The Sea Rovers

ion of Tillamook Rock lighthouse, probably the most exposed structure in the world. Tillamook is a basaltic rock, rising abruptl

Pacific, which often break with appalling violence on its summit, ninety feet ab

party lost his life in attempting to land, and the lot of the survivors was one of great discomfort and constant danger. To prevent being blown or washed away, they tied the canvas to ring-bolts driven into holes drilled in the

workmen was repeatedly flooded with water and their supplies were swept into the sea. They were able at the end of a fortnight to make those on the mainland acquainted

r would permit. First, a square, one-story house for the keepers was built, and above this was raised a tower forty-eight feet high, raising the light 136 feet above the sea level. Sixteen months after work was begun the lamp was lighted for the first time, and has since prevented scores of wrecks. Over the beacon raised amid such difficulties, three keepers stand sentinel, and their lot is an exciting as wel

ne, and the first to give the mariner warning of his nearness to land. The second grade of lights show him his way through the secondary shoals and rocks, and the third grade, or harbor lights, take him safely into port. There are fifty-two fir

204 to 360 feet above sea level, and which are visible from twenty-one to twenty-six miles. The light at St. Augustine, Fla., is a fine example of its class. The strong and massive tower of brick rises 150 feet from the ground, and the light is reached by winding stairs. The apparatus for the light is twelve feet high and

at the elasticity of the system is ample to meet all possible needs. To secure the second result desired the lighthouses are painted in different colors, and the application of the colors is varied in each instance. Some retain their natural colors, while others are painted black and white, or red and white; here broad horizontal bands alternating, and there slender spiral ones setting off the background of a sharply cont

this, and the construction of the lighthouse of the present day is, as has already been shown, a task demanding mechanical skill and engineering ability of the first order. A lighthouse on the mainland h

has two other lighthouses built on submerged rocks, Minot's Ledge in Boston harbor, and Spectacle Reef, on Lake Huron. The first lighthouse on Minot's Ledge was built above stout iron rods driven into the rocks. In April, 1851, there was a severe gale which lasted five days. On the third night of the storm the house was blown down and light and keeper went out together. Four y

to the rock, where it was set up on the surface and the stones driven down into the uneven places. Then the crevices were filled with cement and the water pumped out. After t

yed off Massachusetts Bay to mark the Vineyard and Nantucket shoals, and a line of equal number lies along Long Island Sound stretching from Brenton's Reef to Sandy Hook. Four more are stationed off the New Jersey and Delawa

jurisdiction at least every three months; the latter, a member of the Corps of Engineers, superintends the building, removal or renovation of the towers. Both are resp

s annually expended. From this station one hundred and eighty-nine lighthouses and beacon lights and seven lightships are maintained and supplied, while thirty-six day or unligh

orked under seventy pounds pressure, and from which a series of noises come forth that can be heard from two to four miles. Certain intervals in the sounds designate the nearest light and afford a wel

ighthouses in which it is used. Experiments with electricity have also been only fairly successful, its light blinding instead of giving aid to the pilot. The lighthouse station on Staten Island is a busy place, and much work is done there, but the wheels of industry are so well oiled a

end our lighthouses. The pay of these keepers ranges from $1,000 to $100, the average, by an Act of Congress passed some years ago, being $600. The Lighthouse Board,

ar or on the Western frontier, and many an old shipmaster or mate, whose weather-beaten face bespeaks long years spent on the quarter-deck, as lighthouse keepers now do duty on solitary and barren beac

vious good conduct can save from instant dismissal the keeper who allows his light to go out. He may plead that his wife or child was dying, but he is told that he must subordinate his light to nothing. And he must not only keep his light burning, but stay by it so long as the lighthouse stands. Some years ago an ice pack lifted from its foundations, overturned and carried away the Sharp's Island lighthou

their superiors. They had proven recreant to their trust and were dismissed from the service, the places they had filled being given to the two keepers who had refused to leave their post of duty, even when t

In the lantern room the lenses must be kept free from speck or tarnish, and the reflectors, the brass railings and the gun metal carefully burnished and polished to the last degree of brightness. The oi

is range, and tardiness in this particular is noted by watchful eyes, and at once reported. At inaccessible stations, as a rule, from three to four keepers are employed. In stormy months, when communi

of the peace. The keeper whose lighthouse is located on land is encouraged to keep a garden, and a barn is provided for his horses and cattle. Until a few years ago many keepers greatly increased their incomes by taking boarders in the summer-life in a light

is impossible for a loaded boat to reach his abiding-place in safety. The coal he uses is shipped in bags from Boston to as near the lighthouse as the vessel can approach. The bags are then loaded into small boats and taken to the edge of the shoal water, inside of which it is dangerous to enter. From the

