270 THE SEA. 



judge whether a vessel in the offing 1 is in dire distress or simply requires the ordinary 

 services of a pilot. 



In the eighteenth century, the requirements of a maritime country constantly at war 

 obliged the Government to establish a complete system of signals and signal stations all 

 round our coasts. At the conclusion of our wars with France that system was in full 

 force, and at that time the movements of nearly every vessel, friend or foe, were telegraphed 

 from point to point with a facility which contributed in an important degree to the security 

 of the country. "This Government telegraph system was also available for summoning 

 such aids as then existed for the preservation of life from shipwreck. Accounts of wrecks 

 at what may be called the life-boat era all tend to show that the system of coast telegraphy 

 then in existence played an important part in most notable life-boat and other rescues 

 from shipwreck. With the long peace the need for information on the part of the Govern- 

 ment as to the movements of its own or other ships became less urgent, though the 

 coast system of signals maintained a precarious existence for many years, to assist the 

 coastguard in protecting the revenue. As smuggling decreased, the coastguard men were 

 reduced in number, and the chain of signallers became broken into gaps, which widened 

 year by year. The final blow was given by railways and electricity to the old line of sema- 

 phores stretching between Portsmouth and the Admiralty, and elsewhere, and from headland to 

 headland. But while the Government, by the help of modern invention, enormously increased 

 its facilities of communication with the great dockyards and arsenals, it, conceiving itself 

 to be in no way concerned (we suppose) with the safety of merchant ships or saving life, 

 failed to supply a substitute for the old semaphore system along the coast line; and year 

 by year the evil has increased from the reduction of the coastguard, and the consequent 

 lengthening of the interval on lines of coasts in which watch has ceased to be kept. The 

 result is that during the last twenty-five years, and up to the present time, there has been 

 greater difficulty in communicating along the coast and summoning aid to distressed 

 vessels at all out-of-the-way parts of the coast than existed at the end of the last century. 



" The First Lord of the Admiralty or the President of the Board of Trade can converse 

 at leisure with Plymouth, Deal, Leith, or Liverpool, but the Eddystone has no means of 

 letting the authorities at Plymouth know that a ship is slowly foundering before the eyes 

 of the keepers, though the two points are in sight of each other. The light-keepers at 

 the Bishop have no means f telling the people at St. Mary's that a ship full of passengers 

 is slowly but surely tearing to pieces on the Retarrier reef; and the hundreds of vessels 

 that yearly are in deadly peril on the Goodwins, the Kentish Knock, the Norfolk Sands, 

 and elsewhere, have no means of summoning prompt aid from the land, though they are 

 only a few miles distant from it."* The writer notes that the number of cases of ship- 

 wreck, where the vessels might have been saved, which reach the National Life-boat Insti- 

 tution is considerable. These come largely from obscure and detached parts of the coasts. 

 A foreign barque was wrecked on the Ship-wash, a sandbank eight miles from land, the 

 nearest port being Harwich, from which its southern end is distant ten miles. The wreck 

 was discovered by several smacks soon after seven o'clock on the morning of January 7th, 

 1876, and the news of the disaster was in the possession of the coastguards at Walton, 



* The Lifeboat, &c., Feb. 1st, 1876. 



