The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [6]
During the next forty years, it was later calculated, upwards of 1,000 people were rescued from disabled ships by the mortar line. But if Manby thought that his battles had ended there on the darkened beach, he was wrong. His inventions did not meet with the esteem he had hoped for. Despite his energetic lobbying in Parliament, the Admiralty remained suspicious, and the local sailors agitated loudly for his removal. Other, more credible competitors came forward, claiming either to have invented the line before Manby or to have improved it far beyond his original designs. Even his later attempts to establish a lifeboat service to rescue those victims of shipwreck who were stranded farther out to sea met with disapproval or silence. Manby was present at the inaugural meeting of the Royal Society for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck in 1824, at which the first decision was to award five gold medals: one to the King, one to the Duke of York, one to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and one each to Manby and Sir William Hillary. Manby took the medal, but not the credit. Hillary, a boastful but enterprising Yorkshireman whose career bore a strong resemblance to Manby’s, is now generally honoured as the founding father of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Admittedly, Manby did not always help his own cause. He could be pompous and grasping, and was hopelessly vain. His journals and letters are littered with moments when he ‘considered his fortune made’ by the platitudes of a minister or the flattery of a courtier. His efforts often had more to do with his own self-advancement than they did with more generous motives. But for all his deluded grandeur, Manby did achieve great things. After the invention of the mortar line, he spent the rest of his life searching for the recognition he felt he deserved. Just before his death aged eighty-nine, he decided to build a monument commemorating both himself and the mortar line. When completed, he offered it to the town of Yarmouth, which had already built and paid for a statue of Nelson in the town centre. Manby’s memorial was rejected; he was left with nowhere to put it but his own front garden.
From Berwick to the Solway, including the sea lochs of the west, the Scottish coast runs for 4,467 nautical miles. By the late eighteenth century, that coast had gained an ominous reputation. Most mariners stayed well clear, and those who sailed there often chose to continue travelling all night instead of looking for landfall after dark. Not only is Scotland girdled by two opposing seas – the North Sea and the Atlantic – but her ragged island archipelago provides a major obstacle course for the best of sailors, even now. In the past, the sea was considered so dangerous in winter that one early Act had forbidden ships stocked with essential goods from leaving Scottish ports between the end of October and the beginning of February. The reasoning was obvious. As well as the sandbanks and treachery of the English coast, Scotland is moated by an awkward brew of conflicting tides and currents. The North Sea, which in the eighteenth century gave the only access to the Continent, Scandinavia and Russia, is a dark place of streams and sudden climatic switches. In the Pentland Firth, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic, sailors face riptides, cross winds and breakwaters on the water, and sandbanks, skerries and reefs underneath. Often, the competing tides set up currents that run at ten knots or more, each of which is troublesome enough to have earned its own title: Duncansby Bore, the Merry Men of Mey or the Swilkie. The Pentland Firth itself is still known simply as ‘Hell’s Mouth’. The names that still speckle marine maps represent more than just picturesque history. The Black Deeps and Blackstone Banks took their percentage of dead, year after year. Farther south, the Solway Firth is riddled with quicksands and the Firths of Tay and Forth are notorious for rocks. In the 1870s, Thomas Stevenson,