So brazen were some of the ‘salvors’ that Justice Burrows followed them many miles to Tucker’s Town and, single-handed, retrieved a good share of the money and personal effects [stolen from shipwrecked persons]. H.C. Wilkinson, Bermuda from Sail to Steam: a History of the Island from 1784 to 1901, 1973St. David’s Lighthouse first showed its light on 3rd November 1879. The Honourable Joseph Ming Hayward richly deserved the title of Father of St. David’s Lighthouse, for he was inflexible in furthering its construction. E.A. McCallan, Life on Old St. David’s, Bermuda, 1948Despite being the only mass of land, albeit a mere 200 square miles (including the reefs), in the central part of the western North Atlantic, Bermuda has attracted several hundred ships to a watery death over some five centuries since the island was first seen by humans in the late autumn of 1505. Like mosquitoes to a burning candle, or iron filings to a magnet, vessels seemed almost drawn to the destructive claws of the underwater coral outcrops that surround the island, like the necklace trap of a fishing net. After formal settlement of Bermuda in late July 1612, those who became Bermudians apparently grew quick to appreciate the fast buck of looting such unfortunate container-trucks of the sea, often depriving the crew and passengers of their worldly effects, while “salvaging” the contents of the ship’s holds.Such a not so honourable “tradition” was sometimes used in later years to try and justify the destruction of the archaeological remains of shipwrecked vessels by salvage, a process that could be said to complete the theft of the possessions of others began a century or more previously by earlier Bermudian “salvors”. Nice word that, similar to savour, slaver, saviour, not to mention salvation, which is not what it represented to persons at the receiving end of the predations of “gentlemen” of these isles at the northern apex of the “Bermuda Triangle”. As with Justice Burrows who chased one group of salvors to Tucker’s Town, much of what disappeared in the triangle of our reefs to the East, North and West probably reappeared, ghostlike, on local mantelpieces or in the family strongboxes of the day.The absence of lighthouses and (some say) the luring of ships to the reefs by deliberate showing of fire beacons on the western coast accounted for many of the shipwrecks, though negligence in recent times assisted in the confrontation between vessel and rock, which the former often lost. Against the latter cause of a watery calamity, no radar, radio, or high-tech systems will ever be of much use. In the meantime, lighthouses and sea-beacons remain the principal method by which the nighttime mariner is warned off the dagger-like dangers of the perimeter of reefs surrounding the 20 square miles of habitable land at Bermuda.The first proposals for lighthouses at Bermuda focused on the aptly named Wreck Hill, the most westerly point of land in Sandys Parish, and at the North Rocks (now only one) which were to be found at the northernmost section of the reefs to the north of the island. Neither sites were the ultimate recipients of such a beacon, though a fort was also proposed at North Rock in the 1790s, which would have created a expanse of land around the five pinnacles of hard stone that there then stood. That would been a platform suitable for a lighthouse for defensive protection against hostile ships attacking the reefs, as well as a place for offensive weapons, should vessel be intent on conquest, rather than an untimely demise.In 1846, the light of salvation shone from the first lighthouse erected on Gibbs Hill in Southampton Parish, and ‘its flashes could be seen thirty-three miles off, from a mast-head’.That lighthouse represents one of the great technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, built as it was of great slabs of cast-iron; similar beacons were planted in the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos Islands and at Jamaica, to name a few maritime sites that benefitted from new forms of ironworking of the mid-Victorian period. Gibbs Hill Lighthouse has become a major attraction in the bank of heritage assets of the tourist trade, while its cousin at the East End of Bermuda seems perhaps to have been relegating to the role of a poor relation.Not as tall and made not of iron but soft Bermuda stone, in November, 1879 St. David’s Lighthouse lit up the East End for the first time at Mount Hill, the highest spot on St. David’s Island, fortuitously near the northeastern coast of Bermuda, an area obscured somewhat from the lantern flashes of Gibbs Hill. The newspaper of the day reported that “the erection of this edifice was commenced in September, 1876, and was handed over to the Commissioners by Mr. Francis Hill the contractor and builder, on 11th October, 1879”. For several decades, the beacon was plainly whitewashed, but about 1925, a red band was painted around its waist, a skirt that it retains into present times. A succession of St. David’s Islanders became Keepers of the light, including well-known family names such as Smith, Pitcher, O’Connor and Fox. Perhaps one should add ‘Lamb’, to belay any bleating that might be heard from the Island today, but one stands to be corrected that that family may not have been custodians of the beacon since that first illuminating evening on Mount Hill in the late 1870s.Almost seven acres of land were purchased for the Lighthouse in the ‘national interest’, an acreage perhaps in excess of the footprint needed for the tower and attendant buildings. Given the current interest elsewhere in Bermuda about private lands so acquired, it behooves one to mention that in 1941 more than half of the 510 acres of St. David’s Island was purchased by the authorities and then leased to the United States Government: the farms and homesteads of old within that curtilage were largely consigned to oblivion.Hopefully this little sketch will illuminate a few subjects of East End history, especially for those middle-island and far-westerners who consider land to the east of the Bermuda airport to be a tabula rasa, at least as far as their knowledge, if not interest, goes.Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. Comments may be made to director[AT]bmm.bm or 704-5480