BY the wreck of the Deutschland, the question of better means of communica- tion between outlying stations on the coasts of the United Kingdom and internal bases of supply, has received one more little jog forward into its inevitable ulti- mate position of permanent national im- portance.

For any time during the last twenty years, those whose life led them to an intimate knowledge of the wants and hardships of maritime trade, and whose natural thoughtfulness also led them to consider any apparently feasible method of ameliorating those conditions, have advo- cated the establishment of a sound system, of day and night signals from all out- lying lighthouses, lightships, and coast- guard stations, and the laying down of telegraphic cables to many of the most prominent stations.

We have now—have had for at least twenty years—every form of life-saving apparatus fairly worked and organised, under Government or private supervision ; and it is not likely that in the immediate future any remarkable improvements will be made in either Life-boat, Rocket Ap- paratus, or other means of saving life from shipwreck. Of all the thousand in- genious contrivances in the shape of Life- boats and life-rafts, which have been before the public since 1851, not one has retained a permanent hold for general work on the coast except the Northumber- land prize self-righting Life-boat: while the rocket apparatus, which has achieved so much of late years, was in existence, in all its essential peculiarities, at the beginning of the century. Increased at- tention and experience have resulted in a more efficient manner of working both Life-boat and rocket apparatus, but in means of communication along our coast we are considerably worse off than our grandfathers were.

In the eighteenth century the require- ments of a maritime country in time of war obliged the Government to establish a complete system of signals and signal stations all round our coasts. At the conclusion of the great war with France that system was in full force, and at that time the movements of every vessel, friend or foe, were telegraphed from headland to headland, or on to large towns, or the metropolis, with a facility which con- tributed in an important degree to the security of the country. This Govern- ment telegraph system was also available for summoning such aids as then existed for the preservation of life from ship- wreck. Accounts of wrecks at the begin- ning of what may be called the Life-boat era all tend to show that the system of coast telegraphy then in existence played an important part in most notable Life- boat and other rescues from shipwreck.

With the long peace the need for in- formation on the part of the Government as to the movements of its own or other ships became less urgent, though the coast system of signals maintained a precarious existence for many years to assist the Coastguard in protecting the revenue.

As smuggling decreased, the Coastguard- men were reduced in number, and the chain of signallers became broken into gaps which widened year by year. The final blow was given by railways and elec- tricity, and the old line of semaphores between Portsmouth and the Admiralty, and elsewhere, and from headland to headland, finally disappeared. But while the Government, by the help of modern invention, enormously increased its facili- ties of communication with the great dock- yards and arsenals, it, conceiving itself to- be in no way concerned (we suppose) with the safety of merchant ships or saving life, failed to supply a substitute for the old semaphore system along the coast line; and year by year the evil has increased from the reduction of the Coastguard, and the consequent lengthening of the interval on lines of coasts in -which watch has ceased to be kept. The result is that during the last twenty-five years, and up to the present time, there has been greater difficulty in communicating along the coast, and summoning aid to distressed vessels at all out-of-the-way parts of the coast, than existed at the end of the last century.

The First Lord of the Admiralty, or the President of the Board of Trade, can converse at leisure with Plymouth, Deal, Leith, or Liverpool, but the Eddystone has no means of letting the authorities at Plymouth know that a ship is slowly foundering before the eyes of the keepers, though the two points are in sight of each other. The light-keepers at the Bishop have no means of telling the people at St. Mary's that a ship full of passengers is slowly but surely tearing to pieces on the Retarrier reef: and the hun- dreds of vessels which yearly are in deadly peril on the Goodwins, the Kentish Knock, the Norfolk Sands, and elsewhere, have no means of summoning prompt aid from the land, though they are only a few miles distant from it.

In out-of-the-way parts of the coast the evil is far greater, and for hundreds of miles there is no means by which a Coast- guardman or beachman can send intel- ligence to life-saving stations or harbours, where assistance could be procured.

