Baring Head Light

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 4, 26 March 1945, Page 16

Baring Head Light

“ T~x efence area. No admittance I J without authority.” We opened the gate and climbed a steep hill to a plateau, bare and sea-encircled, over which the gravelled road dips and swings till it stops dead at a plantation. Inside the plantation there were two houses and a garage and several outhouses, set in gardens and rockeries. Outside, on the edge of a precipitous cliff, was the lighthouse. The whole picture was quite different from what we had expected.

Mind you, all lighthouses aren’t like this one. If you want to know what lighthouses can be like, ask Mr. Rob. Wilson, former head keeper of Baring Head, who has been on most of the main stations of New Zealand. Mr. Wilson, who has spent thirty-eight years in the lighthouse service, is now retired, and is waiting at the lighthouse, as he says, for his ship to float ashore.’’, He explained his long service by his love of the sea, the same love which made him stow away aboard a barque as a boy of fourteen. Since then he has never left it.

Baring Head, said Mr. Wilson, as we sat in his brown panelled sitting-room, is the lighthouse-keeper’s paradise. It is the show station of New Zealand. Not that other stations are as bad as many people imagine. The Marine Department, which is responsible for the coastal lights,

has done its utmost to mitigate the hardships of the keeper’s life. All lighthouses now have a fortnightly mail, and are connected to the outside world by line or radio telephone. All are furnished with comfortable dwellings which possess the main amenities, while fuel and lighting is provided. Most stations have local areas of land on which the keeper can keep enough stock to give him fresh meat and milk. Children are taught. by the Correspondence School, when there is no other school available, and for recreation there is a circulating library and wireless provided.

Nevertheless, Baring Head has none of the inconveniences associated with other lights. The keeper and his wife don’t have to be taken up in a basket by a derrick, as they do at the Stephen Island block in Cook Strait, in rough seas. Three men don’t live alone for six months on end as at the Brothers. Baring Head, comparatively, is in the centre of a metropolis. It has a road out to civilization, regular stores and mails, snug houses, garage, cow-bail and workshop, good gardens, friends can come (with an authority), telephone, wireless—it seemed a fine life.

We heard the wind buffeting round the house like a young bull, and singing in the struts of the radio pylons. It had torn

at our clothes and stung our faces. We thought that if we were lighthousekeepers we might like to get out of the wind once in a while. Mr. Wilson said they didn’t notice it. “ Anyway, it’s not half as bad as it was before I planted the trees.” We had been surprised when we found this oasis of trees on what seemed a desolate headland. Mr. Wilson told us how he had ridden across from Pencarrow (where he was formerly head keeper), had surveyed the land (the gift of a settler), had procured hundreds of young firs, getting them landed on the beach, then had planted them in breakwinds. Now the station is a small herbarium, with pohutukawa, karo, the Chatham Islands akeake, taupata, and koromiko, together with flax from Pencarrow Head and ngaio from the Orongorongo Valley. He told us how ten years ago he had built up clumps of rocks which retained the moisture so that flowers could grow. We saw them : vermilion crassula, marigolds, iceplant—and in between them good, green grass.

Looking back over his past experiences at other lighthouses, Mr. Wilson can tell you stories of killer whales he has seen fluking and breaching off the Cavalli Islands, North Auckland ; of how they attack the humpback whales in packs, the bulls keeping them under water, while the killer cows go in and pull out the tongues by the roots, turning the surface of the sea into a lather of blood. Or he can tell you of the earthquake that struck him once in the lighthouse tower at Castlepoint, and of how he broke all records in getting out. Some of the prisms were shattered, and the mercury from the mercury bath was rolling in marbles round the tower and had to be collected in a chamber pot, that being the only china vessel large enough.

If you look at a large-scale map of the Wellington sea coast, you will see that Baring Head juts into the strait like a jagged eye-tooth, going well beyond Pencarrow, and lying neck and neck with Turakirae Head and Cape Palliser to the east and Sinclair Head to the west. A light on this promontory can be seen by ships rounding any of these headlands, and so covers the widest arc possible in

Cook Strait. Why this, the logical site, was not chosen in the first place was known only to a few, and they are dead. Doubtless there were reasons at the time for selecting Pencarrow Head, but even to laymen like ourselves, leaning on the wind at the foot of Baring Head’s white tower and looking south, east, and west over the blue-green flecked strait, this seemed the obvious place for Wellington’s main lighthouse.

