Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (9 page)

It was a cold and gloomy afternoon on the Isle of Lewis, and the watchman strained to see the Eilean Mor Lighthouse, located on one of the Flannan Islands, through the mist and rain. Situated on a major shipping route between Britain, Europe, and North America, the rocky Flannans had been responsible for so many shipwrecks over the centuries that the Northern Lighthouse Board had finally decided to build a lighthouse there to warn sailors of the peril.

It had taken four long years to build. But on December 16, 1900, just a year after construction was completed, a report came that the light had gone out. Roderick MacKenzie, a gamekeeper at Uig, had been appointed as lighthouse watchman, and his duty was to alert the authorities if he was unable to see the light. He noted in his logbook that it had not been visible at all between December 8 and 11; he was so concerned, in fact, that he had enlisted the help of all the villagers to take turns watching out for the light, until it was finally seen on the afternoon of December 12.

But when another four days went by and the light failed to appear yet again, MacKenzie alerted the assistant keeper, Joseph Moore. Moore stood on the seafront at Loch Roag on the Isle of Lewis and stared west into the gloom, looking for the smallest flicker of light, but he too saw nothing. The notion that the brand-new lighthouse might have been destroyed in the recent storms seemed highly unlikely, and at least one of the three resident keepers should have been able to keep the lamp lit, so Moore summoned help.

The following day, owing to high seas, Moore was unable to launch the Board's service boat, the
Hesperus
, to investigate. It would be nine agonizing days before the seas calmed sufficiently for the anxious assistant keeper to leave for Eilean Mor.

Finally, at dawn on Boxing Day, the sky had cleared and the
Hesperus
left Breasclete harbor at first light. As it approached the lighthouse, the boat's skipper, Captain Harvie, signaled their approach with flags and flares, but there was no acknowledgment from the shore. As soon as they had docked at Eilean Mor, the assistant keeper jumped out, together with crew members Lamont and Campbell.

Hammering on the main door and calling to be let in, Moore received no reply. But it was unlocked, so, nervously, Moore made his way inside, to be greeted by complete silence and absolutely no sign of life. The clock in the main room had stopped and everything was in its place, except for one of the kitchen chairs, which lay overturned on the floor.

Moore, terrified of what he might find, was too frightened to venture upstairs until Lamont and Campbell had joined him. But the bedrooms were as neat and tidy as the kitchen and nobody (or indeed no body) was to be seen. The three lighthouse keepers, James Ducat, Donald McArthur, and Thomas Marshall, appeared to have vanished. Ducat and Marshall's oilskin waterproofs were also gone, but McArthur's hung alone in the hallway, in strangely sinister fashion.

Moore saw this as evidence that the two men had gone outside during a storm and that perhaps McArthur, breaking strict rules about leaving the lighthouse unmanned, had raced outside after them. Moore and his fellow crew members then searched every inch of the island but could find no trace of the men. Three experienced lighthouse keepers had seemingly vanished into thin air. Captain Harvie then instructed Moore, Lamont, and Campbell to remain on the island to operate the lighthouse. They were accompanied by one MacDonald, boatswain of the
Hesperus
, who had volunteered to join them.

With that, the
Hesperus
returned to Breasclete, with the lighthouse keepers’ Christmas presents and letters from their families still on board, and Harvie telegraphed news to Robert Muir head, superintendent at the Northern Lighthouse Board: “A dreadful accident has happened at Flannans. The three keepers, Ducat, Marshall, and the Occasional [McArthur in this instance], have disappeared from the Island. … The clocks were stopped and other signs indicated that the accident must have happened about a week ago. Poor fellows they must have been blown over the cliffs or drowned trying to rescue a crane [for lifting cargo into and from boats] or something like that.” It had been twenty-eight years since the
Mary Celeste
(see page 138) had stirred the public's imagination, and now there was a baffling new mystery to puzzle the world.

In the seventh century
A.D.
, Bishop Flannan, for reasons best known to himself and perhaps his God, had built a small chapel on a bleak island sixteen miles to the west of the Hebrides on the outer limits of the British Isles. The group of islands was known to mariners as the Seven Hunters, and the only inhabitants were the sheep that Hebridean shepherds would ferry over to graze on the lush grass pastures. But the shepherds themselves never stayed overnight on the islands, fearful of the “little men” believed to haunt that remote spot.

The lighthouse on Eilean Mor, the largest and most northerly of the Seven Hunters, was only the second building to be erected on the islands—over a millennium later. Designed and built by David Stevenson, of the great Stevenson engineering dynasty, the building was completed by December 1899, and Superintendent Muirhead of the Northern Lighthouse Board had selected forty-three-year-old James Ducat, a man with more than twenty years’ experience of lighthouse keeping, as the principal keeper at Eilean Mor. Thomas Marshall was to be his assistant and the men were to spend the summer of 1899 making preparations to keep the light the following winter.

During that summer, Muirhead joined them for a month and all three men worked hard to secure the early lighting of the station in time for the coming winter. Muirhead later reported how impressed he was by the “manner in which they went about their work.” The lighthouse was fully operational for the first time on December 1, 1899. Muirhead's last visit to Eilean Mor before the disappearance was on December 7, 1900. Satisfied that all was well, he then returned to the Isle of Lewis. Although he was not to find out until a few weeks later, the light went out only a day after he had left the island.

When Muirhead returned to join Joseph Moore and the relief keepers on December 29, he brought the principal keeper from Tiumpan Head on Lewis to take charge at Eilean Mor and then began to investigate the disappearance of the three men. The first thing he did was to check the lighthouse journal. He was very perturbed by what he read.

