The Rope Coils Were All Still Fastened

What We Know

Robert Muirhead shook hands with James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur on 7 December 1900 and sailed home. He was the Northern Lighthouse Board superintendent who had picked all three men for Eilean Mòr, a rock in the Atlantic whose only way of signalling the mainland was discs run out on poles from the tower. Ducat, talking about the discs that day, said he wished he’d have cause to hoist one, just to learn how long anyone ashore took to notice.

Nobody noticed. A gamekeeper named Roderick MacKenzie was paid eight pounds a year to watch for the light from Gallan Head, eighteen miles off. The return book has it seen on the 7th. Not on the 8th, 9th, 10th or 11th. Seen on the 12th, and then not for a fortnight, which was odd but not alarming; the light could vanish four or five nights running. At midnight on the 15th the steamer Archtor passed and her master was certain he should have seen it. He said so only after the news broke.

The relief tender Hesperus reached Eilean Mòr about noon on 26 December. Nobody answered her whistle, her siren, or a rocket. Joseph Moore, the third assistant, jumped ashore at the east landing and climbed to the station. The gate was shut and so were the outer doors. The fire had been cold for days and the beds were empty. In the lightroom the lamp stood cleaned and filled, ready to light.

The last thing anyone at the station had written was readings Ducat took at nine on the morning of Saturday the 15th. The pots were washed and the kitchen tidied, so whoever cooked that day had finished. At the east landing every rope sat where it had been stowed at the relief. At the west landing iron railings were twisted out of their footings, a block of stone weighing more than a ton had been carried down onto the path, and the wooden box that held the mooring ropes, wedged in a crevice a hundred and ten feet above the sea, was gone. So was the lifebuoy lashed to the railings. Muirhead thought at first that someone had taken it to use. Then he looked at the lashings. They were still tied, with scraps of the buoy’s own canvas stuck to them.

The Roadblock

The trouble is the fourteen days. Between Ducat’s last readings and the Saturday Muirhead got down to the west landing, the Atlantic worked on it without a break, and a Hebridean December does not distinguish between the sea that killed three men and the sea that arrived a week later. Every physical fact Muirhead recorded is damage of unknown date: the twisted railings, the ton of stone, the vanished box.

No body was ever recovered, so nobody can say whether a man went into the water alive or already hurt, then or now. Nor was there a witness: the nearest observer sat eighteen miles off with a telescope and could not make out the tower itself, in daylight, for three weeks.

The paperwork that looks like a clue mostly isn’t. Daily readings went onto a slate and were copied into the log afterwards, so the log stopping on the 13th and the slate on the 15th is bookkeeping, not a scene interrupted. And what Muirhead filed was not a finding. He wrote that he was offering the most likely explanation, which is what a careful man writes with two weeks of weather between him and the thing he is explaining.

Best Guesses

Swept from the rope box

Muirhead’s own answer, and the only one written by someone who walked the ground. The box wedged in the crevice a hundred and ten feet up was gone, and the ropes lay tangled in the rocks below it. Ducat had left in sea boots and a waterproof, Marshall in sea boots and oilskins, and Moore told Muirhead the men wore those only to go down to a landing. Muirhead has all three of them there together when the sea came up. He never accounts for the third man, who by Moore’s reading went out in his shirtsleeves.

A second sea took the third man

Most retellings read the clothes as a sequence, though Muirhead did not: Ducat and Marshall went down dressed for the landing, something took them, and McArthur ran out without his coat. Later keepers described the sea coming out of the west landing’s gully without warning in flat weather. J. G. Lockhart wrote up the same behaviour in 1925; Walter Aldebert, stationed there in the 1950s, watched it happen and read the case this way. Nothing physical separates one wave from two, and the sequence hangs on one sentence of Moore’s about what McArthur habitually wore.

Blown from the cliff by the gale

This is the only reading here whose most serious examination was a rejection. Muirhead took it up and argued it down: the wind was westerly, so it would have driven men up the island, not off it, and he was certain three lightkeepers would have thrown themselves flat before the brow. But it was Captain Harvie’s instinct on the day, wired that evening alongside drowning at the crane. And it needs no particular errand and no particular order.

A fight among the keepers

Royal Museums Greenwich lists it. Keith McCloskey’s book surveys it. The 2018 film The Vanishing is built on it. The reading is that something went wrong between three men on a rock in the dark and all three went over, and it leans on a description of McArthur as violent-tempered that appears in none of the three contemporary documents. Nothing at the station supports it: no disturbance indoors, and no damage anywhere that isn’t sea damage. People argue it; nothing shows it.

Nothing survives to test it

The position that the record is spent. Fourteen days passed before a competent observer saw the west landing, no body has ever surfaced, and the gap in the log is an artefact of the station’s paperwork. Its best argument is Muirhead, who had recruited these men and every reason to want a clean finding, and who wrote instead that he was offering the most likely explanation. Against it: the record does discriminate. The west landing was hit; the east landing was not. Two of three men dressed to go down.

The Verdict

On the Saturday he finished on the rock, Muirhead went back to Breasclete, wired Edinburgh, and then called on two widows. The recommendation he attached was small: that the shore watcher report a light he could not see rather than wait. Nothing else this case produced would have helped anybody.

There is no way now to fix the order of events. A bone off the seabed below the west landing, matched to a name, would say which man went first; the Atlantic has held onto it for a hundred and twenty-six years. Short of that, the ceiling is a report by a man who saw the scene a fortnight late and said he was guessing. The ropes had come out of a smashed box and lay in the rocks. Every coil was still fastened.