The Tribune

By ERIC WIBERG

THE UNESCO-designated lighthouse at Cay Lobos was completed in 1869. Its round cast iron tower stands 148 feet above sea level and its lantern and gallery are painted white. Situated closer to Cuban towns than Bahamian ones, the cay is just 12 miles north of Cuba and is known among keepers as the most isolated posting in Bahamas. That’s not an issue today, since Cay Lobos Light is solar powered and automated.

Andros is 75 nautical miles north, Great Exuma over 100, and Ragged Island’s Duncan Town 100 miles. It’s remote.

Annie Potts describes it as “the most picturesque of the light towers commissioned by the Imperial Lighthouse Service.” The 7km square cay it’s situated on doesn’t rise higher than 3.5 feet above the sea level. Because migratory birds use it more than people, Cay Lobos is designated a Key Biodiversity Area. Without water aquifers, residents have relied on capturing rain runoff from buildings and dunes.

The first to chart this outcrop was Spaniard Alonso Valiente in the 1500s. Its name means “island of wolves,” apparently a reference to the local Caribbean monk seals found there. Completed in 1869, it was improved with a Fresnel lens and kerosene fired in the 1930s, with requisite visits from Nassau of  semi-annual inspections and maintenance. Today its two white lights flash every 20 seconds and are visible for 22 miles. How the engineers hoisted a 230-ton tower to the top of a 145-foot base boggles the non-engineering mind.

The route it stands astride is still a critical maritime artery stretching over 500 nautical miles. Because there are no modern buildings on Cay Lobos, everything is historic and decaying. No one has settled on the cay in part due to currents of up to 4 knots, fog, sudden squalls, and the lack of water or soil.

There are many oddities with the building of this light. Since the cay is only made of sand, the engineers drove teak wood pilings into the sand: teak is an oily wood known to repel worms. Then they built a 26-foot-wide curb, also of teak. This was topped with a solid 20-foot-high concrete foundation into which tunnels were engineered. Three keeper homes were built around the base, so they could work without venturing outside.

Finally, only one other Bahamian light was made of cast iron (Great Isaac), and this is the only tower built on the Old Bahama Channel, connecting many oceangoing channels with the Gulf of Mexico and Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic.

The main function of Cay Lobos has been as a way point for persons in distress migrating from wrecks or political instability (Haiti, Cuba) toward the US coast in Florida or the Bahamas. FDR fished there, and many thousands of vessels have logged moving past it, but few have stopped. There’s no dock and no airport.

In May of 1970 the Cuban military is said to have captured a US-flagged shrimping boat named Fram. Many of the causes for folks being stranded at Lobos do not originate in The Bahamas.

In December 1860 the schooner America, under Charles Brown with 500 African slaves aboard, wrecked at or near Cay Lobos and the skipper commandeered the ship Lily of Nassau and pressed her to rescue them. Survivors arrived in Nassau aboard the Karnak. America was 550 or so tons, and the slaves were moved to Cuba before the Bahamas’ royal governor was able to dispatch soldiers to intervene on December 18th.

The crew numbered 36 people. A year after the light was built, this account of the wreck of the slave ship Atlantic on 19 December 1860 under Captain Dawle, with 560 slaves aboard, provides a sense of how harsh the setting was. The eyewitness reported temperatures over 93 degrees. “The chief excitement consisted of catching shark and harpooning some dolphins,” one report said.

The assistant lightkeeper was named AP Rees, and the lighthouse was “a splendid iron structure, 180 feet high, the lantern  of which cost 2,000 British pounds.” A magistrate named JB Burnside recorded an account of lightkeeper Lamotte, who saw a wreck on 4 December at Lavanderas Reef, 18 miles from Lobos. This was conflated with the schooner America, as it was rescued by the Nassau schooner Lily.

The whole situation was made more complicated because the slavers had cut the ship’s name off the stern to confuse the matter. It turned out that the ship was from New York and listed in the whaling trade. On the way to Nassau the Lily was forced to shelter at Green Cay, where they met a yacht named Teviot and the only resident, named Simcox, of the Middle Counties of England, who rowed out and dined with them.

One report cited that they took water from the cisterns of the lighthouse for two weeks. “No violence was offered to the lightkeepers, nor were they interfered with at all in the execution of their duty,” it continued. “But at the same time, the captain and his crew took everything they wanted. Several vessels passed rather close to the cay, but then they came in sight the captain and his men drove the slaves to the far side of the lighthouse, so as to keep it between the vessels and the slaves, who were chiefly women and children. About 14 of the slaves died on Cay Lobos. They were buried two in each grave. Seven graves were found.”

There ought to be graves on this desolate spot. The keeper was growing pumpkins, which the slaves found and ate, and he did not object.

According to Captain John O’Brien in his “Captain Unafraid” series in the New York Tribune of 1912, Cay Lobos was a place that Spanish gunboats around the time of the Spanish American War would earn passive income. They did this by pretending to buy a full hold of coal for the motors, but only taking half of it, and keeping the difference. Then they anchored off Cay Lobos and shut the steam plant off, saving money by doing nothing.

“It was nothing unusual for four or five of these thieving warships to be riding at anchor in this soft spot,” Captain O’Brien wrote. “The Lobos Light was kept by an old Englishman and his nephew. He and his fellows would deliver fresh vegetables and delicacies for them on every trip, and in return they kept us posted of the movement of the gunboats.” He spoke of sending mail and messages via the lightkeepers for US news services and how Cubans used small sloops for the same. Eventually the Cubans complained to the British and this stopped.

In March of 1970 a Massachusetts fishing trawler Jocelyn C. from Chatham, Cape Cod, was converted into a treasure hunting vessel in the Bahamas and was detained by Cuban military forces and released near Cay Lobos. A photographer named William Crockett and Captain Carlson from New Bedford were fortunate in that the Cubans were behaving “gentlemanly” towards lost mariners at the time. Thankfully for them, the Swiss Embassy in Havana, the largest city in the Caribbean, intervened.

These international adventurers were seeking treasure at the behest of Sub-Mare Inc, of Washington, DC, which raised the spectre of working for the US government. The US categorically denied it.

A typical modern rescue, of Haitian refugees by US helicopter and support boats, took place in April and May of 1987. After a month at sea, some 100 or so immigrants landed at Cay Lobos from Haiti. Within a week the US Coast Guard had fed some and flown others to George Town Exuma, 110 miles northeast. Some were taken back to Haiti, but all were taken off Cay Lobos.

Lobos is a working relic, a lonely sentinel. Visited probably fewer than a dozen times a year, this is a lovely place where the tides of death and despair only rarely meet with joy and rescue. In sight of so much world trade, this lone wolf is set back far enough that it partakes in none of it.