The contribution of the Stevenson family to lighthouse building is well-documented. Collectively, Robert Stevenson, his three sons Thomas, David and Alan, and his grandsons Charles and David Alan were responsible for constructing over one hundred lights along Scotland’s treacherous coasts during the 19th century. However, the family’s engineering influence did not end there, but stretched across the globe. Richard Henry Brunton, the so-called ‘father of Japanese lighthouses’ had received his engineering training in Edinburgh under Thomas and David. On the other side of the Pacific, George Henry Slight, the engineer chiefly responsible for lighting the Magellan Strait, also had a strong connection to the Stevensons; his grandfather having worked with Robert on one of the earliest and most arduous lighting projects atop the notorious Bell Rock. And as these pages will show, the Stevenson family’s engineering influence extended all the way to New Zealand for the man involved in the construction and design of many of the nation’s first lighthouses; beautifully commemorated by a set of stamps issued by its postal service in 1947; was the brother-in-law of Thomas Stevenson, and the uncle of Robert Louis Stevenson. James Balfour, whose surname his nephew borrowed for the main character in Kidnapped, was one of several British engineers who laid the foundations of New Zealand’s modern lighthouse service.
Like all countries with a coastline, New Zealand has a sad history of shipwrecks, which increased in frequency as European ‘Pakeha’ immigrants poured into the country and trade burgeoned during the second half of the 19th century. The danger posed by the island nation’s coast was brought into sharp focus in 1862 by the wrecking of the steamer SS White Swan on rocks off Wairarapa, in the southeastern corner of North Island. The ship was carrying politicians and parliamentary records from Auckland to Wellington. Among those aboard was several prominent members of the New Zealand government, including future premier William Fox. Although no lives were lost in this incident, the parliamentary archive could not be saved.
It was only a year later that James Balfour arrived in the country, disembarking at Port Chalmers, Dunedin on 14th September 1863, together with his wife and infant daughter. He and his fellow Scotsman Thomas Paterson had been appointed as engineers to the Otago Provincial Council, which governed the southernmost province of South Island. The two men had become friends while pupils at the prestigious Edinburgh School. Born in 1831, James was one of a large brood of offspring belonging to Lewis Balfour, minister for the parish of Colinton, on the southern outskirts of the city. James was only 16 when his elder sister Margaret Isabel met Thomas Stevenson on a train to Glasgow. The couple married in August 1848, their only son, Robert Louis Stevenson, being born two years later. It was doubtless through Margaret’s advocacy that James was later taken on as an apprentice by her husband’s firm.
By the time of Balfour’s arrival in New Zealand, the nation already had its first modern lighthouse. The honour of building belonged to an English engineer named Edward Wright. First lit on New Year’s Day 1859, this short structure stood on Pencarrow Head at the eastern entrance to Wellington Harbour. Constructed of cast iron by Black Country manufacturers Messrs Cochrane and Co., it had been shipped out in segments. Born in Woolwich, East London, Wright was responsible for many notable engineering works around the country, eventually becoming a long-standing member of the New Zealand parliament.
One of Balfour’s first projects, not included in the 1947 stamp series, was on Dog Island, a low-lying island in the Foveaux Strait, which separates South Island from Stewart Island (New Zealand’s third largest landmass). The site had been chosen based on the recommendations of a number of sea-captains. The original stone structure, which opened on 5th August 1865, was 118ft in height, and remains to this day the nation’s tallest. Two of Balfour’s other early projects are commemorated by the 1947 stamp issue; at Cape Campbell and at Taiaroa Head. Named after a local Maori chiefdom, Taiaroa Head marked the eastern tip of the Otago Peninsula, which shelters the entrance to Dunedin. Cape Campbell was located at the northeastern tip of South Island, overlooking the eastern stretch of the Cook Strait. The image of Cape Campbell on the 2½D stamp shows the cast-iron replacement for Balfour’s original timber edifice, erected in 1907.