The number of vessels of which infor- mation reaches the NATIONAL LIFE-BOAT INSTITUTION, which might have been saved had there been any means by which those who first observed the distressed vessel could have signalled for aid, is consider- able ; the number of those which do not come under the cognisance of this Society must necessarily be far greater; while in those instances where life has been saved, in the majority of cases the rescued per- sons have undergone great misery from long hours of exposure, which would cer- tainly have been obviated had any system for signalling along the coast existed. It is true that in the cases of the Goodwin and Norfolk Sands, recently, the light- ships have been directed to fire guns and rockets when they see a vessel in distress, which signals are so understood' by the beachmen when they see or hear them; but besides the radical defect that such general warnings convey no intelligence as to whether the vessel is in such deadly peril that she has a moral right to call on all good men to risk their lives to save her crew, or simply (as is just as often the case) has dragged her anchors into shallower water, or is leaking a little more than usual, there is also the fact that guns can never be counted on for being heard in a gale of wind: they give no suflicient information as to the position of the wreck or the nature of the help re- quired. While the rockets, good in them- selves as a danger signal, have become utterly unreliable, viewed as signals for men to risk their lives, in consequence of their being permitted to be used by all sorts of persons for all sorts of purposes.

The Northfleet displays any number of rockets, in the hope that aid from Life- boat stations, Coastguard stations, and ships which surround her on all sides, will promptly be sent. Her despairing efforts are viewed from all sides with in- difference, as conveying no precise mean- ing, and the few saved oat of the hundreds on board owe their escape to the approach of a cutter, which comes to offer a pilot! The Schiller, for many hours rolling to and fro on the reef, in the long Atlantic swell, as the risks bore their way through her bottom, fires both rockets and guns; the former are obscured by the fog, and the boom of the latter passes unheeded by the listeners, as an every-day and un- meaning occurrence. While the light- keepers, who in the morning behold the poor people clinging to the remnants of their wreck, have no means of calling aid which, in full readiness to act, is close at hand, could they but be warned.

A hundred minor cases of similar im- port, which do not happen to draw public attention, occur; and then comes another great scandal, and the word Deutschland becomes another smirch on our national system of maritime supervision.

Had a telegraph cable been laid between the lightship and the shore, help, both by steam and Life-boat, could have been sent to the Deutschland by noon of the day of the wreck, and, failing the telegraph, a proper system of ordinary signalling would have brought aid long before the time when the loss of life began.

At the official investigation of the cir- cumstances attending the wrecks of the FEBRUARY 1, 1876.] THE LIFE-BOAT.

439 Schiller and Deutschland, attention was called in various ways to this question, of putting outlying stations in telegraphic communication with the mainland. On the former occasion, the objections urged by the representatives of the Government were the mechanical difficulties; on the other occasion we were simply informed that difficulties did exist which had, up to the present time, been found insu- perable.

"We do not know what these obstacles are; but it may fairly be conceded that those whose duty it has been to enter'into the details of any general scheme may have detected/scientific and other objec- tions not generally known. But the three objections commonly advanced—the un- desirableness of introducing into light- houses and ships anything to distract the attention of the light-keepers; the danger to be apprehended from lightning, from the presence of electric machinery; and the danger to the electric cable from the action of the waves at such exposed posi- tions, are manifestly not of sufficient im- portance to justify their being advanced as serious obstacles, when once the Go- vernment or the public have become con- vinced that electric telegraphs in such positions are necessary.

There can be no doubt that sooner or later, if lightships and lighthouses are found to be hopelessly unsuitable for telegraph stations, special vessels and special houses, placed as near as possible to the said lightships and houses, for the sole purposes of forming telegraph and signal stations, must be established.

Whether this necessity will arise on the part of the Government from the exi- gencies of a maritime war, or whether such an event will be so long postponed that the need will be previously recog- nised by the public and shipowners as an essential element in the conditions of ma- ritime trade and public safety, remains to be proved. The expense, and the sort of doubt as to who are the persons respon- sible for the performance of the under- taking, may, as we suppose, prolong the time for the carrying out of such a project some year or two more; but we cannot see why proper day and night signals, by flags, semaphores, and various pyrotechnic lights, should not be at once arranged for; and we think that every headland known to be in a position to transmit in- telligence of disasters on the coasts and off it, together with certain lightships, should be so provided, together with an organised staff of competent signalmen and watchers.

