Facing the Sea: Lightkeepers and Their Families By Harold Chubbs and Wade Kearley Foreword by Lorne Humphries Genre: History: General Imprint: Flanker Press Format: Hardcover, 132 pages, colour photos and illustrations Pub Date: October 2013 Price: $34.95 ISBN-10: 1-77117-301-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-77117-301-8 Shipping Weight: 0.9 kg
About this Book In Facing the Sea, authors Harold Chubbs and Wade Kearley have captured an important era in the maritime history of Newfoundland and Labrador. These tales of rescue and tragedy, of love lost and redeemed, describe first-hand what life was like for lightkeepers and their families in twenty-five light stations along the exposed and often inhospitable coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Most of these stories are told here for the first time in print, and each story is rich with new details and insights from the perspective of these remarkable men and women. Order Now!
The photo at the left shows the lamp, lens, mercury bath bearing, and winding apparatus which was installed on the Pachena Point lighthouse in February 1908. The lens is a 1st order Fresnel lens made by Chance Brothers of Birmingham England – one of the largest sizes possible, and it all sits on a wooden tower!
The glass lens, 3 m tall, 2.5 m wide and weighing 400 kg was brought by boat around Cape Horn. The 1000-watt bulb in use now puts out four million candlepower and is visible from Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. (reference)
The Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) carries lighthouse keepers and their supplies (groceries, mail, household goods, etc) usually by ship or helicopter. This story describes the inner workings of the Canadian Coast Guard light icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier as told by my friend Abe Van Oeveren. I have been on several ships and they are indeed a complicated piece of machinery run by very competent men and women.
Abe’s comments to me about the story when I asked permission to reprint:
The account is based on material gathered on several trips blended together to make a story that flows end to end. To make it readable I avoided talking about too much crappy weather which keeps everybody on board the ship unable to fly up to Van, Naden or Barry, or how the ship’s crew’s collective mood changes as the 28 day typical patrol proceeds. Continue reading Reprint – A Sailor’s Journal→
A friend, Brian Waddington (aka Gups-Y-Bees) and I, he an ex-lighthouse keeper from Ivory Island many years ago, have a common friend on my old lighthouse at McInnes Island.
The friend is Colin Toner and he has been on McInnes for a few years, but the following experience as related below and the same on Brian’s website butterfliesdragonspeace (Part 1 and Part 2) was a different day in the life of a lighthouse keeper!
Colin Toner looking out the kitchen window I see my dog lounging in the sun then it occurs to me this one is grey and mine is inside – beautiful grey wolf swam all the way here to visit .
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Light-house keeping is a fine career if you are the light-house keeper type. Rarely boring, always useful, fits right into Buddhist beliefs about what makes a proper job and you just never know who is going to show up for coffee and company.
Something Even Better than working on a lighthouse?
In an email with an ex British Columbia (BC) lighthouse keeper he mentioned that he was going to work in Alberta, Canada as a Fire Tower Lookout!
What does that have to do with lighthouses?
A lot from many people’s perspective! Both jobs have the isolation and romance that a lot of people seek in a job. When I was younger I know it was always in the back of my mind.
Again the same questions pop up – Wouldn’t it be lonely? What about wild animals? What happens if you hurt yourself? These and many more questions are asked, but to the adventurous, it is part of the adventure. Anyways, take a look at the photo at the top – that is an Alberta lookout tower but not as you or I probably imagined it – sitting on the ground!
One of the things a lightkeeper notices on the shoreline are the different changes, be they strange fishing floats, bloated dead fish, defeathered seabirds, massed clumps of seaweed or the profligate carcasses of the By-the-wind-sailor.
