The Tribune

IN 1963, a journalist for the Standard Times pointed out how invaluable the ILS (Imperial Lighthouse Service) is for keeping “the lights which mark the sea routes. Those beacons on the deep-sea shipping lanes scattered over the banks and bordering the lesser channels.” The 1966 Fort Lauderdale News pointed out how the lighthouses are “guardians to some of the most important cruising and trade routes in the world.”

The Elbow Reef Light Station is such an extraordinary success and well-loved, restored, and written about by the likes of Dave Gale and Annie Potts, director of the Bahamas Light House Preservation Society, yachtswoman, and author of Last Lights: the hand-wound lighthouses of the Bahama Islands. All have been a great help to those learning about lights.

Longtime keeper Geoffrey Forbes of Salina Point, Acklins, has spent nearly a decade on remote Castle Island Light. This monastic life has for many generations been passed down within families. As Potts put it, the lighthouse symbolizes hope in a town named Hope. In 1961, a Michigan sailor stopped at Great Isaac Light on a schooner and went ashore in a rowboat to be met with Preston Johnson, another keeper, and a Mr and Mrs Nesbit and their young child, which began a years-long correspondence. 

Prime Minister Lloyd George voting, in August of 1895 the British Parliament debated giving funds to ILS in Bahamas, with money approved to maintain and inspect the lighthouses. An opponent asked that the funds would be spent on lighthouses in northern Scotland, to which AB Forwood replied the Bahamas lights “were not maintained for the purpose of the residents of those islands, but for the benefit of the commerce of the world. It is the duty of every county to light its own coasts….”  Mr. W Allan said that in his opinion “the chief inspector of the Bahama lighthouses and his assistants were underpaid considering the unhealthiness of the climate, and it was absolutely necessary to maintain lighthouses on the dangerous Bahama reefs.” Dr. Clark felt that the lights “were in the highest degree beneficial to the British mercantile marine, and the colonies were quite unable to pay for them.” Mr. Allan gave a “graphic description of the dangers of navigation through the Bahama Reefs,” and funding for 11 lights was approved.

Goulding Cay, on westernmost tip of New Providence was the site chosen by a scientist named Williamson in 1930 to study the dining habits of sharks in the wild. In 1914 the Delaware County Daily Times reported that a large steamer was seen hard aground on the un-marked Southampton Reef north of Conception Island. The ship was badly damaged and no crew were visible to the passing steamer named Taunton.

What if there had been a lighthouse there?

The New York Times 1888 told of a crew led by Captain Dodge, whose crew survived the wreck of the schooner Elva E. Pettingtill, which ran aground on a reef in Abaco in January. Fourteen years later the Great Falls Leader told of a 108-ton schooner Amelia Hearn also wrecked in Abaco while on its way from Maryland to Tarpum Bay, Eleuthera.

In the fall of 1920, SS Naiwa was salvaged and towed to Philadelphia by the British tug Barstow after her hull and propeller shaft were badly damaged in the Bahamas. In November 1977 the remote Cochinos banks of northern Ragged Islands became the setting of a sad and desperate grounding by political refugees from Haiti fleeing north. The Miami Herald reports how the US Coast Guard brought 52 Haitians landed in Miami after their homemade wooden sailboat ran out of wind at the Cochinos and they all tried to survive on a Bahamian cay. Then in April of 2000, a wooden sailing boat with 300 Haitian immigrants aboard. Fourteen of them died of dehydration, and 31 were severely dehydrated. When this vessel grounded, three others also en route alerted the RBDF and authorities of their plight. The following day 122 others arrived in Inagua, just 100 miles north of Haiti, followed by 224 more.

The Haitians claimed that each of them paid smugglers US$4,000.

In August of 1985 a Haitian sloop, 11 days from Hispaniola, wrecked on Flamingo Cay, Ragged Island or Jumentos Cays, with 125 refugees. Shortly before this, 135 were wrecked at Cay Lobos Lighthouse.

A few years later a commercial fisherman was diving off Flamingo Cay when he was severely bitten by a shark. Fortunately for Chester Fox, age 34, BASRA managed to have him air-lifted to Princess Margaret Hospital in Nassau with severed arteries and bone exposed – they used special inflatable pants to stem bleeding, according to the Nassau Tribune.

A Tampa newspaper in November 1986 ran a story about a Vietnam veteran named Harrell and two women friends, who set off on a sailing voyage aboard Great Escape to the Caribbean and Bahamas. After being stopped and searched for drugs off Jamaica and Exuma, they claimed to have come upon 10 packages of drugs floating on the remote Brown Banks east of Long Island and took them aboard without telling authorities. After being apprehended by the US Coast Guard, they were strip-searched, restrained, interrogated, and kept deck chained and photographed. Later they were unshackled, given dinner and apologized to, before being put back on their boat and released – in Cuban waters.