As for the question of a night danger- signal to be exhibited by vessels in dis- tress, we sincerely trust that the few words of the captain of the steam-tug Liverpool, relative to his reasons for not taking his vessel out to the wreck of the Deutschland—in which he points out that the mere fact of rockets being thrown up by no means proves that a vessel was in peril—have not been altogether lost sight of either by the Government or the public.

Few points are more important in our arrangements for adding to the security of the mariner than this of the night distress- signal. The present arrangement has certainly not yet given general confidence.

When the rocket-gun and flare-up were reserved by Board of Trade Regulations, sanctioned by Act of Parliament, for the occasion of a ship being in deadly peril, it was indispensable for the security of those who henceforward had to be guided by these signals that the provisions of the regulations should be carried out rigor- ously. They have not been so carried out, and the universal complaint of beach- men, fishermen, and life-boatmen, concur- red in, we believe, by the Coastguard, is that.there is as great doubt at the present moment whether certain signals mean that a ship is in great danger, or that she simply wishes to communicate for pur- poses of convenience, as there ever was.

This is a most unfortunate fact. In moderate gales, that is, in ordinary bad weather, the effect of this state of feel- ing is that numerous Life-boats, sal- vage-boats, and steam-tugs go out on different parts of the coast, when not really required, because they may be wanted, though the case does seem doubtful: but putting aside as compara- tively unimportant the waste of money involved in such fruitless expeditions, every boatman who has so gone off to no purpose returns with an additional seed of distrnstfulness of "danger-signals" im- planted in his mind, which seed inevitably bears fruit when the moderate gale be- comes a hurricane, and the ordinary south- wester, with its warm drizzling showers, has given place to the bitter north-easter, hail and snow. Such experiences un-doubtedly did bear fruit when the Deutsch- land was wrecked, and do so constantly in scores of wrecks, whose crews endure long nights of waiting in Tain for succour, till they perish one by one, and of whom no one survives to tell us the story.

The beachmen, the fishermen, and the Coastguard, who man our Life-boats and other boats, and throughout the greater part of our coasts are rarely known to fail when it is absolutely certain that the crew of a wreck is in real peril, are the last men to whom to impute a shadow of blame for this. The fact in itself is not creditable to a great maritime state; and the certainty that such a state of things must produce again and again similar disaster, indeed is producing them in different shapes and degrees day after day at the present time, is neither comforting, we should suppose, to a British public smarting un- der the pain and discredit of the notable disasters at sea of recent years, nor re- assuring to those foreign states whose ships frequent British ports, and whose subjects are supposed to have suffered from British maladministration of mari- time affairs.

While the foregoing has been preparing for the press, two cases have occurred which, are apt types of hundreds of others on the records of this Institution, and which will give greater force to our re- marks.

The first case is that of the wreck of a foreign barque on the Shipwash, during the night of the 6th of January. The Shipwash is a bank 8 miles from the land, the nearest large port to it being Harwich, from which its southern end is distant 10 miles. This wreck was dis- covered by several smacks soon after 7 in the morning of the 7th of January. The news was in possession of the Coastguard and others at Walton, Harwich, and Aid- borough before 10 A.M. that day, but the crew were not taken off the wreck till after daylight on the following morning— after they had been more than twenty-four hours exposed to all the horrors of a piti- less easterly gale, and the momentary ex- pectation of being either swept off the wreck by the sea, or the vessel itself breaking up beneath their feet.

So ill adapted is our system of sending information along the coast, however great the emergency, that the news did not reach Ramsgate till the morning of the 8th, and the Ramsgate Steam-tug and Life-boat actually started on a most gallant, but unnecessary expedition . to rescue the crew of the wreck, at the time they were being taken off by the tug from Harwich ! The Ramsgate men were thus needlessly exposed for fourteen hours in a storm, with the cold so intense that the salt water froze as it fell in showers over the bows of the Life-boat.