I had seen many beaches littered with the pale blue bodies of the By-the-wind-sailor and thinking they were the nefarious Portuguese Man o’ War I hesitated to examine them, fearful of the imagined sting I would receive. It was not until I read the article yesterday on the By-the-wind-sailor from the Monterey Bay Aquarium that I realized that I was in error in my knowledge. Continue reading By-the-Wind-Sailor→
Photo credit: Dana Le via Flickr http://bit.ly/14zepJ9
I wrote an article entitled I Love Nightshift awhile ago. It is true, and now I know why I felt so healthy working on the lighthouse – lack of electric lights! It may not be for all people, but it did work for me. Working the night shift was done mostly in the dark as we had to watch for fog, visibility markers, lights from ships, flares, sea conditions, clouds – all only visible in the dark without electric lights.
Humans’ circadian clocks become skewed when they are exposed to electric lights but revert to a schedule more in tune with the sun when they go camping.
By Kate Yandell | August 6, 2013
Long-term exposure to electric lighting has fundamentally altered humans’ circadian rhythms, according to a study published in Current Biologylast week (August 1). But a week camping away from electric lights swiftly reset eight study participants’ circadian clocks.
“What’s remarkable is how, when we’re exposed to natural sunlight, our clocks perfectly become in sync in less than a week to the solar day,” coauthor Kenneth Wright, a University of Colorado Boulder integrative physiologist, said in a press release. Read more . . .
[private] For the first week of the study, participants went about their ordinary routines at home. Next, they all went camping in the Rocky Mountains for a week without flashlights or electronics.
Throughout the study, the participants wore wrist monitors that logged light intensity, time of day, and activity. At the end of each week, the researchers measured the participants’ melatonin levels, which indicate circadian cycle status.
While going about their ordinary routine, the participants went to sleep at 12:30 a.m. on average, experiencing on onset of melatonin about 2 hours prior. In the wilderness, the participants’ circadian clocks were advanced by 2 hours; they experienced an earlier onset of melatonin, coinciding with sunset, and went to sleep sooner.
The experiment also showed that a week in the wilderness reduced the differences among the participants’ daily rhythms, with the schedules of early birds and night owls converging.[/private]
A weeklong camping trip can help reset a person’s internal biological clock, so that it will be easier to wake up in the morning and feel more alert, a new study suggests.
After study participants spent more time exposed to natural light and less time in artificial lighting, researchers found their bedtimes and wake-up times shifted, both moving up to two hours earlier.
“After camping, the night owls in the group showed the greatest shifts in the timing of their internal clocks,” said study researcher Kenneth P. Wright, Jr., an associate professor of physiology at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Night owls looked more similar to earlier morning types,” Wright said. In other words, night owls started keeping an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule, and they said they felt more alert in the morning.
This study was the first to quantify the impact of our modern lifestyle — of spending more time indoors in artificial light and less time outdoors in natural light — on human’s internal biological clocks, or circadian rhythms, the researchers said.
The findings are published online today (Aug. 1) in the journal Current Biology.
Increasing natural light
In the study, researchers looked at eight adults with an average age of 30 who did not have any sleep problems. Participants spent one week living their usual schedules of working, attending school, socializing, exercising, sleeping and waking, and they wore a wristwatchlike device that measured their light exposure. [Best Camping Spots in America’s Backyard]
Then they spent a week camping in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains in July. In the great outdoors, participants were exposed to sunlight and a campfire’s glow, but were not allowed to use any artificial light — meaning no computers, flashlights or cellphones.
Before the camping trip and after it ended, researchers measured levels of melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep and wakefulness, as a marker for each participant’s individual biological clock.
During the week of camping, the participants were exposed to four times more natural light, on average, compared with when they lived their normal lives, Wright said.
More natural light caused the participants’ internal clocks to become perfectly in sync with nature’s light and dark cycle, or the timing of sunrise and sunset, he pointed out.
“If people want to be more alert in the morning, they need to increase their exposure to natural lighting during the day, and decrease their exposure to electrical lighting in the evening,” Wright said.
But you don’t have to pitch a tent, unroll a sleeping bag and go camping to reap these benefits.
