To power the Amphitrite Lighthouse, coal and supplies would be deposited in Spring Cove, loaded onto a wheelbarrow and pushed the one-kilometre distance along a boardwalk built upon a bog.
The coal was used to power the foghorn. The lighthouse keeper was required to crank the clockspring by hand every eight hours to turn the stainless steel mirrors that amplified the lighthouse’s kerosene lamp. Light the lamp at dusk, return at midnight to wind the crank, and then extinguish the lamp at dawn.
To miss a shift, to let the lamp go out, often meant shipwreck and death for the many sailors charting the waters west of Vancouver Island. The lighthouse was a lifeline for those sailing the area still known today as the Graveyard of the Pacific.
Even on a sunny, clear day the Pacific Ocean on Vancouver Island’s west coast can be deafening. Rogue waves can snatch people from the rocks, claiming them for the sea. Razor-sharp reefs offer no quarter to ships that sail off course.
More than 2,000 ships ran aground, floundered or sunk in the area from the Columbia Bar on the Oregon coast to Cape Scott on northern Vancouver Island, with 700 souls lost to those cold, Pacific waters.
After the destruction on Boxing Day in 1905 of the Pass of Melfort, a four-masted steel bark, in the waters near Ucluelet, B.C., the Amphitrite Lighthouse was built a year later. A telegraph line connected whaling stations for quicker marine response to nautical disasters.
In a testament to the unyielding power of Mother Nature, the original lighthouse was destroyed by waves in 1914. A year later, crews built its replacement ‘like a bunker’ to withstand the force of the seas. All of the materials to build the replacement were hauled over the boardwalk. It still stands today, although most lighthouses in Canada are now automated.
Shipwrecks declined considerably once Amphitrite and others began guiding sailors to safer shores. You can view Amphitrite Lighthouse, as well as remnants of the plank road that replaced the boardwalk, as part of the Wild Pacific Trail in Ucluelet.
