The Tribune

GREAT Isaac Lighthouse, on remote Great Isaac Cay, sits perched on a narrow rock 18 miles north of Bimini. The prominent white tower is one of the Bahamas’ most enduring maritime landmarks at 152-foot high and made of cast-iron. The complex light assembly was shipped from the London Exposition in Hyde Park of 1851, and in 1859 installed in the northwest Bahamas, at the western approach to the Northwest Providence Channel.

After Great Isaac Light was shown in Hyde Park, it was taken apart, shipped and re-assembled by the Imperial Lighthouse Service (ILS) protecting the northwest corner of the Great Bahama Bank, helping to “end deliberate wrecking of passing ships.”

Its classic Fresnel lenses used to project its refracted beam every 15 seconds. The lenses are named for August-Jean Fresnel, a French civil engineer and physicist whose research into optics led to the wave theory of light. Brought up on the Normandie coast, the frail young man started his studies with bridges and highways and preferred to work alone. Though he died at 39 from TB in 1827, his name is written on the Eifel Tower and he saved countless thousands of lives with the invention of powerful lighthouse lenses.

The Great Isaac Light has had many keepers, and their families kept the beam going although it has been automated since August 1969, after two keepers were lost without a trace. A recent lighthouse historian notes that “the island’s isolation and harsh weather left the structures weathered and partially ruined [and] access is difficult, as the interior stairs have been removed.”

In 1968 Harry Rose penned an article on the legendary lighthouses of The Bahamas, and adds this to the conversation: In 1865 with the end of the American Civil War, “Bishop Addington Venables reported Bimini’s inhabitants were entirely engaged in the occupation of wrecking,” alleging that some 600 wreckers were listed as “licensed wreckers,” double the 1858 amount. His article was sponsored by for the Bahamas Government Information Services. 

While today probably any lighthouse in the Bahamas can be approached and accessed by simply showing up (Elbow Reef Light at Hopetown being one of the few manned year-round), back in the 1800s up to the 1960s, Rose tell us that “where lighthouses can be reached by the public without risking life or limb, there should be no problem entering them if prior permission is obtained from the Imperial Lighthouse Service, by phone or writing….” He points out the irony that most of the lights  are, “by the very nature of their purpose, likely to be difficult to access.”

Of course, shipwrecks happen with or without lighthouses, and this is as true on the Little Bahama Bank as anywhere. For example, a ship named Margaret from Portland, Maine was sailing with 1,340 bales of valuable cotton from the fields of Louisiana to the mills of England (New Orleans to Glasgow) in January of 1860 when it wrecked. Captain Merryman was able, with the help of Bahamian wreckers in several ships, to get most of his cargo of cotton to Nassau, where it would have been adjudicated, meaning an award was given to wreckers, and some of it returned to the original owners.

The New Zealand newspaper The Daily Southern Cross in January 1867 reported in detail on ships lost and damaged in the Bahamas in a recent great hurricane. These included the sailing barque Raven loaded with timber of white pine, that grounded at Great Sturrup Cay just before midnight on October 1. It rolled over and was bashed to pieces, with all hands drowned. That fate is not uncommon when the sea is covered in deadly timbers quickly moving in all directions.

Aside from narrow strips of canvas around their waists all five bodies retrieved were naked. One had his arm around a spar and was found “thrown high and dry into the bush.”

Meanwhile, the brigantine William Henry under the command of Captain Barnard from Maineo, Cuba, and loaded with lumber and “shooks” (disassembled staves and ax heads used to make casks, barrels, or boxes, packed together for shipping) was lost at Gorda Cay, Abaco. The ship was overwhelmed by a hurricane east of Hole in the Wall Light. Sadly two of her crew were drowned, and this new ship lost.

Another brig named Baltic, under Captain Maddocks was voyaging  from New York to Texas when it too struck North Eleuthera and sank. At the same point of northwest Eleuthera, Captain Yates’ brig John R. Plater, en route from New York to Havana, was totally wrecked with a general cargo.

Nearby Harbour Island claimed the brig J. P. Ellicott under Captain Gray of Boston, which was sailing from Maine to Haiti with lumber when it was dismasted by the storm. It drifted into the reefs of northeast Eleuthera and was doomed. 

In 1964, nine Cubans managed to take an odd route to freedom – the opposite direction in fact. We learn from an article in the Miami News entitled “From Havana to Safety – the hard way: Nine Cubans Starved, Weak but Free” that the group jumped off a ship in the Bahamas to float for 12 hours in a tiny raft. The ship they leapt off was a Lebanese freighter named Areti, which they stowed away upon in Havana.

The Areti was going to Italy and already rounded Great Isaac Light when the Cubans hopped into the sea in a raft just 6 X 4 feet and held afloat by empty oil drums and planks. The Coast Guard cutter USCG Cape Knox raced from Miami after radio communication with the Areti’s officers, and found the stowaways adrift off Hole in the Wall Light, south Abaco. There were jumbled efforts to land the men from the ship and have a US Coast Guard plane pick them up at Grand Bahama. However, ultimately the refugees were taken to the US - which was their initial goal anyway!

Etienne Dupuch, senior editor The Nassau Tribune, mused about two criminals who in Miami “picked up a girl, stole a boat, and set off on a cruise through the islands.” In his editorial of February, 1974, he wrote that the crooks had “no experience handling a boat, and they ran up on a rock at an abandoned lighthouse in the western Bahamas” – probably Great Isaac, vacated five years earlier.

A well-meaning Floridian captain with “a group of tourists aboard” went to the aid of the crooks. Sadly, for his trouble, he was shot and killed.

Then, furthering their depravity, the murderers left their Canadian fishing charter guests, as well as their lady companion, took the dead captains’ boat, and made for Cuba where again they shipwrecked.

Caught by the Cubans, they were sent to Nassau, where Mr. Dupuch’s relative defended them, though they were sentenced to hang.

So, lighthouses could not prevent crimes either. In fact, the high visibility of Great Isaacs may have made it easier for the miscreants to be found.