Wright suggested making an effort to get more natural light in the morning or at lunch by taking a walk and raising shades or blinds at home and at work. He also recommended dimming lights and reducing the intensity of artificial lights on computers, TVs, and other electronic devices an hour before bedtime.
“A flip of a light switch can be pretty powerful,” Wright said, adding that “light can be very arousing and alerting to the brain.”
Resetting internal clocks
“This study goes a considerable way toward showing the practical impact of light exposure on human biological clocks in the real world,” said Dr. Andrew Lim, a sleep neurologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, who was not involved in the research.
Lim said the findings reveal how an artificial lighting environment — with insufficient light during the day and excessive light after sunset — can play an important role in causing people to fall asleep later and wake-up later. It leads to a misalignment between sleep-wake cycles and an individual’s internal biological clock.
Lim said that it’s difficult to attribute all of the observed effects in the study to differences in light exposure alone, because campers also had different activity levels and social schedules than they would at home.
He also mentioned that it’s unclear whether these results would hold true in other latitudes, during other seasons besides summer, and in different age groups.
(ISNS) — Throughout most of human history, humans went to bed shortly after the sun went down and woke up in the morning as it rose. There were candles and later oil lamps, but the light was not very bright so people still went to bed early.
Then came Thomas Edison and the incandescent light bulb and everything changed, including our sleeping habits. So, if you have problems getting to sleep at night or are a miserable person to be around in the morning, blame him.
Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder found that if you live by the sun’s schedule, you are more likely to go to bed at least an hour earlier, wake up an hour earlier, and be less groggy, because your internal clock and external reality are more in sync. The sun adjusts your clock to what may be its natural state, undoing the influence of light bulbs.
The work is published in the current issue of the journal Current Biology.
The disconnect between the outside environment and sleep is one reason why even native Alaskans have problems sleeping in the almost endless days of the Arctic summers, and get depressed during the long nights of winters.
The subjects in the Colorado study lived more normal lives.
“We weren’t studying people who had sleep difficulties,” said Kenneth Wright, an integrative psychologist at Boulder. “The amount of sleep they got did not change. What changed was the timing of their sleep and the timing of their [internal] clock relative to when they slept.”
The researchers took eight adults, average age around 30, and followed them around the normal course of their lives for a week. The subjects spent most of their time indoors while working, studying, eating, and sleeping. Most of the light they encountered was artificial. Then, they sent the same people out camping.
Sleep and light were measured daily and the hormone melatonin every hour across 24 hours, once after the week of living at home, going to work, school, and then after a week of camping.
Melatonin is the “hormone of darkness,” said Namni Goel, a psychologist and sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Scientists use the hormone to measure photoperiods, or the physiological response that organisms have to cycles of daylight and darkness.
“It rises at night naturally, and falls during the day, suppressed by light,” said Goel.
Melatonin also drops the body’s core temperature, making it easier to sleep. People often take melatonin pills to help them fall asleep, she said.
After the week’s study indoors, the Colorado subjects went camping in the Rockies. Instead of artificial lighting, they had only sunshine during the day and campfires at night. Wright estimates the light from the sun was four times as intense as what they experienced indoors. The nature of the light also changed during the day. Think of the bright white light of midday and the golden glow that often precedes sunset.
After their week of camping, researchers measured the subjects’ melatonin levels again.
The researchers found that the onset of melatonin shifted two hours earlier, and the subjects’ actual sleep shifted more than an hour earlier. Their bodies were recalibrating themselves, Wright explained.
When they woke in the morning in their normal lives, the melatonin and the external time were in conflict. They were waking up, but the melatonin in their bodies was telling them they should still be asleep. That might account for their still feeling sleepy, Wright said.
When they were out in the outdoors, the melatonin levels and the sun cycle were more aligned–the levels went down as the sun rose and before they woke up. They were subject to more light — sunlight — for the majority of the day.
