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Updated: May 12, 2025
I've got some things to tell you about that life-savin' station cruise. I've been thinkin' that I know the cap'n and most of the crew on the lightship off back of the Point. How'd you like to go aboard of her? You could get some yarns from those fellers that might be wuth hearin'." "I have no doubt I should. But I'm afraid I can't go.
They walked over the wide flat sands, and came at length to the sea's roar, the white tumbling of foamy breakers, and the full force of the south-east wind. Across the invisible expanse of water could be discerned the beam of a lightship. And Audrey was aware of mysterious sensations such as she had not had since she inhabited Flank Hall and used to steal out at nights to watch the estuary.
Until, by-and-by the Warner lightship, afar out at sea beyond Spithead, and the Nab light beyond her again, could be seen twinkling in the distance, while the moon presently rose in the eastern sky right over Fort Cumberland; and then, all at once, there was a sudden flash, which, coming right in front of me, dazzled my eyes like lightning.
This is a broken and rocky piece of bottom running from the tip of the southeastern part of the ground, at about 10 miles S. from the buoy on Ammens Rock and about 82 miles SE. ½ S. from the lightship at Portland, to a point about 20 miles S. by E. from the buoy named. Its length is not to be stated definitely, and it is probably greater than here shown. The width averages about 1½ to 2 miles.
With change of tide and rising water we got up sail and at last reached the Gull lightship, on whose deck we met old friends, and where we had Divine Service as the evening fell in.
He invariably saw a floating mine, a buoy, or a lightship long before the man whose proper work it was to see it, and at sea, with a telescope to his eye, I often saw him apparently taking in two signals from opposite points of the compass at one and the same moment, with the ship rolling heavily and sheets of spray flying over the bridge.
Landing on the Bell Rock invariably cured the sickness for a time, and the sea-sick men had such an intense longing to eat of the dulse that grew there, that they were always ready and anxious to get into the boats when there was the slightest possibility of landing. Getting into the boats, by the way, in a heavy sea, when the lightship was rolling violently, was no easy matter.
Then the bustle and confusion of the liner; the calm monotony of the journey, when one came on deck each morning to find the vessel so manifestly in the same spot where it had been the morning before that it was impossible to realize how many hundred miles of ocean had really been placed behind one; and finally the Ambrose Channel lightship and the great bulk of New York rising into the sky like a city of fairyland, heartening yet sinister, at once a welcome and a menace.
"Oh, he's bin' actin'," replied the old man, with a quiet chuckle, as he resumed his work on the boat; "he's bin' actin', that's all." At this moment the boom of a gun fired by the Gull lightship broke on the ears of the men of Deal, and a moment later the bright flash of a rocket was seen. It was the well-known signal that there was a ship in distress on the sands.
The same year the Navy had taken a great harvest of prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a Prussian fishing dogger, flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem and stern, was purchased to be a floating lightship, and re-named the Pharos. By July 1807 she was overhauled, rigged for her new purpose, and turned into the lee of the Isle of May.
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