Bougainville Reef
p. 17 · Read in the full issue
The Light Was Out!
Belated Warning on Bougainville Reef
IN early September, a few days after Dr. W. E. Smythe, Ronald Leadbetter and Albert Camp bell, all of Samarai, Papua, had been rescued from Bougainville Reef off the Queensland coast (see Smallships section this issue) the Commonwealth Shipping Depart ment warned that the reef's beacon was out and was not expected to function again for two weeks. The reef, they said, was dangerous to shipping.
The warning came too late to save Dr. Smythe's yacht. When he was rescued he said that they had expected to see the beacon from a distance of at least 12 miles.
They saw no light so imagined that they were in safe waters. They anchored and went to sleep. Next morning their ship was pounding itself to pieces on the reef.
The excuse of the shipping de partment’s lighthouse section was that “the beacon had apparently exhausted its year’s supply of acetylene.”
A light that does not function is worse than no light at all. And no light at all is the common thing in all waters from the Australian coast eastward through the islands of New Hebrides, Solomons and Papua-New Guinea. Masters of ships which cost anything from £l,OOO to £1 million accept it as normal that they should take their ships in and out and round about unmarked passages, reefs and anchorages and, if anything should go wrong, find themselves at the receiving end of an official inquiry.
If governments were responsible for the damage to ships hitting un marked and unlighted points and reefs in their territorial waters, we could expect a spate of lighthouse and beacon building.