The relationship between light and sleep and how much sleep a person needs has been the subject of several classic experiments.
Some involving putting subjects in deep, totally dark caves for weeks at a time have discovered that the 24-hour-day is almost exactly right for our bodies. The average amount of time our bodies consider a day comes to 24.3 hours, Goel said.
Goel and other Colorado scientists agree that the experiment was small, with only eight subjects, which limits what can be concluded. Nonetheless, the findings justify more experiments like it.
And more camping.
Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. [/private]
I published a report January 04, 2012 on the building of McInnes Island lighthouse in 1953 based on the adventures of Ken Stewart who was part of the construction crew. I updated that post later with more information in the form of a PDF file.
1977
When I arrived with my family in the winter of 1977 the first thing we did was explore the island. Pictured left is a small log cabin buried back in the woods on the trail to the SW tip of the island.
Now let’s skip ahead to December 09, 2012 when I received an email from Mrs. K. Marshall with another photo of the same cabin taken about twenty-two (22) years earlier! What a delight to see what she had written on who built the cabin and also for her to see my photo taken so many years later.
In her email she said:
My grandfather James “Jimmie” Smith was a junior lighthouse keeper on McInnes for a few years in the late 1950s. He was there with my grandmother Mildred “Millie”, and their 2 daughters who were teenagers at the time, my mother Carol and her sister Sharon.
These photos are of a driftwood log cabin that my Mom and her sister built on the island. I’ve been scanning old family photos this past week and have quite a few from the lighthouses.
I’d be really curious to know if the cabin was still standing while you were stationed there.
Well, as I told her the cabin was there in the winter of 1977, but by the summer of 1978 we had burnt it down as it was very unsafe for anybody to venture inside and could not be repaired. An email from her Mom, the Carol mentioned above, says:
Pool area – labelled
[To build] the cabin I pulled and carried the logs from just below the cabin from the beach. The shakes I cut those with a hand saw to length. Split them with Mom’s best butcher knife and a hammer on the back of the knife….that didn’t go over at all well…believe me.
McInnes island – no labels
That end of the island where the cabin was. No one had trails there at all. Sharon and I started to explore that area. Dad, Bruce and Tony when they realized where we where disappearing to, they cut the logs of the trail so the adults could get into that area.
The swimming pool was past the
The swimming pool
cabin. You went up the hill and there was the natural crater in the rock. Dad and Mom used a washing soda to clean it all. Then the guys had a pump and hoses. They pumped new sea water up into the basin. Dad made up a bag of concrete to sort of plug one end of the crater. We just lived in that area all good days. Lots of nights we spent in the cabin. Continue reading McInnes Island Lighthouse – a Tale from the 1950s→
This is a past and very notable lifesaving rescue by two BC lightkeepers, Lynn Hauer and assistant lightkeeper Wolfgang Luebke who were at Chatham Point lighthouse at the time.
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Chatham point lighthouse - photo from Margaret Lutz
We sleep with the radios always on, and ‘with one ear open’.
At 3 AM on April 30, 2012 I was awakened by the unmistakeable sound of a Mayday distress signal. Being able to copy both sides of the communication, I knew it was within our response area. I sprang out of bed. Comox Coast Guard Radio was responding to the call from a very concerned woman, “We don’t have a lifeboat; we are putting our life jackets on now. We are bailing but it isn’t helping!!”
I knew we could be there in 10 to 20 minutes; we were tasked by Rescue Coordination Center. Assistant lightkeeper Wolfgang Luebke and I responded in our 18 foot aluminum station boat. It was pitch black out, and raining. We made our way by compass bearing, across Johnstone Strait into Burgess Passage.
Arriving on scene, we found a man and woman frantically bailing water with ice cream pails! Their bilge pump was inoperative. Their efforts were futile. Their ‘kicker’ motor was under water, and the large outboard was next. Water was pouring in around the re-boarding gate and inches from flooding completely over the transom, which would have seen them go down in minutes. We began pumping the water out of their vessel, with the Honda pump that is always stored under the seat of our station boat. We were all very relieved to see the flood water level slowly subsiding.