THOUSE

icient for their needs. Each lighthouse keeper is supplied by the Government with a well-selected library of fifty volumes. There are five hundred and fifty of these libraries, and they a

cted with the lighthouse service. He had been a sea captain before he became a lighthouse keeper and was a man of signal mechanical skill and marked inventive genius. His knowledge of electricity, and of light and sound was thorough and exact, and the results o

ning to sailors. The island was a barren and desolate spot when Captain Brooks settled there, but he and his family turned it into a paradise. All of his large family of boys and girls were born there, and there grew up to sturdy manhood and splendid womanhood. One daughter was an authority on ornithology; another, a gifted water-color artist, and every one of the children was a skilled musician, their family

u have reached its end, wave your handkerchief toward the lighthouse opposite. Soon a woman will appear in the door of the tall gray tower, and running down to the boat moored to the stone wall, step into it, take the oars, and with graceful yet powerful strok

in part to her record as a life-saver, that she was given the place she now fills. Besides attending to her duties as keeper, there are other cares that keep her busy; she is a careful housewife, keeps abreast of current literature; and

to the harbors of Nova Scotia. When the late fall comes and the tardy fishermen hasten away to the mainland, the gulf turns to ice and hems the rock in with a clutch that only the returning summer can loosen. There, in the autumn of 1896, Angus Campbell took his newly wedded wi

rsuit of the seals they had noticed on the ice the day before. His wife saw them start across the ice and then returned to her household duties. They had not been gone more than four hours, when the wind, which had been growing colder and blowing steadily from the eastward, shifted to the southwest. The

y a general splitting up of the ice floe. She saw the men standing just the other side of the open water. She saw her husband wave his hands at her and she waved back. Then the darkness came, like a great blanket dropped from the wintry skies, and men and ice were blot

imprisonment on the ice-locked rock. But not for a single night did she fail to fill and light the lamp that had been her hapless husband's charge. When the Government steamer touched at Great Bird Bock, on May 5, 1897, the captain looked long and e

n, tottering figure crept to the brow of the ledge, but it was some minutes before the tender's capt

ur husband?"

in a faint, palsied voice, "and so

and was making his way up the rocks. When he reached the woman she bur

?" asked the captain

ope on the morning after the boys were carried out on the ice floe, that they might be in sight and might be saved some way. But that morning there was nothing to be seen but water and ice. Then hope was gone. I knew there was nothing to do but wait for the spring. And I have done it. Every day I have swept the horizon with the aid of the glasses. It was merely a formality, after

s removed from the rock to her fo

the sea, and presents what seems a precipitous front to the ocean, but there is no more rugged, dangerous coast along the seaboard of Maine than here, and when a gale rages the waves pound the rock as if bent upon washing it away, the thunder of the green-gray wall that beats against it, sounding, at such times, like the cannonade of a hundred heavy guns. Life on Matinicus for years past has been a never ending struggle between man and the elements, and this lends peculiar interest to the history of the light

keeper and the wife assistant keeper of White Head, another light on the Maine coast. There they remained until the spring of 1890, when they removed to Middleborough, Mass., intending to pass the balance of their days beyond sight and hearing of the rocks and the waves. But the hunger which the sea breeds in its adopted children was still strong within them, and the fall of 1892 found them

at sea, it is only during the months of summer and autumn that the lighthouse tender ventures to visit it, and its crew from December to May of each year are wholly cut off from communication with the land. It is this, however, that makes the South Shoal lightship a veritable protecting angel of

ks at a time, is kept tolling day and night. A two-inch chain fastened to a "mushroom" anchor weighing upward of three tons holds the vessel in eighteen fathoms of water, but this, so fiercely do the waves beat against it in winter, has not prevented her from going adrift many times. She was two weeks at sea on one of these occasions, and on another she came to anchor in New York Harbor. Life on the South Shoal lightship is at all times a hard and trying one, and, as a ma

d the gold bar. The last mentioned badge of honor is granted only to one who has twice distinguished himself by a special act of bravery. It was given Hatch in the winter of 1898. A wreck occurred at night, just outside the breakwater. The eight people aboard made their way to the breakwater pier, but the heavy seas swept several of them back, and one lost his life. Pulling to the pier in a small boat, Keeper Hatch took off the captain's wife; but she was hardly in the boat before it wa