malady known as "bends," which attacks those who work
long under high air-pressure. A victim of the "bends" cannot straighten
his back, and often his legs and arms are cramped and contorted. These
terrible results will give a good idea of the heroism required of the
sea-builder.
Having sunk the caisson deep enough the workmen filled it full of
concrete and sealed the top of the air-shaft. Then they built the
light-keeper's home, and the lantern was ready for lighting. Three
days within the contract year the tower was formally turned over to the
Government.
And thus the builders, besides providing a warning to the hundreds of
vessels that yearly pass up the bay, erected a lasting monument to their
own skill, courage, and perseverance. As long as the shoal remains the
light will stand. In the course of half a century, perhaps less, the
sea-water will gnaw away the iron of the cylinder, but there will still
remain the core of concrete, as hard and solid as the day on which it
was planted.
It is fitting that work which has drawn so largely upon the highest
intellectual and moral endowments of the engineer and the builder
should not serve the selfish interests of any one man, nor of any single
corporation, nor even of the Government which provided the means, but
that it should be a gift to the world at large. Other nations, even
Great Britain, which has more at stake upon the seas than any other
country, impose regular lighthouse taxes upon vessels entering their
harbours; but the lights erected by the United States flash a free
warning to any ship of any land.
[Illustration: Peter Cooper Hewitt.
_With his interrupter._]