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Updated: May 14, 2025
Before the cutter which brought him could return, a heavy gale sprang up, and he himself was kept a prisoner for nine weeks, after which the lighthouse-keepers heard no more complaints as to the quantity of food kept in store. The bright light, which burst forth from the top of the white tower, warned us to beat a retreat.
Subsequently the Spanish admiral, Melcampo, made a sort of apology for this; but the Captain-General of Cuba, on the other hand, wrote to Sir James Walker, complaining that the British lighthouse-keepers on Berry Island had refused to aid the Spaniards in pursuit of 'pirates' on British soil. Lord Granville took up the matter in a proper spirit. He sent energetic remonstrances to Madrid.
On the second morning out we reached Alacranes lighthouse; and when I saw the flat strip of sand, without a tree or bush to lend it grace and color, the bleak lighthouse, and the long, lonely reaches of barren reefs from which there came incessant moaning, I did not wonder that two former lighthouse-keepers had gone insane.
On the contrary, he and his wife became frequent visitors at the signal-tower, and the families of the lighthouse-keepers felt almost as much at home in "the cottage" as they did in their own houses.
We parted without knowing each other's names. I had no idea what he thought of me, but I thought he must have been somebody. While traveling around the coast of Yucatan I had heard of the wild and lonely Alacranes Reef where lighthouse-keepers went insane from solitude, and where wonderful fishes inhabited the lagoons. That was enough for me. Forthwith I meant to go to Alacranes.
Percy found everything new and strange the stilted wharves on the ledges, heaped with lobster-traps and festooned with buoys of all shapes and colors; the fish-pier with its open shed, sheltering the dark, discolored hogsheads rounded up with salted fish; the men in oilskin "petticoats," busy with splitting-knives on hake and cod and pollock and haddock, brought in by the noisy power-boats; the lighthouse-keepers from Matinicus Rock, five miles south, in military caps, oilskins, and red rubber boots, towing a dory to be dumped full of slimy hake heads for lobster bait; the post-office and general store above the cove, and the spruce-crowned rocks beyond it.
Upon the road two dark figures could just be discerned, one a little way behind the other, but overtaking and joining the foremost as Ruth looked. After all they might be quarriers or lighthouse-keepers from the south of the island, or fishermen just landed from a night's work.
The present keeper received me with the welcome always accorded a visitor to out-of-the-world places. He corroborated all that my Indian sailors had claimed for the rabihorcado, and added the interesting information that lighthouse-keepers desired the extinction of the birds because the guano, deposited by them on the roofs of the keepers' houses, poisoned the rain water all they had to drink.
"There will be no sign of our camp at daybreak. The tent will be gone everything. If our luck holds and why should it not? no one need ever know that the Señor Marteen and his friend José Medina picnicked for three days upon that cape." "But the lighthouse-keepers! What of them?" objected Hillyard. In him, too, hope and excitement were leaping high.
On the contrary, he and his wife became frequent visitors at the signal-tower, and the families of the lighthouse-keepers felt almost as much at home in "the cottage" as they did in their own houses.
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