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Updated: June 14, 2025
Thus, the Goodwin Sands, which are upwards of ten miles in length, are marked by three lightships. The one on the north has three masts and three fixed lights. The one on the south has two masts and two fixed lights. The one that lies between the two off Ramsgate, and named the Gull has one mast and one revolving light.
To-day a clear beam of light shines out to sea, eighteen miles from the top of Tillamook, and only the criminally careless captain can come near enough to be in any danger whatsoever. Such is one bit of progress made in safeguarding the sea. More wearing even than life in a lighthouse is that aboard the lightships, of which the United States Government now has forty-five in commission.
Lightships off the English coast were equipped with the wireless and were thus enabled to warn ships of impending storms, and on several occasions the wireless was used to summon aid from the shore when ships were sinking because of accidents near the lightship.
When fog falls down, as it does sometimes in a moment, on the hundreds of ships coasting down the traffic ways round our shores ways which are defined so easily in clear weather and with such difficulty in fogs the hundreds of lighthouses and lightships which serve as warning beacons, and on which many millions of money have been spent, are for all practical purposes as useless to the navigator as if they had never been built: he is just as helpless as if he were back in the years before 1514, when Trinity House was granted a charter by Henry VIII "for the relief...of the shipping of this realm of England," and began a system of lights on the shores, of which the present chain of lighthouses and lightships is the outcome.
In that hour London quieted wonderfully; the streets achieved an effect of deeper darkness, the skies, lowering, looked down with a blush less livid for the shamelessness of man; cab ranks lengthened; solitary footsteps added unto themselves loud, alarming, offensive echoes; policemen, strolling with lamps blazing on their breasts, became as lightships in a trackless sea; each new-found street unfolded its perspective like a canyon of mystery, and yet teeming with a hundred masked hazards; the air acquired a smell more clear and clean, an effect more volatile; and the night-mist thickened until it studded one's attire with myriads of tiny buttons, bright as diamond dust.
At present the chief use of submarine signalling is from the shore or a lightship to ships at sea, and not from ship to ship or from ship to the shore: in other words ships carry only receiving apparatus, and lighthouses and lightships use only signalling apparatus.
It was during the morning of July 6, 2137, that we entered the mouth of the Thames to the best of my knowledge the first Western keel to cut those historic waters for two hundred and twenty-one years! But where were the tugs and the lighters and the barges, the lightships and the buoys, and all those countless attributes which went to make up the myriad life of the ancient Thames? Gone! All gone!
Some one on shore had reported that the guns and rockets had been seen flashing from the Gull and North-Sand-Head lightships; whereas the report should have been, from the Gull and South-Sand-Head vessels. The single word was all-important. It involved an unnecessary run of about twelve miles, and an hour and a half's loss of time. But we mention this merely as a fact, not as a complaint.
There was no lightship on or near the Goodwin Sands till 1795, when one was placed on the North Sand Head. In 1809 the Gull lightship, and in 1832 the South Sand Head lightships, were added, and the placing of the East Goodwin lightship in 1874 was one of the greatest boons conferred on the mariners of England in our times.
Gongs are somewhat used on lightships, especially in British waters. They are intended for use at close quarters. Leonce Reynaud, of the French lighthouse service, has given their mean effective range as barely 550 yards. They are of most use in harbors, short channels, and like places, where a long range would be unnecessary. They have been used but little in United States waters.
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