Later .'that night we stood on the balcony of the tower and saw pinpoint after pinpoint light up and flash intermittently through the summer haze. Cape Palliser — Cape Campbell — Karori Rock, and on our right the lights of Wellington, like submerged lamps. The skipper of a ship entering Wellington by night is well served with lights. There are twelve in all, from Palliser light beckoning out to the Pacific, to the red and white beacon at the end of the seven mile sandspit at Cape Farewell. For Wellington-bound vessels, Baring Head is the most important of these, for its welcoming flash warns them of their proximity to the treacherous rocks and reefs which infest the narrow heads. Later, when the skipper has left Baring

Head on the beam, he is guided up the harbour by the Pencarrow low-level light, its white sector winking up the safe channel and the red sector flashing over foul ground. Not the new low-level Pencarrow light, but the old white tower 322 ft. up the cliff above it, is a real curiosity in lighthouse history. Pencarrow was the forerunner to Baring Head and was the first lighthouse to operate in New Zealand. Its history over the last hundred years • shows how modern science has been adapted to serve the users of the sea. A hundred years ago the light shining from Pencarrow was an ordinary lantern placed in the bay window of a cottage —now

the low-level light is a Dalem-Aga apparatus, using acetylene dissolved in acetone as fuel, with automatic replacements of mantles, and automatic lighting up at sunset and cutting off at dawn? Between these two extremes was a multitude of inventions colza oil wick burners, the paraffin burners, the kerosene burners, with mantles like Aladdin lamps, and last of all the electric design which was installed at Baring Head in 1934, the first of its kind, so it was said, in the Southern Hemisphere.

“ A group occulting white light, having three eclipses every 15 sec., thus : light 5 sec., eclipse 2 sec., light 2 sec., eclipse 2 sec., light 2 sec., eclipse 2 sec., visible for 23 miles, is exhibited from a white concrete tower 40 ft. high.” That is how the "New Zealand Nautical Almanac” describes Baring Head lighthouse. Not being sea captains, we wanted to know what it all meant and how the aparatus worked. So we asked Mr. Wylie, the acting keeper, to show us.

Leaving our visit to the lighthouse itself till dark, we first went to the powerhouse, which is also the control station. This is built between the houses of the two keepers and is a plain, rough-cast building, holding in its five rooms the two Diesel engines and generators which provide power for the station, the battery sets which store the power, the radiobeacon equipment (for fog signals), motors and generators for the beacon, and an anemometer (which we discovered, is a wind-measurer). The radio-beacon room

is a grey-painted complication of dials, panels, boxes, clocks, switches, and valves. Mr. Wylie explained that this wireless fog signal is worked automatically by an eight-day clock, regulated from wireless time signals. At night and in foggy weather the beacon sends out from its singing aerial (the pvlons were the first thing we saw at Baring Head) a continuous series of Morse signals as follows : ZLOA, followed by A’s for, 45 seconds, a long dash, a repetition oi this, and then a silence for 250 seconds, the whole transmission taking six minutes. In fair weather from sunrise to sunset the signal is transmitted twice an hour, on the hour and at the half-hour. The signal, being a call sign, enables ships and even

aeroplanes to determine their position in bad weather.

From the radio-beacon room we moved across to the motors and generators used for the beacon. Here there are six small machines on the floor like grey pups. Arranged in duplicate groups of three, one motor to one high-tension generator and one low-tension, these run in alternate months and supply the beacon with current. Behind the beacon-room is the battery-room, with ninety-six cells, arranged in relays on three sides of the room —enough to run a car for a life-time, but they will only keep the station going for a day if not rechar The next room was the “ brain ” of the distant lighthouse.

Mr. Wylie pointed to a panel as wide and as high as the wall of a room, saying that was what did the work and was what we should write about. He pointed out three separate divisions, one for the engines, one for the batteries, and one for the lighthouse. The panel for the lighthouse was more complicated than the others, and it is here the long-short-short effect of the light is manufactured. The main feature was a small motor coupled to a rotating contact like the balance wheel of a watch, but a hundred times bigger. As we watched, Mr. Wylie flicked a switch and the motor whirred and the rotating contact clicked round, the cylindrical contact slipping over the cams with a sound like the sucking of a

pump. It is these cams, which are varied in length to accord with - the length of the flash, that give the lighthouse itscharacteristic signal.

To the left of the contact is the automatic mechanism for starting the engine when the battery supply falls below novolts. As the battery banks in turn become exhausted, a charge brush moves across a buzz-bar, and when the banks have all been used up the charge-brush strikes a limit switch and immediately starts the engine. There are two of these 9 horse-power Diesel water-cooled engines, each used on alternate days, and they are so coupled that if one should fail, the other starts before it has' completely stopped, while an alarm bell rings in the keeper’s house.