Quite a memorable trip (after which they sued authorities!) 

In 1869, a sailing brig under Captain Haskell named J. McIntyr was wrecked on the same Brown’s Bank, Bahamas with a cargo of sugar and molasses at 4:30 am. Her cargo was saved and taken to Nassau. There is neither land nor a light to mark the bank. Remote Cayo Verde (north of Cuba, not Green Cay, south of Nassau) was purposely visited by bird watchers on the large yacht Thalia in March of 1934. They found many cormorants and booby birds nesting there. In the fall of 1865 Captain Carter’s brig, the Dudley was leaking so badly, despite being caulked in Aruba, that she had to lay over in Cayo Verde en route to Philadelphia.

Guinchos Cay (aka Ginger Cay) in the southern Bahamas, lies between Cay Lobos, Cay Sal and Orange Cay. It is infrequently visited, tiny, and does not have a light. The islet is only about 10 feet above sea level and 600 feet in diameter. It is a speck, and a 2018 study by Dr. Michael Pateman and Dr. William Keegan turned up no evidence of prehistoric activity.

In other accounts of lighthouse tenders, by the head of the Rod and Reel Club in 1944, the tender seemed to always be moving, and full of life, since the captain brought his family along. Off the Bight in Cat Island, one such supply boat brought a Roman Catholic priest with a Cockney accent who would christen babies along the way.

The Cold War saw intense patrols by US, British, and Bahamian vessels and aircraft to monitor fishing poachers, people smuggling, and other incursions into remote banks like Cay Sal and Cochinos Bank. In March of 1969, a fleet of vessels was intercepted by Spanish ships at Guinchos Cays, consisting of a bark-rigged steamer with cannon, arms, ammunition, and recruits who were being smuggled into Cuba through Bahamas from places like Mexico. In 1947, as many as 360 Cuban rebels were seized with weapons at the Guinchos Cays. In 1894, the schooner Ada Bailey of Camden Maine under Captain Gardner wrecked at Guinchos Banks with sugar, which they worked feverishly to salvage. In 1853, Captain Munson of the brig Amonoosuck bemoaned that this position for the Guinchos are 10 miles off where Imray’s charts said they would be.

In July of 1847, the Nueva Yberia from the UK to Cuba was wrecked in Guinchos Cays. In 1861, the Spanish government recommend that the US Secretary of the Navy, William Seward, award the commander of USS Mohawk, Lieutenant Craven, a medal for his heroic rescue of the people of the Spanish polacca named Bella wrecked on Guinchos. Her Majesty the Queen of Spain recommended an award, which was issued. During three days, Lt. Craven stood by saving all the passengers and peoples of the ship. In 1845, the Spanish ship ConcepciÓn under Captain Sanchez of Santander was wrecked at Guinchos Cay. All crew were saved and taken to Havana.

In 1970, the US Coast Guard intercepted a fish poaching ship named Fram off Guinchos and Cay Lobos, facing Cuba across a narrow channel. In September 1993, a complex drug interdiction effort culminated with Cubans cooperating with the DEA to turn over the suspected drug smuggling 29-foot vessel Thief of Hearts off Guinchos. The small boat was caught while on its way from Colombia to the US via southwestern Bahamas. Planes and boats were being tracked by USCG over Guinchos, since drugs were dropped. When a suspected plane took off, USCG cutters Farallon and Padre, backed by joint operation choppers, were deployed to track or follow it.

Poaching of fish conch and lobster has long been a cat-and-mouse chase in the southern Bahamas. In November 1979, the RBDF sent 28 Cuban-American fisherman to HMP Fox Hill for stealing the country’s fish in farflung places like Dog Cay, Guinchos Cay, and Anguilla Cay, on Cay Sal. Overall 10 boats and 32 men were seized.

A rather hazy story emerges of international intrigue in November of 1983, when a “big wooden yacht from Miami, the Ricky IV, disappeared in the Bahamas on its way to meet a mother ship.” The US Coast Guard Cutter Cape Gull later found it smashed on the rocks at Guinchos Cay. The crew said they had become lost on a fishing trip, but they were thought to be smugglers.

In July 2003, a people-smuggling boat named Gaviota 16 was intercepted off Florida after it wove a similar route along the Old Bahama Channel and through deserted Bahamian Cays on the way north from Cuba, monitored by the US and Bahamian authorities. With so many cays, reefs, and shallows, folks will always want to hide in the wide uninhabited expanses of the Bahamas, with anchorage provided just a few dozen feet below. So defence forces, like lighthouses, will always have a practical need for funding.