The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [134]
As of July 1998, all those who use the sea for work (fishermen, yachtsmen hiring out their boats, merchant skippers) have to have some form of qualification to sail in British waters. Amateur sailors need no qualification. There is no nautical equivalent of the compulsory driving test for cars. In the US, it is illegal to go to sea without insurance, and to obtain insurance, sailors need qualifications to demonstrate their ability. In Britain, the only check is on the use of a VHF radio. It is illegal to operate a radio without producing a Ship Radio Licence for which the owner needs a certificate of competence. Even then, the radio can still be operated by unqualified sailors under the owner’s instruction and there is still no law forcing owners to possess a radio. Considering the rise in amateur sailing in the last two decades, the RYA points out that the general standard of sailing is remarkably high. They too are reluctant to insist on all sailors obtaining qualifications, since, aside from the difficulties in policing it, they believe that a universal minimum qualification would actually lower the standard of seamanship in Britain rather than improving it. The debate goes round in circles. For every improvement, another flaw develops.
But if those who use and follow the sea have changed, the sea has not. Very few aspects of existence on solid ground apply offshore. Water makes everything mutable. Once out of sight of the coast, life works to an alternative schedule, dictated by tides, winds, currents and stars rather than the fixed rotations of a clock. Practices are different, thinking is different, history is different. Even the geography is different. A hazard that appears one day can disappear the next. Despite our unresting efforts to immobilise our surroundings, they will keep moving beneath us. Land slips, coasts erode, sand banks up. The sea shifts its own furniture constantly. The best efforts of mankind are only meddlings by comparison. The lighthouse at Dungeness, for instance, has had to be rebuilt four times since 1600 because the sea kept sliding away from it. The most recent version, built in 1904, is already 500 metres from the high-water mark. Even in the most accurate chartings, errors creep in, currents change and politics takes an interest. One example is GPS, which gives each user an electronic guide to their situation, speed and time. GPS has become so popular and so cheap that most boats, however large or small, now use it. In theory, the system is accurate up to ten metres. At present, it relies entirely on twenty-eight American satellites run by the US military. During the Gulf War, the signals were deliberately distorted by several metres to prevent Iraqi intelligence from gaining too close a hold on Allied positionings. The world’s sailors, in other words, are reliant on the goodwill of the Pentagon. Until the current system is replaced by international commercial satellites, politics will go on playing the same games with the sea as it did in the days of empires and monsters.
The lighthouses also became part of our Lilliputian effort to pin down Gulliver. They were just one in a long chain of attempts to civilise the sea, to make it manageable and rational. In the hands of a Smeaton or a Stevenson, they became part of a new faith. They were built for a specific purpose, but they also became expressions of a bolder time when Britain still believed that sense and science could conquer all. When the first lighthouses were built around the Scottish coast, they fulfilled a more complex role than merely warning against submerged dangers or acting as useful daylight landmarks. They acted as guides by which the mariner could fix position, calculate distance or gain an accurate measurement of speed. They also fulfilled a symbolic purpose as signs of civilisation, order and constancy. The lights told the mariner not only where he was but what course to take, and, if he made the right calculations, how long it would take him to get there. They acted as the ocean’s