A Dreadful Accident Has Happened: The Unexplained Disappearance Without a Trace of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse Keepers December 1900

 Noon on the day after Christmas in the year 1900.  

The crew of the Irish clipper ship Hesperus reached the coast of the Flannel Isles and prepared to dock alongside the desolate, rocky, archipelago's newly built lighthouse.  Upon arrival, the crew of the Hesperus discover that the lighthouse has no flag flying from its mast and no one greets the newly arrived clipper to welcome them ashore.  The Hesperus’ Captain Jim Harve, blows his ship’s whistle and fires a flare skyward hoping for a response, but the Flannel Isle and its lighthouse remain silent and seemingly abandoned.

After a few tense moments a boat is launched from the Hesperus and a sailor named Joseph Moore, who himself is an experienced lighthouse keeper, is sent ashore.

Moore arrives at the Flannan Isle Lighthouse and finds the gate closed; the beds unmade and all the clocks not set to the proper time-something very uncommon in the highly disciplined maritime world of the United Kingdom.

A search of the Isle is launched and more sailors from the Hesperus come ashore.  Upon further investigation all of the lighthouse keepers' oilskins and winter gear are found stowed away and untouched on the island. Logbooks whose last entries are dated December 7, 1900 are discovered open and seemingly in order with routine entries recorded in a timely manner.  The crew of the Hesperus fans out to conduct a search of the Flannel Isles for the missing keepers but no trace of the men is ever found.

It is as if three men, James Ducat experienced and Principal Lighthouse Keeper of the Flannan Isles, Thomas Marshall Second Assistant Lighthouse Keeper and Donald McArthur Occasional Lighthouse Keeper who had been filling in for the 3rd Assistant Lighthouse Keeper William Rose who was out on sick-leave, have all vanished into thin air without a trace.

Built only the year before in 1899, at the time the Flannan Isle Lighthouse was considered state of the art.  It was built at a cost of nearly $300,000 in today’s money and was designed by engineer David Alan Stevenson who designed or helped to design twenty-six other lighthouses in and around Scotland in his lifetime.  

Ironically enough, the Flannan Isle Lighthouse commissioned by the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB) of the United Kingdom became officially operational on December 7, 1899 exactly a year to the day before the last entry in its logbook and the inexplicable disappearance of its crew.

Ducat, Marshall and McArthur 1900

The rescue ship Hesperus was not the first vessel to realize, or report, that something might be amiss with the Flannan Isle Lighthouse.  On December 15, 1900 the steamship Archtor sailing from its home port of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to the Scottish port of Leith near Edinburgh noted in its logbook that the lighthouse on Flannan Isle was not operational.

News of this was passed on to the Northern Lighthouse Board when the Archtor docked in Leith and it was immediately decided to launch an investigative relief expedition on December 19th but due to inclement weather off the coast of northern Scotland the aforementioned Hesperus under the command of Captain Harve was not able to reach the Flannan Isle Lighthouse until nearly a full week later on the day after Christmas.

 The Flannan Isles, sometimes referred to even today by sailors as “The Seven Hunters” on account of how many ships have been destroyed on those most inhospitable rocky outcroppings, and how many ghosts of dead sailors are said to haunt the land, are a chain of  seven uninhabited islets that are part of the Hebrides Islands off the coast of northern Scotland.  The closest populated area to the Flannan Isles is the Isle of Lewis which is about eighteen or so nautical miles to the east of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse.           

This means that at the time of their unexplained disappearance James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur  were the only living souls around for nearly twenty miles!  In fact, the Flannan Isles themselves have been completely uninhabited since the year 1971 when the Flannan Isle Lighthouse became completely automated and no longer required the need for any permanent lighthouse keepers.

To this day the Flannan Isles are visited only by the occasional tourist group interested in the remote Isles wildlife or its historical value as a place that medieval monks called Eilean Mor in gaelic.  Many ascetics journeyed to the place known as Eilean Mor in search of the solitude and desolation that they sought to commune with God during the high Middle Ages. 

Location of the Hebrides off Scotland

Also, in the last five years, or so, interest in visiting the lighthouse has increased after the making of a feature film in 2018 called The Vanishing which detailed one possible (highly fictionalized) theory that might account for the unexplained disappearance of the three lighthouse keepers back in the year 1900.

Essentially, the movie The Vanishing centers around the volatile personalities of the three lighthouse keepers and proposes that their disappearance may have been caused by a murder, or a murder suicide that was the result of something that may have either washed ashore or been discovered on the Flannan Isles by the lighthouse keepers   And though their is evidence that some of the men may have quarreled, any theory about a crime, or some unknown discovery, is nothing more than mere speculation at best.

To this day it remains impossible to say what exactly happened to the lighthouse keepers of the Flannan Isles, but from the very moment that the Hesperus landed on its rocky shores in an ill-fated rescue mission theories ranging from the highly plausible to the absurdly far-fetched have abounded to try and explain the disappearance.

