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By Root 789 0

is less about their history than their current purpose. The way in which we treat the ocean has changed profoundly since James Park first arrived to polish the reflectors at Kinnaird Head. There are no more pirates, press gangs or wreckers. There are no eager opportunists waiting by the shore for ships to die. Those who work on the sea have become a marginal part of Britain’s life, still there but somehow inessential, associated with a long-ago time before fish came in packets and boats became hobbies. Britain makes its money by other means; the sea has become optional now. It is possible to trace the sea’s steady demotion through the political hierarchy. Two centuries ago, the Lord High Admiral was second only to the monarch and the prime minister. Now, civilian sea-business is dealt with by the Department of Transport or by the less-than-glamorous fisheries minister, a position that does not even carry a Cabinet place. Maritime safety is now governed by a flotilla of separate organisations: HM Coastguard, the Marine Safety Agency, the Marine Pollution Control Unit, the Royal Yachting Association and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The navy has been reduced to a peacetime rump, the fishing boats are preoccupied with quota systems and netting regulations, and the only criminals left are scraping a living from quota-jumping ‘black fish’. Then Thomas Smith began his work, the sea was administered by the Admiralty, the criminals and the professionals. Now it has a civil service all of its own.

When the first lights were built around the British coastline, they were the only safety measures in existence. Of the 100,000 or so people employed on the sea in the 1750s, between thirty and forty per cent would not have survived to see old age. Those who escaped death through disease, ill-treatment or hardship had little hope of surviving shipwreck. The only chances of salvation in case of disaster were luck or land. Once down in the frozen Atlantic waters, they were as good as dead, and they knew as much. But alongside the slow development of the lighthouse services came other changes. The most significant nine-teenth-century improvement in lifesaving was the foundation of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. In 1823, Manby’s old rival William Hillary published an impassioned pamphlet arguing the need for a regularised life-saving service. In his Appeal to the British Nation of the Humanity and Policy of forming a National Institution for the Preservation of Lives and Property from Shipwreck, he demanded to know why, ‘In the nineteenth century, surrounded by every improvement and institution which the benevolent can suggest, or the art of man accomplish for the mitigation or prevention of human ills, will it for a moment be capable of belief, that there does not, in all our great and generous land, exist one National Institution which has for its direct object the rescue of human life from shipwreck?’

Hillary’s pleas touched a public nerve. By the time of his death in 1847, he had personally helped to save over 300 lives, but, echoing Manby’s example, he too died in extreme poverty, while the institution he founded languished. The RNLI, which now has a national volunteer crew of more than 4,400 and a record of saving more than 131,000 lives, came from uncertain beginnings. Until 1854, only four lifeboat stations were established in England and none at all in Scotland. The country had other things on its mind, and it was not until lifesaving was glamourised by Grace Darling’s example that the public were sufficiently roused to support a full-time charitable organisation. In part, they were galvanised by the events of a few fatal years. In 1851, the Board of Trade first started compiling figures for deaths at sea around the British coastline. Their findings made sobering reading. In that year, 428 people had been killed in one disaster alone, and in 1852, 1,115 vessels were wrecked and 900 lives lost. The figures did not include British shipping in foreign waters, which would probably have doubled the numbers.

Lifeboats