Kish lightship

Kish lightship

In Brief

"Kish" refers, several times in the novel, to the Kish Bank, a dangerous sandbar approximately seven miles east of Dublin with a long history of wrecking oceangoing vessels. The shoals now have a lighthouse, but in 1904 a "lightship" was moored there, supplied and manned (as the lighthouse is today) by the "Irish lights board," a government agency charged with maritime safety.

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In Proteus Stephen asks himself, "Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship, am I?" In Nausicaa, Bloom reclines on the same Sandymount beach and sees a light far out on the waves: "And far on Kish bank the anchored lightship twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom." Such lightships (still to be found in Ireland and the UK) warned pilots of navigation hazards at sites where it would be difficult, impossible, or prohibitively expensive to build a lighthouse. They had large letters on their sides, announcing not the name of the vessel but its location. A stout mast or superstructure supported a single light high enough off the water to be visible from passing ships.

Men were needed to staff these lonely outposts, a fact that arouses Bloom's sympathy in Nausicaa: "Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot." He remembers the crew of the Erin's King "throwing them the sack of old papers," a frail lifeline to civilization. This memory, first recalled in Calypso, comes from a time when Bloom took his daughter Milly "On the Erin's King that day round the Kish."

John Hunt 2013
A lightship bound for the Kish Bank being launched into the River Dart in Devon, England, in a photograph of unknown date. Source: www.simplonpc.co.uk.
Lightship moored on the Brake Bank, part of the notoriously dangerous Goodwin Sands off the coast of southeastern England, in a photograph of unknown date. Source: www.simplonpc.co.uk.