Lighthouses
( Old Head )
Three of six Irish lighthouses built by Sir Robert Reading under letters patent from King Charles II c.1665, were on the Irish south coast. Old Head of Kinsale lighthouse on the west and Charles Fort lighthouse on the east of the Kinsale Harbour entrance were two of those and emphasized the importance of the Port of Kinsale at the time. The Old Head Lighthouse in 1665 consisted of a cottage with a built-in coal-fired brazier built into the roof, which would be replaced in 1804 by the Revenue Commissioners with a lantern powered by oil lamps. The first permanent tower lighthouse with keepers ’ cottages was completed in 1814 but was replaced in 1853, as the first lighthouse’s light was too often hidden in the clouds. Hook Head l ighthouse in 1671 was Reading’s third south -coast lighthouse and consisted of a coal burning lantern on top of the tall medieval tower lighthouse that had been built in the thirteenth century by Strongbow’s son -in-law, William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, for the safety of ships entering Waterford Harbour en route to New Ross, established by him on the River Barrow. The 1613 map by Gerard Mercator (Section 4: Fig. 33) denotes Hooke Towre at the entrance to Waterford Harbour, clearly an Irish mariner landmark of much importance through the centuries.
Lisbon Earthquake
While there were two notable earthquakes near Lisbon in the eighteenth century (1755 and 1761), the Great Lisbon Earthquake at 9.40am on All Saints Day (Nov 1) 1755 was the more devastating, with the loss of 30,000-50,000 lives across Portugal, Spain and Morocco. The resultant tsunami claimed many of those lives. The tsunami waves reached Cork shores that afternoon and were reputed to have caused more than one thousand deaths and deposited huge amounts of ocean sediment, much to the detriment of Cork ports (Hickey & Beese 2018). Current opinion is that the claims of loss of life were largely fictional. There is no known documentation for that death-toll and Samuel Lewis in his 1837 Topographical Dictionary of Ireland made no reference to such a dramatic event, just eighty years later. Similarly, the Cork Post Office General Directory 1844 – 45 in a Chronological Summary of major historical events for the County and City of Cork documented in 1755 'a violent earthquake felt in Cork at 36 minutes past nine o'clock in the morning' but made no commentary on the tsunami or Cork deaths (this Appendix: Port of Cork ). However, although there is a lack of verifiable evidence of any mortality amongst Cork shoreline inhabitants during that afternoon there is geological evidence of local flooding and coastal change in Barley Cove (West Cork)sea inlets in West Cork which could be dated to the 1755 event. It seems that the impact of the tsunami lessened moving east along the coast, probably becoming like a violent storm in the ports relevant to this document (Beese 2021)
Marine Steam Engine
( Pelican )
The early low-pressure steam engines were inefficient, such that on longer voyages the storage space for coal left little room for cargo. Such was the case with the 705t Sirius in 1838, dangerously overloaded with 450 tons of coal, barely making the first transatlantic crossing
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