This short story was taken from our archives. It first appeared in the July 1931 issue of The Bermudian. It appears here exactly as it did originally.
This photograph shows the Gibbs Hill Light and its attendant signal mast as people seldom see them.
The arrivals and departures of all ships are invariably signalled from here, but in these days, with the Bermuda and the Duchess gliding through Two Rock Passage almost as soon as there is light enough to see, most of the flags are hauled down before residents and visitors are stirring.
Still, to those who are fortunate enough to be up and abroad at the time, the soaring white spire of the light, resplendent in the level rays of the just-risen sun, and the mast with its multi-coloured flags tugging at their halyards in a stiff southwest breeze, present an arresting and enchanting spectacle.
For those who hold the key the flags tell many stories. They tell not only of the class of vessels, whether steam or sail, but also of their nationality, their owners, whence they hail, and their positions about the is. lands. For instance, at the peak the white flag with the diagonal red cross signifies a mail steamer from
New York. Immediately below, the familiar white F of the House of Furness indicates that she belongs to Fur-ness Withy and Company. On the yard
arm halyards further details are given. The signals flying from the port yard, immediately below and including the upper black ball, are associated with the upper two flags on the main halyard. The black ball stands for steamer.
Should the ship be a sailing vessel a wooden cross would be suspended instead. The long white pennant with the red tip fixes her nationality as British and below, the red flag with the yellow cross shows that she is at present in Murray’s Anchorage. All the essential information is therefore given. The message runs, A Furness Withy steamer with mails from New York has been sighted, and is now in Murray’s Anchorage.”
From the starboard yard flys another flag, blue with a diagonal white cross, showing that the Duchess of York, whose chequered house flag appears at the main halyard just below the Bermuda’s, has entered Hamilton Harbour. Of course all this is hardly news. The Bermuda’s coming is known long before the flags are hoisted atop Gibbs Hill. But before the advent of the cable and radio, when only by means of visual signals could the approach of vessels be made generally known, the mast played a large part in the everyday life of the colony. It was, then, like a newspaper, the disseminator of important. even vital, information. It was a sort of communal bulletin, to which the people looked for the first word of the safe return of husbands and sons, of the successful culmination of ventures, of the arrival of mails and news from abroad.
It was, in consequence a focus of the general attention. Every house had a spyglass for reading the signals, as well as a chart to be consulted for their meaning. The Bermudians of those days kept an eye on Gibbs Hill as they kept one aloft during the hurricane season. Regular schedules and modern methods of communications have done away with all that, eliminating, as scientific progress has so often done elsewhere, much that gave colour and flavour to life. The flags continue to fly, but they go unheeded.
There is perhaps something a little pathetic in that brave display, something of the plight of the prima donna whose superseded powers can no
longer attract the public. It has been the fate of the flags to be now of interest only to the cab drivers who learn from them, if a ship is late, when it is time to line up at the docks. Yet occasions still arise when there is real work for the mast to do. This happens when the course of a ship not equipped with wireless brings her within sight of the South Shore. Then the flags speak tersely and cryptically. They ask and answer questions. They assure her that she will be reported to her owners and they bid her God-speed.
Taken together the light and the signal mast tell pretty much the whole story of Bermuda. They are the visible and outward signs of that close attachment between the life of the colony and the sea, which, until recent years, has been the outstanding factor in its history. The light, of course, is still highly useful, and probably always will be.
But the mast is hardly more than an interesting survival of the past. It fits in with an altogether different order of things. Those flags which fly there now whenever a vessel is entering the harbour have meanings which no chart of the International Code will help to decipher. They speak of other and seemingly more spacious days, days of the privateers and the blockade runners, days when there were tall Bermudian ships riding in Port Royal beneath Gibbs Hill.