Appointed Marine Engineer to the Colony in 1866, Balfour scouted locations and drew up conceptual designs for several other lighthouses before his untimely demise. Among these was one situated at Bean Rock, a nautical hazard close to Auckland Harbour. Another was at Cape Farewell, a sand-spit at the western entrance to the Cook Strait. As with Cape Campbell, these lights were originally constructed of wood. The light at Cape Farewell – named thus by James Cook as he sailed away from the newly-surveyed islands on his first voyage of exploration – was replaced by a steel structure in 1897. The original Bean Rock light, which is of unique hexagonal design, still stands, having been restored in the 1980s.
Towards the end of 1869 a double tragedy struck, emphasizing the dangers of the forces Balfour and his fellow engineers had been striving to mitigate. First of all, on 15th December, Thomas Paterson was drowned on a journey between Dunedin and Timaru when the mail-coach he was travelling in was overturned and carried away while attempting to ford the river Kakanui in flood. He’d recently been surveying the site of a new bridge on North Island. At the time of Paterson’s death, Balfour had been working on an experimental breakwater in Timaru. In order to return to Dunedin in time for his friend’s funeral on 19th December, Balfour decided to join the small steamship SS Maori, then in harbour at Timaru. During the transfer to the ship in a violent swell, Balfour’s surf-boat got into difficulty. A lifeboat from the Maori rescued the eight persons aboard but was then capsized by a large wave as it drew alongside the steamer. Balfour disappeared from view before he could be hauled from the water. His body later washed up from the beach. The two friends were buried side by side in Dunedin’s southern cemetery under headstones commemorating their Celtic roots. (Balfour’s is flanked by a pair of lighthouses.) Assessing his contribution to the New Zealand lighthouse service, Frederick Furkert, Engineer-in Chief of the Public Works Department in the 1920s, described Balfour as ‘a far-seeing man of boundless energy and sound judgement whom the young colony could ill afford to lose.’
After the death of Balfour, the post of Marine Engineer was taken up by John Blackett. Born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Blackett had worked in shipbuilding, railways and mining before emigrating to New Zealand in 1851. Over the next two decades, he’d served as ‘provincial engineer’ in Nelson, and seems to have played a role in the erection of the port’s first lighthouse (and the nation’s second) in 1862. Blackett’s promotion coincided with the premiership of Julius Vogel, which ushered in an expansion in civil engineering projects under the direction of a new Public Works Department, which Blackett would later head. Over the next decade, Blackett oversaw the construction of a further 14 lighthouses; all of them following his own innovative design. To achieve sufficient stability without resorting to heavy stone or imported cast-iron, Blackett’s blueprints called for a double-wall of native timber (kauri and totara) to be constructed at the base of the tower, filled with rubble up to a height of 8 to 10 feet. One of the most important of these economical structures was at erected at Waipapa Point. Located on the landward side of the Foveaux Strait, this area had borne witness to the young colony’s worst maritime disasters when the SS Tararua had struck a reef below the headland in April 1881, resulting in the loss of 131 lives.
One of the most remarkable projects undertaken during Blackett’s tenure, dramatically illustrated on the 6d stamp, was at Brothers, an island group on the southern side of the Cook Strait and an important marker of the entrance to Wellington Harbour. Demands for a lighthouse in this stretch of water had been made ever since the loss of the barque Maria off Cape Terawhiti in 1851, which resulted in 26 deaths. A lighthouse had been duly erected on Mana Island on the northern edge of the Strait, but further shipwrecks in the vicinity of Brothers in 1867 and 1872 eventually prompted the authorities to relocate this light to the other side of the Strait. The isolated and rugged nature of The Brothers, which rise to almost 80 metres in height, made this a very challenging engineering project; the landing of stores and equipment alone taking two months. New Zealand’s only rock station, and the last to be manned, the lighthouse first went into service in 1877.
