The Nation’s Largest Collection Of Lighthouse Bloopers, Part 6

Continuing an examination of the series of articles on the lighthouses of the Apostle Islands appearing on the maritime web site, boatnerd.com.

Back to Part 5

Part Six: The Devils Island Lighthouse and the Gull Island Tower

Devils Island Lighthouse

Under discussion:

The Devils Island Lighthouse, by Dave Wobser

The Gull Island Light, no author listed

A shocker: the Devils Island  article is almost error-free. The reported height of the lamp above lake level is 12 or 13 feet off, but that’s about it.

Well, so long as you skip past the first half of the article,  with the same boilerplate paragraphs about the French cartographers who couldn’t count past twelve, and the steamboats puffing all over Lake Superior fifty years before the Soo locks opened, and all that.

The lonely Gull Island tower

Time to  wrap up our trip with a visit to the red-headed stepchild of the Apostles, Gull Island. The smallest of the bunch by far, Gull is a barren acre of rock and sand, marked by an industrial-style tower devoid of any charm. The island only takes on interest when you delve into its history: the damn thing is a ship-eating monster. From 1865 to 1929, when the government finally got around to putting up the light, nearly a dozen ships came to grief on Gull Island and the nearby shoals. Once finally put into service, the automated lamp was maintained by the keepers of the nearby Michigan Island light, until that station too was vacated in 1943.

A late arrival, without resident keepers of its own, and nondescript in appearance, the Gull Island beacon is usually given short shrift in treatments of the Apostles lights. The Boatnerd series follows this pattern, offering a bare-bones table of date and location and two short paragraphs of text. True to form, in less than a hundred words, there are two mistakes.

First, the table: 

Location: Off Michigan Island in Lake Superior; Date Built: 1928

Location correct, date off by a year. Now the text:

A light was first proposed for this location in 1906…

Off by more than forty years. Gen. Joseph Totten, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,  chairman pro tem of the Lighthouse Board,  recommended purchase of Gull Island “for lighthouse purposes” in a letter to Commissioner J.M. Edwards of the General Lands Office, dated Nov. 24, 1863. The well-known Great Lakes maritime engineer Gen. Orlando Poe renewed the request in 1871. It’s too bad no one listened to them; it might have saved a few ships and a life or two.

*****

Thus ends our inspection of boatnerd.com’s guide to the Apostle Islands lighthouses-- thanks for sticking with me. I’m still slack-jawed not just at the number of blunders crammed into these articles, but also by their variety of subject and scale. Some show ignorance of basic regional history, like the distorted chronology of the French presence on Madeline Island, or the posh summer colonies that show up the better part of a century too soon. In contrast, many of the details offered regarding the individual lighthouses seem to suggest that Mr. Wobser did at least some background reading, but just couldn’t keep the information straight. Did he lose his notebook and try to reconstruct everything from memory?

And then there’s that imaginary 1868 Chequamegon Point lighthouse, and I can’t begin to guess where he got that from.

Aspiring authors are often advised, “Write about the things you know.” These articles remind us that a corollary is equally important: “Stay far away from subjects you don’t know much about.”

For more information: Sources consulted.