LAST WATCH

In a technological age, lighthouse devotees renew an ancient tradition

- DOROTHY WICKENDEN

For the greater part of two decades, Sally Snowman has lived and worked contentedly on Little Brewster Island, a craggy patch of bare rock, crabgrass, concrete, and dilapidated buildings in Boston’s outer harbor. Under the auspices of the Coast Guard, she serves as the keeper, and the historian, of Boston Light. The lighthouse, opened in September, 1716, was the first in the American colonies, and Snowman is the last official keeper in the United States.

The lighthouse is a white tower, eighty-nine feet tall, whose east windows face across the North Atlantic toward the English coast, some three thousand miles away. Snowman, a plainspoken New Englander with mariner roots that reach back three centuries, maintains a crisp official manner while on duty. But sometimes, standing in the lantern room, she contemplates what it was like to undergo the voyage to the New World on a merchant’s galleon—made by hand from little more than oak, rope, tar, and flax cloth. Along with violent seasickness, passengers suffered from fever, dysentery, boils, scurvy, mouth rot, rat bites, and lice so copious that they could be scraped off the body. When gales raged, one emigrant wrote, people “cry and pray most piteously,” and “everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom.” A woman on that crossing, incapacitated by a stalled labor, was shoved through a porthole into the sea. “It was a horrible trip,” Snowman said. “Imagine what they felt when they spotted the light.”