Captain Harve of the rescue ship Hesperus wasted absolutely no time in trying to come up with an explanation of his own for what happened to the lighthouse keepers when he telegraphed from his ship on December 26, 1900 back to the Northern Lighthouse Board that: 

“A dreadful accident has happened at the Flannans.  The three keepers, Ducat, Marshall and the Occasional have disappeared from the Island.  The clocks were stopped and other signs indicated that the dreadful accident must have happened about a week ago.  Poor fellows…they must have been blown over the cliffs or drowned while trying to secure a crane.”

Blown over the cliffs?  Must have been quite a wind to catch three unhealthy men so unawares, though the rocky surface of the Flannan Isles can become quite slippery and wind gusts in the northern Hebrides can become fierce, almost hurricane-like in nearly an instant, so that such an accident is possible, even for a small group of men used to living in desolate places on islands and along coastlines tending to lighthouses.

It is also possible, as Captain Harve states, that the three men could simply have fallen off the island while attempting to operate a crane based on the rope and pulley system.  A box, or some nautical wreckage coming ashore would have been a most welcome and intriguing break from the tedious monotony of keeping the Flannan Isle lighthouse and using cranes and pulleys is how most supplies were brought ashore.  In this scenario it is most likely that one of the three men fell off the rocky cliff face and then the other two were drowned in an ill-fated rescue attempt.  In the coming days after the Hesperus came ashore wreckage, and flotsam and jetsam, would be found on the isle that could be used to justify such a scenario but it should always be kept in mind that no bodies of the missing and assumed drowned lighthouse keepers ever washed ashore or were ever discovered anywhere.

Needless to say, Captain Harve and the men of the Hesperus were at a complete loss to truly explain what happened to the keepers of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse and to explain how three men could so suddenly vanish without a trace.

The men of the Hesperus literally scoured the island for any clues and they stayed there for days searching every inch of the isle for any sign of the missing keepers and their fate.  On the east side of the island, the side of the island facing Scotland itself and the side closest to land, everything appeared intact and nothing out of the ordinary was discovered.

But on the west end of the island the men of the Hesperus found considerable damage to structures there which would most likely have been indicative of a recent storm.

Clipper Ship Hesperus

On the 29th of December 1900, while the crew of the Hesperus was still searching the Isles for signs of the missing lighthouse keeper Robert Muirhead an official Superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board arrived on the island to conduct and conclude an “official” NLB investigation into the men’s disappearance.  It should be noted that Muirhead had personally hand selected each of the three men to be keepers of the Flannan Isle Lighthouse and that he knew each of the men, and their temperaments, well.

He looked at the clothing that the men left behind and at the wreckage that had been found on the island.  Muirhead concluded that there had been a fierce storm with heavy rains and he determined, oddly enough, that Ducat, Marshall and McArthur had left their dwellings in their undershirts in a heavy driving December rain and gone down to the water’s edge.  He said in his official report that the storm must have been quite fierce and sudden because, “Some of the damage sustained on the island would have been difficult to believe without seeing.”

Muirhead’s official report for the NLB echoed many of the same conjectures that Captain Harve had come up with when he first landed on the island only days before.  Muirhead’s official statement read: 

From evidence that I was able to procure, I was satisfied that the men had been on duty until dinnertime on the 15th of December; that they had gone down to secure a box in which the mooring ropes, landing ropes etc. were kept and which was secured in a crevice of rock about 110 feet above sea level, and that an extra large wave, had rushed up the face of the rock, had gone above them, and coming down with immense force had swept them completely away….

Swept them completely away without a trace.  Possible, but from the very moment that the NLB’s official report was released conjecture on what really happened to the Flannan Isle Lighthouse keepers has run rampant.

No bodies have ever been found and no personal effects from any of the three have ever been found out at sea or washed ashore.  Many pointed to a cover-up of a crime, like a murder-suicide, by the NLB which is plausible because a lot of people would have wanted to continue their careers and not have been held responsible for appointing three mentally unfit men (or even ex-cons!) to keep the lighthouse that was a maritime crown jewel of Scotland at the time.

Some local residents in northern Scotland said that the men had most likely been abducted, part of a late Victorian-Era espionage scheme gone wrong, which is not as ridiculous as it sounds because in the early part of the 20th century the desolate ports of Scotland were a known way stations for spies from continental Europe, most notably Russia and Germany, to enter the United Kingdom.

Those who believe in legend say the Flannan Isle Lighthouse Keepers were murdered by “The Seven Hunters” mournful ghosts, the restless spirits of sailors long passed that died on the rocky shores of the inhospitable Hebrides.

Giant waves, government cover-ups, spies and ghosts.  In the first year of the 20th century three men vanished from the Flannan Isles without a trace and it remains, to this day, one of history’s most enduring mysteries that was most aptly commemorated by Georgian Era poet Wilfred Wilson Gibson in a famous work called Flannan Isle:

Yet as we crowded through the door

We only saw a table spread

For dinner, meat and cheese and bread;

But all untouched and no one there.

As though, when they sat down to eat,

Ere they could even taste,

Alarm had come, and they in Haste

Had risen and left the bread and meat,

For at the table head a chair

Lay tumbled on the floor….