In the log entry for December 12, the last day the lighthouse had appeared to be working, Thomas Marshall had written of severe winds “the like I have never seen before in twenty years.” Inspecting the exterior of the lighthouse, he found storm damage to external fittings over one hundred feet above sea level.

The log also noted, somewhat unusually, that James Ducat had been “very quiet” and that Donald McArthur—who had joined the men temporarily as third keeper while William Ross was on leave—was actually crying. And McArthur was no callow youth, but an old soldier, a seasoned mariner with many years’ experience and known on the mainland as a tough brawler.

In the afternoon, Marshall had noted in the log: “Storm still raging. Wind steady. Storm bound. Cannot go out. Ship passing sounding foghorn. Could see lights of cabins.” This was distinctly odd: no storm had been reported on December 12, and what could possibly have happened to upset an old salt like McArthur?

The following morning, Marshall had noted that the storm was still raging and that, while Ducat continued to be “quiet,” McArthur was now praying. The afternoon entry simply stated: “Me, Ducat and McArthur prayed,” while on the following day, December 14, there was no entry at all. Finally, on December 15, the day
before
the light was reported for the first time as being not visible, the sea appeared to have been still and the storm to have abated. The final log entry simply stated: “Storm ended, sea calm. God is over all.”

Muirhead puzzled over what could have frightened three seasoned veterans of the ocean so greatly, and also what was meant by that last sentence, “God is over all.” He had never known any of the men to be God-fearing, let alone to resort to prayer. Equally troubling was where such violent storms had come from when no poor weather, let alone gale-force winds, had been reported in the vicinity at any point up to December 17.

Muirhead also wondered why nobody on Lewis had known of such a frightening storm when the lighthouse was actually visible (bad weather would have obscured it during the day), and for that matter how the passing boat Marshall recorded on December 12 had managed to stay afloat in such a gale. Equally, if it had sunk, why had no boat been reported missing?

Finally, Muirhead wondered if a three-day hurricane raging over such a localized area was too unrealistic to consider, or simply if one or even all of the lighthouse keepers had gone mad, which might explain the unusual emotions recorded in the lighthouse log and the men's subsequent disappearance. He could think of no other reason for them to disappear on the first calm and quiet day following the alleged storm. If they were going to be swept out to sea, surely that would have been more likely to happen during the gale, had they been foolish enough to venture outside, rather than during the spell of calm weather reported in the final log entry.

One interesting thing to note was that the log that week was written by Thomas Marshall, the second in command and youngest of the three men. That was not so unusual, but for him to be making insubordinate comments about his principal in an official log was certainly out of the ordinary. Especially as the log was bound to be read at some point by the Northern Lighthouse Board and, of course, by James Ducat himself. And to record the aggressive McArthur as “crying” when he would also certainly have read the log himself once the storm had passed seems strangely foolhardy. Yet there it was, in black-and-white, in the official lighthouse log. The whole point of such a record is to note times, dates, wind directions, and the like, not to record human emotions or activity such as praying. The investigators were baffled by this.

Clearly the men on the island had been affected by a powerful external force of some kind, and so Superintendent Muirhead turned his attention to the light itself, which he found clean and ready for use. The oil fountains and canteens were full and the wicks trimmed, but Muirhead knew the light had not been lit at midnight on December 15 because the steamship
Archtor
had passed close to the Flannan Islands at that time and the captain had reported he had not seen the light, when he felt sure it should have been clearly visible from his position.

The kitchen was clean and the pots and pans had been washed, so Muirhead concluded that whatever had happened to the men had taken place between lunchtime and nightfall, before the light was due to be lit. But there had been no storm on that day, as evidence from both the lighthouse log and the Isle of Lewis confirms.

Muirhead then decided to make a thorough search of the site and, despite high seas, was able to reach the crane platform seventy feet above sea level. The previous year a crane had been washed away in a heavy storm, so the super intendent knew this to be a vulnerable spot, but the crane was secure, as were the barrels and the canvas cover protecting the crane.

But curiously, forty feet higher than the crane, 110 feet above sea level, a strong wooden box usually secured into a crevice in the rocks and containing rope and crane handles was found to be missing. The rope had fallen below and lay strewn around the crane legs, and the solid iron railings around the crane were found to be “displaced and twisted,” suggesting a force of terrifying strength. A life buoy fixed to the railings was missing but the rope fastening it appeared untouched, and a large, approximately one-ton section of rock had broken away from the cliff, evidently dislodged by whatever it was that had caused the rest of the damage, and now lay on the concrete path leading up to the lighthouse.

Muirhead considered whether the men could have been blown off the island by the high winds but decided this would have been impossible during the calm weather of December 15. Further inspection revealed turf from the top of a two-hundred-foot cliff had been ripped away, and seaweed was discovered, the like of which no one could identify. Muirhead thought that a mammoth roller wave could have swept away the two men in oilskins working on the crane platform, but such a freak wave had never been reported before.

Unable to come to a definite conclusion, Muirhead returned to Lewis, leaving a very uneasy Joseph Moore with the new principal keeper, John Milne, and his assistant, Donald Jack. In the report he made on January 8, 1901, a sad and baffled Muirhead noted that he had known the missing men intimately and held them in the highest regard. He wrote that “the Board has lost two of its most efficient Keepers and a competent Occasional.” And he concluded his report by recalling: “I visited them as lately as 7th December and have the melancholy recollection that I was the last person to shake hands with them and bid them adieu.”