Cape Palmerston
The Cape Palmerston (CG SAR vessel) arrived on scene approximately 40 minutes after us. We saved an $80K boat from going to the bottom, and we surely saved a man and his wife from drowning; they would have been in that frigid water with only PFDs, for more than a half hour, had two keepers from Chatham Point Light not been there…we wouldn’t have been there if not for your SEEING THE LIGHT!
Lynn Hauer
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This letter was from from Lynn Hauer, a lightkeeper at Chatham Point and it was addressed to Canadian senator Nancy Greene, hence the reference to Seeing the Light. Senator Greene and her friends were very important in fighting to keep BC lighthouses manned. If unmanned, these people would probably have died. Many instances happen daily where a BC lightkeeper helps a mariner. Many of them you will never read about as they go into station reports and are lost in the central Coast Guard office paperwork – well, not actually lost, just suppressed.
The only way for the lightkeepers to get attention is to report their rescues to the Press (forbidden) or have it written up by myself, or other people outside the arm of Coast Guard censorship.
As Lynn said in a preface to the email she passed around to the lighthouse keepers:
It is important to keep the Senators up to speed of things that are going on. They support lightkeepers (LKs), we should keep them in the loop. They and the public recognize and care about what LKs do.
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The following emails show how the email was received by Senator Greene.
Dear Lynn,
First, thank you for your quick action! You are so right.
Thanks also for passing this on to me. I will circulate it as best I can.
All the best!
Nancy
Thank you so much Nancy. Your recognition means very much to Wolfgang and I. The thank you that we received from the couple that night, we extend to you.
As I stated in my post The Lighthouse as a Sovereignty Symbol, put a lighthouse on your disputed territory and it is yours, or something to that effect. Now here is another ongoing dispute coming to light again – Canada vs USA. According to my theory above, Canada wins! – retlkpr
Posted: Dec 23, 2012 7:37 PM AT Last Updated: Dec 24, 2012 12:38 PM AT
The Canadian flag flutters in the breeze by the lighthouse at Machias Seal Island. (Photograph by: Fred J. Field-The Canadian Press)
A tiny island between New Brunswick and Maine is the subject of renewed calls from both sides of the border to settle a territorial dispute once and for all.
Machias Seal Island is a flat, treeless piece of rock located about 19 kilometres southwest of Grand Manan Island and east of Maine at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy.
The island is a sanctuary for many kinds of seabirds including the Atlantic Puffin and draws visitors from around the world to observe them in the summer. more . . .
[private]
There are no permanent human residents on the island, just pairs of lightkeepers who spend 28 days at a time maintaining a lighthouse operated by the Canadian Coast Guard.
The original lighthouse was built by the British in 1832, and a lighthouse has been maintained there ever since.
So why would anyone even care which country gets title to Machias Seal Island?
‘Wouldn’t we feel silly?’ The answer lies in the 720 square kilometres of water around the island in what’s called a grey zone. Lobster fishermen from both Canada and the U.S. fish these waters.
“The fishing community on Grand Manan is permitted to fish there on an open-end basis and it’s our way of laying our claim to this water that is part of the Machias Seal Island dispute,” said MP John Williamson, who represents the riding of New Brunswick-Southwest.
Williamson said the island is considered to be in his riding.
‘I think our claim is sound and is legitimate.’ —MPJohn Williamson “I think our claim is sound and is legitimate, but at the end of the day it’s going to come down to the minister in this country and the administration in Washington to settle it,” he said. “I think it is in the interests of both of our countries to do that.”
That feeling is echoed by Stephen Kelly, a professor at the Center for Canadian Studies at Duke University and a retired American diplomat who has served in Canada.