It is also significant, that the Aldborough Life-boat's crew declined to launch their boat (they being 15 miles from the wreck), mainly-because there were no sure grounds for concluding that the crew were still on board it; information which could.

| certainly have been conveyed by the Ship- j wash Lightship, had it had an electric- wire communication with the shore; or, failing that, by properly-arranged " dis- tant signals " visible to the eye.

At the same time, it is manifest that had the information been telegraphed ! from the point which it actually did reach ! so early as 10 A.M., either to the Admir-alty or the Board of Trade, or any other public department, assistance could with ease have been sent to the wreck by orders from London, not on the forenoon the day after the wreck, but before noon the day of the wreck.

Had this vessel carried a lot of help- less passengers, instead of nine hardy sea- men, the story of the Deutschland would inevitably have been repeated, and with a far greater national discredit.

The other recent case to which we invite attention is that of the steamer Vesper, of Hartlepool, lost on the Kish Bank, 4 miles south of the Kish Lightship, on the morning of the 13th January. The weather is reported as a "fresh breeze, with a heavy swell." The crew of this wreck, which struck the bank at 5 A.M., though, only 4 miles from the light- ship (which saw them), 7 miles from Kingstown, and less than 6 from the Coastguard station at Dalkey, received neither assistance nor attempted assistance, nor did the lightship pass the news on to the shore until 10 A.M., when a boatman at Kingstown saw masts sticking out of the water on the Kish Bank, with signals of distress flying from them. Promptly enough then the Life-boat was launched, and, towed by H.M.'s steam tender Amelia, proceeded to the wreck, only to find, how- ever, that on the steamer sinking, the crew had taken to their own boats, and being unburdened with passengers, and the weather being moderate, all escaped to the land.

What a reproach to our system, that the lightship should have had no means of signalling for assistance when it was first wanted, and no means afterwards of hoisting the signal that the lives were saved! Certainly, if it had been blowing any- thing like a gale, the whole of the crew of the Vesper would have perished for the want of the lightship having proper means of communication.

It is manifest that a scheme for con- necting all important points of observa- tion by electric telegraph, with what may be termed " assistance depots/.' could not be completed without considerable delay, great consideration, and a vast outlay.

"We may, in fact, conclude that this part of the work, even after the necessity has been fully recognised, and the project actually entered on, will be piecemeal and slow. A few cables here and there, to well-known and obvious danger-points— oftentimes the important point in deter- , mining on the station being its suitability for the ordinary necessities of commerce, irrespective of life and death cases—this must be the beginning. Afterwards, as time and chance develop other necessities, more cables will be laid. Again, the question, of money will have an import- ant influence in delaying, because only a certain sum would probably be allowed year by year. But the universal use of " distant signals," to be seen by the eye by day or night, might and ought to be introduced by the Government forthwith. There is no reason, for in- stance, why the lightships on the Kish Bank and the Shipwash, should not long ago have been furnished with the means of unmistakably signalling to the nearest point of land: such signals as " wreck on shore," " crew in imminent peril," or " crew from wreck rescued;" and no rea- son why a permanent signal station at the nearest points of land respectively should not have been established; the duty of the signalmen thereat being to watch the lightship, and who should have full instructions as to what to do with their information when they get it! This practical and cheap reform could be effected in a few weeks, with an outlay which would be inappreciable compared with the value of the ships and cargoes yearly saved from destruction, indepen- dently of the question of life-saving alto- gether.

But such a labour could of course only be undertaken by the State, and no pri- vate society, or commercial body, or na- tional institution could by any means interfere with a work which, both on ac- count of the utilisation of the means already existing, and of the indispensable control it would be necessary to hold over numerous individuals on all parts of the coast, must of necessity be initiated, car- ried out, and kept under due supervision by the Government.