Lighthouses: Their History and Romance
William John Hardy
9781465550514
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was very good of the old abbot so to do; but in doing what he did, he was no better than a great many of his fellows. Marking dangerous reefs, and leading the mariner safely into port, were, formerly, the work of Christian charity; they were two of the many useful offices which the Church performed when there was no one else to carry them out, and for which we, who see the same things so much better done, often forget to bestow upon her even a word of praise or gratitude. Bells on rocks, marks on shoals and sands, and beacon lights used to be maintained by the great monasteries, or by their various offshoots, in this country; and those beacon lights, dim, flickering, and uncertain though they may have been, were the direct ancestors of the modern lighthouse. We do not, of course, claim for Christian charity the credit of originating the idea of these warning signals for ships. Long before the dawn of Christianity, Lybians, Cushites, Romans, Greeks, and Phoenicians had protected navigation by the means of lighthouses—high columns, on the summits of which were placed fires of wood in open grates, or lamps lit by oil, all similar in style, though on a smaller scale, to the wonderful tower of white marble, erected at Alexandria, nearly three centuries before the birth of Christ, by Ptolemy Philadelphus at a cost of about £170,000 of our money. Opinions differ as to whom should be ascribed the honour of paying for this mighty work; Alexander the Great and Cleopatra have been credited with it; but, on the whole, such reliable evidence as there is points more to Ptolemy as its projector. This being so, we may perhaps believe the story about the inscription that was placed upon the tower. The architect’s name was Sostratos, and he, desiring to be perpetually remembered in connection with the lighthouse, cut deeply into one of the stones these words: ‘Sostratos of Guidos, son of Dixiphanus, to the Gods protecting those upon the sea.’ Then—being assured that Ptolemy would permit no name save his own to be remembered in connection with the work—he coated over the inscription with a layer of cement, and placed thereon one wholly laudatory of Ptolemy and associating his name alone with the erection of the pillar. Time went by; monarch and architect had been gathered to their fathers, and at last the cement began to crack, and then drop away; bit by bit it vanished together with the writing upon it, and the letters on the true face of the stone beneath stood out clear and readable—then the world knew to whose skill was due this blessing to sailors and travellers! But it is not needful to speak further of these more ancient lighthouses, or their builders; reference is made to them only to remind the reader of the antiquity of coast lighting as a system. These pages concern the lighthouses of our own country alone, and there is no evidence to prove or suggest that the shores of England were lighted prior to the Roman occupation. Indeed, of direct evidence of lighthouses being used by the Romans in Britain, there is exceedingly little. The system was extensively employed by them in Gaul, and the Tour d’Ordre at Boulogne—or ‘the Old Man of Bullen,’ as Elizabethan sailors called it—is mentioned as a lighthouse in the year 191 A.D.; so that it is hardly likely that the Romans would, for long, have left navigation around England unassisted by lights.
