The Tribune

AS if NEMA’s startling announcement of a tsunami surging towards these islands had not caused enough hysteria in the Bahamas on Wednesday, the news that a wealthy Texan had purchased the Elbow Cay Reef Lighthouse in Hope Town and was about to move it to his private island in the Exumas, promised a tumultuous rebellion as it started to circulate in Nassau last night.

If dear old one-legged “Spotty” – one of Abaco’s well known characters— had still been alive, Nassau would have heard and felt his cannon balls by now as he declared war — at least he would have had a leg to stand on this time to secede from New Providence, as he and several of the “brothers” tried to do shortly after the PLP declared independence from Britain in 1972. In 1973 the UK government refused to grant Abaco’s request for special independent Crown Colony status. Abaco wanted to remain under the “mother country’s” wing while the rest of the Bahamas floated into the wilderness alone. But “Spotty” is no longer with us and so the rumble — unlike the old days — has started slowly.

“Lighthouse to be dismantled, rebuilt in Exuma” read the headline in The Abaconian of Marsh Harbour, Abaco. We wondered how many noticed that that edition of the Abaconian, printed on March 26th, was dated April 1 — April Fool’s Day! So this was a special April Fool’s joke.

But it was a good story.

“I love Abaco,” the Abaconian quoted Adam Finkle as saying as he described his plans for the most photographed — and also famous — lighthouse in the Bahamas chain of islands. However, said Mr Finkle, who was described as a wealthy Texas philanthropist, “I find I’m spending more time at my home in Exuma. So, I thought to myself how do I bring a little bit of Abaco back with me?”

He said he got his idea from Paradise Island’s Cloisters, a monastery dismantled in France and rebuilt, brick by brick in the Bahamas.

And then Mr Finkle had another brilliant idea — according to him this was the clincher that swayed the government to sell him the lighthouse and give him permission to dismantle it and move it to Exuma. He said that the undisclosed sum that he was paying for the red and white, candy-striped lighthouse could go a long way in either delaying or averting altogether the controversial VAT tax. Some Bahamians might have considered that a great deal, but not so Abaconians.

According to Wikipedia, Elbow Cay “features one of the last operational kerosene-fueled lighhouses in the world. The lighthouse, built in 1862, becoming operational two years later, is one of only three manual lighthouses left in the world. It has a spring mechanism that has to be hand cranked every several hours to maintain the sequence of five white flashes every 15 seconds. The lamp burns kerosene oil with wick and mantle. The light is then focused as it passes through the optics of a first order Fresnel lens which floats on a bed of mercury.”

This lighthouse – if Abaconians of that era had had their way would have never been built. However, today it is a money earner for the island.

The late Paul Albury, author of “The Story of the Bahamas” had a wealth of interesting — indeed delightfully amusing stories to tell of the wrecking of that era and the part played by the lights from those sentinels in helping to kill the trade.

The “Bahamian wreckers,” wrote Dr Albury, a dentist by profession, but an historian at heart, “looked upon the erection of lighthouses with dismay. After all, they reasoned, the Lord put the reef there and he made the wind to blow and the sea to rage. Lighthouses were the works of man and, all things considered, they preferred to be on the side of the Lord.”

And of the Elbow Cay lighthouse he wrote: “Nowhere were lighthouse builders more frustrated than those who went to Elbow Cay. The people of Hope Town placed every obstacle they could think of in the way. They refused to supply fresh water to the construction crew, and at night they sank the vessels loaded with building material. But, the work went on to completion. A few years after it began to function, lightning struck the tower one night and the inhabitants were convinced that Providence had intervened on their behalf. The next night, however, the light shone forth as bright as ever to their bitter disappointment.

“Without the Bahamian wreckers, hundreds of thousand of pounds worth of imperilled merchandise which was saved, would have been swallowed up forever by the sea. And this merchandise proved to be a great boon to the Bahamian people. There were many to say that far too little of the proceeds found its way to the rightful owners of the goods. But we must remember that except for the efforts of the wreckers the owners would have received nothing.”

Anyway, despite the dismay of the Abaconians of 1862 who considered the lighthouse a blight on its trade, today’s Abaconian would never relinquish its hold on its most treasured tourist attraction.

And so, dear old “Spotty” and his tribe can continue to rest in peace — even they should be able to appreciate a good April Fool’s joke!