It was about half past seven when we entered the engine-room, and Mr. Wylie had hardly started the lantern mechanism before a sullen thumping was heard behind us and we turned to find the flywheel of one of the engines revolving. Mr. Wylie then went to work with a copper oil-can, burnished like a coffee-pot, while we inspected the racks of tools and the quiet, efficient 4I kilowatt generators.

It was then after lighting-up time and the whole apparatus was at work—the engine, the lighthouse, the radio beacon (we could hear the resonant signal from the next room), the generators, and the anemometer, th is hard - worked instrument scribbling with its three self-inking pens (two for wind direction, one for volume) the whole twenty-four hours of the day. The wind was blowing hard as we bullied our way across to the lighthouse, outside the plantation belt. The sun was setting over toward Nelson and the sea had gone the colours of petrol on asphalt. The “ Tamahine ” was pushing in and the coastal steamer “ Tiroa ” was slipping quietly past the heads as we went into the base of the lighthouse tower.

This tower• is > somewhat unusual in design. Many New Zealand lighthouse towers have been constructed with iron, being made at foundries such as Chas. Judd’s in Thames, or Luke Brothers’ in Wellington. But Baring Head has 40 ft. of reinforced concrete (2 tons of reinforcement, 45 cubic yards of concrete), buttressed by six flanges, which make it look as solid as Gibraltar Rock. Its erection was undertaken by the Public Works Department, supervised by the Marine Engineer. In profile the tower differs from the usual, the balcony being kept as small as possible. A short steel ladder from the first landing gives the keeper access to the balcony from the outside and enables him to clean the transparent panes. There are forty-two in all, but those toward the land are whitewashed. The lantern itself came originally from Cape Egmont and many of the prisms are chipped from long service and transportation.

No better scene for a murder novel or a thriller film was ever described by Ngaio Marsh or photographed by Hitchcock. Above us, as we began to climb the tower, was the lantern obscured by the landings, but fitfully flashing, making long shadows wax and wane on the whitewashed lower walls. Outside (through latticed rectangular windows), the wind washing the steep walls and the light falling intermittently on the grass ; inside, the runged steel ladder, glistening with oil ; now at the first landing ;

now' at the lantern, and a sudden blinding flash from the lens as the light comes to a peak—then —then blinding againfar out to sea the flicker of other lighthouses, as though in response. To us, strange to the lighthouse routine, it was so eerie and fascinating, the regular recurrence of that brightness, that signal reaching through the dark like a quick dawn, that for a moment or two we forgot our job.

It looks quite simple, the lantern of a modern lighthouse — two big globes (” 1,000 watts each,” said Mr. Wylie), the reserve one canted over, and the other set at the focal centre of a 7 ft. wide bull’s-eye lantern, and if one burns out (they hardly ever do) before its . one thousand hours are up, the reserve comes up automatically and the alarm bell rings. Quite simple. But behind that delicate mechanism, and the design of those prisms and lenses, was a century of research and invention.

“ Second order dioptric,” says the “ Nautical Almanac.” That means that the lens has a focal distance of 700 mm., while the light diverging from the whitehot filament is caught by the upper and lower sets of prisms and is reflected back so that ’ all rays emerge from the main lens in a narrow band, thus increasing their power and range. Above the lantern is a ventilated double-shelled copper dome, topped by a weather cock and a lightning conductorbelow it an iron grill you can walk on. Outside the lantern (whose glass panes have to be cleaned of salt spray and dust every day) is a balcony where sometimes the birds fall after stunning themselves against the glass. If birds or stones smash the panes, as they do occasionally, there are storm panes handy which can be screwed in until the glazier can come and make a permanent job. That’s all there is to this modern lighthouse —no sign of wavepounded rock, spiral staircase, rocket gun, or lighthouse-keeper’s daughters.

We asked Mr. Wylie about the famous Dalem sun-valve used as an automatic controlling device in modern lighthouses. The sun-valve starts the light at' sunset and stops it at dawn by the effect of sunlight on two bulbs filled with ether, one black and the other transparent.

We had one once,” said Mr. Wylie, “ but it wasn’t very efficient. The moon put the light out one night, and since then we’ve given it up. We always start the light by hand.” Long flashshort flash —short flash—it became a pattern in our minds, and out in the' ether too, the radio beacon was

sending ZLOA . . . ZLOA ... It seemed that science had at last dominated the elements in order to protect human

life. Not. before time. In the last hundred years there have been close on a hundred wrecks and marine accidents round the Wellington Headsfrom the “ David ” and the barque “ Tyne ” in 1840 to the capsize of the scow “ Echo ” in 1932 —but now, as one skipper said, entering Wellington Harbour was like navigating on a tramway.” Seeing the apparatus at Baring Head, we could quite believe it.