The phenomenal commercial expansion of the Dominion of Canada, which has brought about an amazing development in the maritime traffic with that country on both its seaboards, naturally has been responsible for the display of striking activity in the provision of aids to navigation. Both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines bristle with dangers of a most terrible nature; the innumerable islands and precipitous flanks of rock recall the wild ruggedness of the western coast of Scotland or the forbidding Atlantic shoreline of France and Spain.
When the ships of Britain first traded with Canadian shores, shipwrecks and ocean tragedies were numerous; there is no escape for a ship which is caught on those pitiless coasts. The early settlers, therefore, did not hesitate to provide ways and means of guiding navigators to safety. Their first lights were primitive, comprising bonfires fed with wood, of which ample supplies abounded, pitched on prominent headlands; and these flickering rays, when not obscured by smoke and fog, served to speed the ship safely on her way.
The British pioneers, naturally, did not hesitate to improve upon these uncertain crude methods of warning, in course of time, by the erection of more substantial lights. These for the most part comprised timber-frame dwellings, used by the family entrusted with the maintenance of the light, from the roof of which a wooden tower extended, similar in design to the buildings favoured for a similar purpose in the United States. Many lights of this class are still doing faithful service to-day, and although one might anticipate the destruction of such a beacon from fire, yet, owing to the unremitting care displayed by the families associated with the upkeep thereof, this awful fiend has not been responsible for the temporary extinction of many lights in the country’s history.
_Photo by permission of Lieut.-Col. W. P. Anderson._
One of the finest and most powerful beacons in the world. It is filled with the hyperradiant apparatus, and the ray is of 1,100,000 candle-power.]
One of the oldest, if not the first light to be established, was that on Sambro Island, to indicate the entrance into Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia. This signpost of the sea was set up in 1758, and fulfilled its purpose for 148 years, when it was reconstructed and fitted with the most up-to-date appliances. The white flash now bursts forth, at an elevation of 140 feet above mean high-water, from the top of a white octagonal stone and concrete tower, and is visible from a distance of seventeen miles. When it is blotted out by fog, a powerful signal is given once every ten minutes by a cotton-powder charge. Mariners, however, are cautioned against attempting to make Sambro in fog, as the shore is wild and cruel. This explosive signal is emitted rather to communicate a timely warning to vessels which have lost their way.