The lighthouse on Stephens Island, commemorated on the 4d stamp, is notable for being the country’s highest above sea-level, at almost 600ft, and once its most powerful. The island itself – another named by James Cook – lies opposite Cape Farewell on the eastern edge of Tasman Bay, and marks the northernmost point of land in the Cook Strait. Construction was overseen by David Scott, the government’s long-serving ‘Lighthouse Artificer’ and a contemporary of Blackett, about whom little else has been published. (According to the Nelson Historical Society, Scott was born in Tasmania in 1842 and had been a pupil of Nelson College, one of New Zealand’s oldest schools). The project was another arduous one, being then 5-hours steaming from the mainland and requiring the construction of a landing jetty and an iron tramway to the island’s summit. To achieve this, a total of 24 round-trips of workers and 750 tons of stores and building materials were made aboard the government service tender Hinemoa. The 50ft tall cast-iron tower, which was completed in January 1894, was one of the first manufactured in-country, by the Auckland firm Beany & Sons, although the parts for the lighting system still had to be imported.
The construction of a light at Cape Palliser, whose image adorns the 2d stamp, completed the extensive illumination of the Cook Strait. The new lighthouse was erected on extreme southeastern tip of North Island about 50km southeast of Wellington. Nearby Palliser Bay was regarded as one of the most notorious areas for 19th century shipwrecks, as is faintly suggested in the philatelic illustration. In fact, only a few months before the light went into operation in 1897, another wreck had occurred in the vicinity, claiming the lives of a dozen crewmen of the Zuleika. The light at Cape Palliser completed the first phase of New Zealand lighthouse building, which by then totalled around two dozen major navigational lights.
The lighthouse at Cape Brett was the last project overseen by David Scott prior to his retirement after 31 years in government service. It was the first constructed during the second consolidation phase of lighthouse building, which aimed to plug gaps in the existing network. Its siting at the southeastern point of the Bay of Islands helped illuminate a void of navigational darkness on the coast between the lights at Moko Hinau and Cape Maria van Diemen in the Far North District of North Island. Cape Brett Lighthouse was lit on 21st February 1910 after an 18-month period of construction. It was the first New Zealand lighthouse fitted with a mercury bath to improve the lantern’s rotational efficiency. With an elevation of 500ft, its beam could be seen up to 30 miles away. As can be seen in the philatelic illustration, the lighthouse overlooks an impressive rock formation, named Otuwhanga Island.
Lit on 12th January 1913, Castlepoint lighthouse was constructed on the Wairarapa Coast roughly halfway between Wellington and Napier. It was one of the last manned lighthouses to be established and one of the more accessible for lighthouse keepers. As can be seen in the image on the ½d stamp, its 23m cast-iron tower tapered significantly; from a diameter of around 18ft at its base to just under 10ft at the top. Castlepoint was later christened ‘The Holiday Light’ owing to the touristic popularity of the beach it overlooks.
The introduction of lighthouses in New Zealand over the latter part of the 19th century undoubtedly helped reduce the frequency of shipwrecks along its coast even as maritime traffic continued to grow. For this reason, it was an obvious choice to be the symbol for the N.Z. Government Life Insurance Department, whose name features on the 1947 stamp issue. The Department, which was established in 1869, had its own franking agreement with the Post Office; hence the issuing of stamps in its own name. The earliest of these to bear images of a lighthouse were those printed in 1891; all previous issues had featured the head of Queen Victoria. These stamps, which remained in circulation until 1907, featured a generic light tower coloured according to value. The 1947 issue was the first to reference specific structures. The obvious anomaly among the eight selected is the Eddystone Lighthouse. Britain’s earliest and most famous modern lighthouse was included perhaps as a tribute to the mother-country where these vital navigational aids had first been developed. In 1969, the Department issued a further set of stamps featuring eight more historic lighthouses, including those designed by James Balfour at Dog Island and Farewell Spit, to commemorate its centenary. That year also marked the centenary of the engineer’s premature passing.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 