Sometimes when you meet someone famous you can be disappointed. They seem shorter, uglier, or not as nice as their public persona. It’s all down to reputation versus reality and the power of the media to make ordinary people look extraordinary. At other times it is because they have two personas – their stage faces and their normal selves.
When it comes to lighthouses there is none with a more fearsome reputation than the one at Puysegur Point. On mainland New Zealand’s southwestern extreme, it is the Kiwi equivalent of Cape Horn and most of the time it is all violent seas, gales and horizontal rain.
The name Puysegur, while hard to spell, has a quirky history. Lieutenant Dumont d’Urville, while on his first South Pacific expedition aboard the La Coquille (later to become the Astrolabe) is said to have bestowed the name in honour of AntoineHyacinthe-Anne de Chastenet de Puységur.
The beach at Otago Retreat hut with our cruise vessel at anchor in the bay and Coal Island behind it
Puységur was from an aristocratic French family which had funded the expedition and, as is the nature of these things, he never visited the fearsome location that had been bestowed with his name.
At the time, much of the scientific investigation and geographic exploration of the world was privately funded by aristocratic families. Along with his brothers, Puységur was one of the founding members of the ‘Society of Universal Harmony.’ While this sounds a bit New Age, it was notable for many discoveries, none more so than the invention of ‘Animal Magnetism,’ or hypnotism as we would refer to it today.
The brothers funded the works of Franz Anton Mesmer who gave demonstrations on their estates of his hypnotherapy. In one such experiment, Mesmer hypnotised a servant of one of the Puységur brothers named Victor Race. Among other features, the Puységur brothers noted when Victor was hypnotised, he “Displayed a far brighter mind than in his normal condition; he spoke about the ‘normal Victor’ as a third person.” This phenomenon was called “divided consciousness” and was the beginning of the profession we now know as psychology.
Cape Brett – site of another lonely, windswept lighthouse.
In 1879, 55 years after it was named by d’Urville, Puysegur Point became the site for one of New Zealand’s most important lighthouses. It provided one of the last points of navigation reference for ships heading from Sydney to Cape Horn and the markets of Europe. It also gave warning of a fearsome coastline that had claimed more lives than most.
Construction of the wooden lighthouse was difficult because no suitable landing area could be found near the site. All materials and equipment had to be landed some three kilometres away at a thin section of Preservation Inlet named Otago Retreat and a track cut through the heavy bush to transport the materials to Puysegur Point. The Otago Retreat hut is still there and it served as covered storage for supplies that were taken out to the lighthouse by horse-drawn dray for over a century before helicopters took over the role.
Puysegur Point Lighthouse was built in 1883.
Lighthouse keepers by their nature were a tough lot. After the first year of operation, there came a note from the resident keeper to the Marine Department management in Wellington: “I think that the climate at Puysegur Point is seriously endangering our health. Both my wife and I have developed a form of rheumatism which we attribute to the very damp climate here, together with the absence of fresh fruit and vegetables, milk and meat.” He doubled down with, “We often have to work in very bad weather, besides being tormented with thousands of sandflies while working. Therefore I hope, Sir, you will grant us a rise in salary for each of us is doing our best to deserve it!” Then, as now, no good deed went unpunished in the bureaucratic world. All lighthouse keepers’ salaries were decreased shortly afterward.
There is nothing like poverty to focus the mind on other opportunities. Probationary assistant keeper Philip Payn noted the many gold prospectors that would visit on their way to and from Preservation Inlet claims. Payn started working a claim on nearby Coal Island in his spare time. By the end of 1887 he had become so consumed with prospecting that he was dismissed from the lighthouse service for dereliction of duty. Word got out and by late 1890 there were 120 miners camped on Coal Island.
At its peak, the lighthouse had three lighthouse keepers and their families on-site. It resembled a small village with the 12m tower of the light as its focal point. In 1942 all of this suburban paradise was thrown into turmoil when Lance Thomas, a psychiatric patient turned miner from Coal Island, decided that having the loom of the light flash through his window every 15 seconds at night was driving him mad. He set out to fix the problem by holding all the keepers hostage with a rifle, smashing the radiotelephone and setting fire to the timber lighthouse. It burnt to the ground and for nine months this section of the coast remained unlit.
Sunset in Preservation Inlet.
As you would expect, the lighthouse keepers found many distractions to while away the long hours off duty on the station. It was said that for a dose of adrenaline the younger keepers would crawl out to the cliff edge in one of the many raging gales and play a game of chicken, seeing who could lean out over the cliff the furthest before spreading their oilskin coats wide trusting the wind to sail them back to safety.
Technology showed its hand early at Puysegur Point. The Lighthouse boasted one of the most remote phone lines in the world. A single strand of Number 8 wire connected the lighthouse at Puysegur Point with the settlement of Orepuki in Southland. The line went live on July 20, 1908 and paid for itself handsomely 18 months later when the passenger steamer Waikare, on a cruise to the fiords, struck an uncharted rock near the entrance to Dusky Sound and began to sink. All 141 passengers and 85 crew were safely taken off the stricken vessel and landed on a nearby island.
To raise the alarm, second officer Appleyard set out in a lifeboat to Puysegur lighthouse, 60km to the south. Rather than land at Otago Retreat and make the long walk to the station, Appleyard beached his boat directly under the lighthouse and scaled the cliffs to send the mayday message over the telephone.
Now fully automated, Puysegur Point lighthouse is regularly visited by more adventurous tourists.
I had often listened to the marine weather forecast over VHF radio from the comfort of my bunk as the cold, automated voice had given a storm warning for Puysegur with a casual mention of 50 knots. I was intrigued to go there and when the opportunity came to guide a small group by boat to the southernmost fiords, I pounced on it.
We landed on the beach at Otago Retreat and chatted with the hunters staying in the hut that was redolent with the sweet smell of the cooked crayfish they’d eaten for every meal. We set out on the three-kilometre amble along the old bush-clad dray track. Puysegur Point Lighthouse was made automatic in 1980 and most of the houses and outbuildings were removed. As we emerged from the bush line it was the foundations of these buildings that led our eyes down to the stumpy lighthouse with its 35-watt tungsten halogen bulb and its entourage of solar panels.
I am braced for violent seas, 50-knot gales and horizontal rain. I have a vision of staggering to the last few hundred metres to the lighthouse like Captain Oates in a blizzard.
Instead, there is calm, blue skies, heat and a location that could have been a site for a well-appointed, high-end resort. The sandflies are out in force and our group talks in hushed tones, as though the place is in one of Puységur’s states of divided consciousness – hypnotised, perhaps, into a brighter, more reasonable version of itself. BNZ