“It just strikes me if we have this opportunity to remove a potential irritant going forward, why don’t we take it?” Kelly said in an interview from his office in Durham, N.C.
Kelly put his thoughts in a commentary for The New York Times last month, which he said he was prompted to write after seeing territorial disputes that have erupted between Japan and China over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
He said while the situation between Canada and the United States is much different, land disputes are better settled.
“What if some valuable resource is discovered in the grey zone around Machias Seal Island? What if some other contingency that we can’t imagine now of strategic importance comes along?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t we feel silly that we didn’t take the opportunity to resolve this when the stakes were relatively low.”
Irrelevant for lightkeeper
For Ralph Eldridge, a Canadian who has been a lightkeeper on the island for the last 16 years, the question of who owns Machias Seal Island is a “non-issue,” something that is never a question from the visitors who travel to the island each summer.
And Eldridge said he doesn’t have to produce his passport to go there.
“But neither does someone from the United States or China or Japan or Spain have to when they come to the island,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade said ownership of the island and surrounding waters is clear as far as Canada is concerned: they are Canadian.
“Canada’s sovereignty over Machias Seal Island and sovereign jurisdiction over the 210 square nautical mile surrounding waters is strongly founded in international law,” Barbara Harvey said in a statement.
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[private]
In the Media Op-Ed: Canada and US dispute ownership of small rocky island Digital Journal By Ken Hanly Dec 25, 2012 in World
Tourist comes to Machias Seal Island during the summer to see birds such as the Atlantic Puffin.
Machias Seal Island is a tiny rock island 16 kilometres from the coast of the US state of Maine and 19 kilometers south of Grand Manan Island just off the coast of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The island is claimed by both Canada and the US.
Machias Seal Island has an area of just 8 hectares or about 20 acres. The island is a sanctuary for many seabirds including the Atlantic Puffin seen in the appended video. Visitors from around the world come to view the birds during the summer. There are no permanent residents of the island although there are lighthouse keepers who come in pairs and stay four weeks at a time. The lighthouse is operated by the Canadian Coast Guard. The original lighthouse was built by the British in 1832. There has been a lighthouse maintained ever since. Many think that the presence of the lighthouse will give Canada a legitimate claim to the island. The United States has never had a presence on the island except in 1918 during the First World War when a small detachment of marines was posted to the island with Canadian agreement.
However in the past private citizens in Maine have claimed ownership of the island. There is a tour boat operator from Cutler Maine, who brings tourists to the island in the summer to view the birds. While there has been no oil or mineral resources discovered in the area, there is a large 720 square kilometres around the island called a grey zone. Lobster fishermen from both Canada and the US fish this area.
MP for New Brunswick Southwest , John Williamson said: “The fishing community on Grand Manan is permitted to fish there on an open-end basis and it’s our way of laying our claim to this water that is part of the Machias Seal Island dispute.I think our claim is sound and is legitimate, but at the end of the day it’s going to come down to the minister in this country and the administration in Washington to settle it. I think it is in the interests of both of our countries to do that.”
Unfortunately an earlier decision of a joint commission in 1817 did not decide the ownership of Machias Sea Island even though it did decide that of other islands in the area including Moose, Dudley, and Fredericks Islands that are now owned by the US and also Grand Manan island that now belongs to Canada.
Stephen Kelly of Duke University and a retired US diplomat thinks that it would be a good idea to resolve the issue.
“It just strikes me if we have this opportunity to remove a potential irritant going forward, why don’t we take it. What if some valuable resource is discovered in the grey zone around Machias Seal Island? What if some other contingency that we can’t imagine now of strategic importance comes along?Wouldn’t we feel silly that we didn’t take the opportunity to resolve this when the stakes were relatively low.”
