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One night in the spring of 1851, Lighthouse Keeper John Bennett gazed out into furious stormwaters and pondered the fate of his two assistants.
Ever since the spindly Minots Ledge Lighthouse had gone into service in the waters off Cohassett, Massachusetts the previous year, the tower had swayed uneasily whenever storms came. Builders forced each of the nine metal legs five feet into rock. But it was not enough. The tower still shook whenever the winds and the waves started to roar.
When an especially nasty gale invaded the waters around the lighthouse on April 17, 1851, Bennett feared the disaster would happen. Stuck on shore, he worried the violence of the night would sweep the little light station away, and with it his two friends.
At the lighthouse, Joseph Wilson and Joseph Antoine had every right to sit in a corner and cower, waiting for the end. Instead, they stayed at their watch and thought of the hapless sailors who might be out that night. Until the moment the tower collapsed under the force of the waves, they kept its light burning and its bell ringing.
Eighteen years later, Ida Lewis did a most unladylike thing. Already known for performing noble rescues in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, she set off in a gale to rescue soldiers whose boat had capsized in stormy water. Later, readers of The New York Times, Leslie’s Magazine and Harpers Weekly learned of how she fought through the heavy seas and rescued the soldiers, just before it was too late.
Someone writing a job description for Wilson, Antoine, and Lewis might have called them keepers of beacons. While true, it misses the point. They were beacons themselves, challenging school children and grownups to noble works of service.
In the dark days after Sept. 11, the heritage of service left by those shining old beacons is something to grasp onto. It enriches the pursuits of lovers of lighthouses, in ways that fixing old buildings cannot.
It is important to keep old lighthouses so future generations can see them. But even in the best of times, preservation of historic lights hardly seems the most important task a volunteer might perform, as useful a service as it is. Those who visit the sick, feed the hungry or minister to the poor certainly rank higher on the list of things to do to benefit others.
Amassing lighthouse books and collectibles or lists of light stations visited provides a needed break from life’s harder tasks and enables us to face them head-on. By itself, though, it has limited permanent value. Sitting on a rock next to a lighthouses on a sunny day and gazing out on the water is a good way to think through imponderable questions. But just being next to a building in a beautiful setting is not enough to grasp what happened there. Neither is maintaining it or collecting things to remind us of it. It is following the examples of those who kept the lights that adds a new and deeper element.
This became even truer when the jets slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The stories of the firefighters who died climbing the towers are humbling. Learning of the passengers who took back a plane from highjackers intent on bringing destruction to Washington, D.C. makes us wonder what we would do if we were on board. The sense might increase in the months ahead, as men and women risk their lives in the fight against a new and frightful enemy.
But the keepers would have done the same thing, because they did it every day of their lives.
Whether they were risking their lives or doing the humdrum work of keeping the lights on, the keepers and their families did so at personal cost to themselves. In their honor, it seems hardly enough to put lighthouses on their graves or to maintain their homes. When children and adults hear of Abbie Burgess, who kept the light burning while her father was on shore, they should not just learn a good story. They should receive an object lesson in how to live.
But it is not necessary to consider specific lightkeepers to urge people on to acts of nobility. There is enough in the guidance provided by the beams themselves. So it is that insurance companies and churches love to use lighthouses in their logos.
The Statue of Liberty is a lighthouse, holding her torch high, for the ships far out to view. In the National Anthem, flashes of light reveal the republic still stands. Bombs and rockets are the source of that illumination in this song. But it could have been a beam from a lighthouse.
Irving Berlin caught this theme, when he wrote the song that has become our second national anthem: “God bless America, Land that I love, Stand beside her and guide her Thru the night with a light from above.”
The First Chapter of the Book of John puts it another way: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
Jesus elaborates in the Sermon on the Mount. “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
“Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
The words, in the fifth chapter of the Book of Matthew, have been at the core of countless sermons since Jesus first pronounced them. They could just as well be the essence of secular meditations of a people intent on taking on a bully that hides in the darkness and kills thousands at a time in the name of a fanatical interpretation of God. Anger or revenge would not be their goal, but justice and self-defense.
This is the vision set forth by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when he wrote in 1630, “We shall be as a City upon a Hill.” That vision, of a civilization providing light for those around it, has guided America for more than 370 years, and will lead us again now. Let light go forth into the darkness, whatever the cost. Let us venture into that darkness, to roll it back with our light.
When we are done, we shall return to our buildings with the beacons on top, and continue to preserve them for generations unborn. If anyone asks why, we will tell of the keepers of those beacons and how they kept the light. Then we’ll say we also do it just because. Because they’re beautiful, that’s why. Because a life is not worth living if we can’t maintain what is lovely in life.
Then we’ll remind visitors what happened at Minots Ledge after that first light went down. Another tower went up in its place, of granite instead of iron, stronger than ever. The cylindrical tower still rises from the water, more than 140 years later.
A new Minots Ledge Light went up because the danger was still there. Lightkeepers had to keep lighting their beacons to protect others from danger, as the firefighters did in New York, as Joseph Wilson and Joseph Antoine did when the last tower fell.
So it shall be with us. So it shall be in New York. Towers will rise again, stronger than ever. The light will go forth, because we have kept it burning.
This story appeared in the
November 2001 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
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