Ralph Edlridge, who has been a light-keeper on the island for 16 years, thought ownership was a non-issue. Neither he nor anyone else who comes to visit the island has to worry about showing a passport whether they come from Maine, Canada, China, or Spain he said. Barbara Harvey a spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and International Trade said that as far as Canada is concerned the island is Canadian: “Canada’s sovereignty over Machias Seal Island and sovereign jurisdiction over the 210 square nautical mile surrounding waters is strongly founded in international law.” Some residents of Maine may not agree.
This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com
Along the border of the Canadian province of New Brunswick and the American state of Maine sits a small rocky island caught between the two countries.
An almost endless number of headlines have been made in recent months over the (at times heated) conflict between Japan and China over the ownership of a small group of islands in the East China Sea.
Due to the nature of islands, often found along inexact maritime boundaries, ownership disputes are not uncommon – but few of them tend to make headlines. A recent article has shone a spotlight on one of these lesser-known tales, involving a lighthouse isle along the Canada/USA border.
Found at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, Machias Seal Island is an unassuming rocky outcropping of less than 20 acres, with only a lighthouse tower and outbuildings raised above its flat, barren surface. This modest appearance may be why the island was overlooked during the latter part of the 18th century, when Britain and the newly-formed United States were defining their territorial boundaries. Surprisingly, the intervening centuries have done little to resolve the question of just who owns the island.
While the dispute over Machias Seal Island has remained a friendly one, it has heated up in recent decades. Unlike in the case of Japan and China’s battle over the Diaoyu/Senkaku archipelago, there are no rich offshore oil and gas reserves at stake, however, there is a vibrant lobster fishing industry in the indeterminate “grey zone” of the surrounding waters.
Image of island’s lighthouse from www.ccg.gc.ca
“It’s very congested,” said the head of local fisherman’s association. “It’s a very hard area to fish. The Americans think it’s theirs; the Canadians think it’s theirs, and nobody gets along all that well.”
Canada has, thus far, maintained the upper hand in the conflict – despite an elimination of full-time staff from lighthouses on the East Coast to cut costs, the building on Machias Seal Island bears the distinction of being the sole remaining non-automatic lighthouse in the region, a contiguous occupation that stretches back two centuries.
The Department of Foreign Affairs has been willing to foot the Coast Guard’s bill for the live-in staff, giving only the explanation that it is for “sovereignty purposes”.
The Chinese are at it. The Japanese are at it. The Brits and the Argentines are at it – all squabbling over small islands. There is even speculation that the US and Canada will revive their long-running dispute over little Machias Seal Island.
When large states are feeling small, it seems, small islands loom large. This is true not just of tiny, uninhabited outcrops. Independent and semi-independent islands are in the limelight too.
One reason for this is clear. Entitled to many of the same rights as large states, but without the same responsibilities, these islands pose an outrageous challenge to the international order and need to be brought back under control.
It is not just their tax practices, although this is the issue that currently defines the EU’s agenda. By selling passports to anyone passing, islands help criminals change identities and travel the globe undetected. And by conferring diplomatic recognition upon renegade countries, islands endanger global security.
There is a second reason too: entitled to many of the same rights as larger states, but without the same responsibilities, small islands are an outrageous challenge to the international order, and are therefore extremely useful allies to big countries.
Thanks to the competition caused by their tax regimes, small islands can be helpful to large countries wishing to impose fiscal discipline upon their partners or just hoping to excuse their own tax practices. And by handing out passports to all-comers, islands can ‘liberate’ the business elites and political opposition of repressive regimes – saving big states the need to intervene.
Small islands are even credited with a diplomatic daring which larger countries cannot afford to practice. Fearful of encouraging secessionist tendencies at home or of antagonising their international partners, large states are often too nervous to recognise breakaway countries. Small islands go where large states fear to tread.
This ambiguous status in an international system made for big players gives islands a significance quite disproportionate to their size. Take for instance Nauru (population: 9,000; size: 21 square kilometres; distinguishing features: looks from above suspiciously like a treasure island).
For years, China and Taiwan were locked in competition for Nauru’s diplomatic loyalty, with Nauru reportedly allowing itself to be bought first by one side then the other. Indeed, in 2002, when the Taiwanese president rocked the world by supporting a referendum on independence, his move was viewed as a reaction to Nauru’s sudden switch of loyalties to the People’s Republic.
The case of Nauru also shows how quickly islands can go from international pariahs to valued partners, depending on large states’ whims. In 2003, the US appears to have decided that the Nauruans’ passport-for-sale scheme was not a danger to international security after all. Just the opposite in fact: it offered a means to smuggle nuclear scientists out of North Korea. If reports are true, Nauru, the one-time bandit, suddenly found itself made deputy sheriff.
This special attitude towards islands – an attitude which does not seem to pertain to other small states – reflects the strong hold they exercise over the popular imagination. Blame that Christmas favourite, Treasure Island. For people living a routine mainland life, islands signify pirates or palm trees: they are either dangerous or alluring.
At one extreme are the harmless bores who view islands as a serious threat to international security and stability, can recite by heart the guidelines on good governance produced with a cheerful lack of irony by the EU, OECD or G20, and show an unhealthy interest in all forms of small-island deviance.
At the other are the escapists who see islands as an alluring alternative to mainland life and who secretly dream of seizing a rocky outcrop and establishing a libertarian utopia of their own.
Islands are thus either ‘unviable’ – incapable of sustaining themselves without cheating on big states, and ripe for depopulation – or an escape – ripe for repopulation by mainlanders. Acknowledging instead that islands are in fact entities in their own right, capable of responsible self-regulation – within the same context of global interdependence that affects all countries – might help avoid unfortunate situations like Nauru’s.
After all, if the reports about 2003’s ‘Operation Weasel’ are accurate, Nauru’s citizens had just succeeded in stopping their government from selling passports on grounds of good governance, only to see the US reintroduce the practice for them.
The ownership of Machias Seal Island is disputed by the United States and Canada. Canada is in physical possession of it, but the United States has not formally dropped its claim to the island.
I’ve previously written several posts about the development of the US-Canadian border, whichincludesweirdexclaves. Ambiguity about the border even led to the creation of 2 short-lived nations.
(Painting by Benjamin West of the American delegation at the Treaty of Paris)
Although the United States and Canada now maintain a long, peaceful border, the placement of that border has been in doubt since the Treaty of Paris (1783) in which Britain recognized the United States as an independent nation. That treaty attempted to draw borders over unexplored lands. The authors did the best that they could with their knowledge of geography. But, alas, one of the descriptions for the border between Maine and maritime Canada was problematic. The treaty says that US territory includes:
all Islands within twenty Leagues of any Part of the Shores of the United States, and lying between Lines to be drawn due East from the Points where the aforesaid Boundaries between Nova Scotia on the one Part and East Florida on the other shall, respectively, touch the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Ocean, excepting such Islands as now are or heretofore have been within the limits of the said Province of Nova Scotia.
I’ve bolded the parts of the text that are the source for the Machias Seal Island dispute.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, the eastern border of Maine was of great concern to the British. Some British officials coveted what Americans saw as their territory, and vice versa. Control of the Bay of Fundy was of great importance to British commissioners at the Treaty of Ghent (1814), which ended the War of 1812.
Now back to Machias Seal Island. The American argument is that it lies within 20 leagues (approximately 69 miles) of the coast of the United States.
The Canadian argument is that a land grant that pre-exists the Treaty of Paris defines the island as part of Nova Scotia. It built and has operated a lighthouse on the island since 1832.
Occasionally fishermen from the 2 nations have gotten into scraps about its ownership. Some Canadian citizens have staked mining claims to the island as a means of asserting Canadian sovereignty. The State of Maine has included the island on its maps of electoral districts.
But if possession is indeed 9/10ths of the law, then Machias Seal Island is Canadian. The United States has chosen not to press the issue.
Facing the Sea: Lightkeepers and Their Families
