Lighthouses glow bright in history
Editor's note: Bob Krauss is on vacation. This column first ran in The Advertiser on March 3, 1996.
By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist
Hawai'i lighthouses have stood guard since monarchy days.
Oahu's lighthouses stand on lava bluffs facing the sea.
Cynics might argue that the romance drained out when O'ahu's last lighthouse keeper locked his cottage at Makapu'u.
He was Ron Cianfarani, a Coast Guard boatswain first class, who hauled down the flag at 2 p.m. on Jan. 4, 1974. His wife said she wouldn't miss the loneliness and the problem of getting their child to school from that isolated outpost.
The lighthouse switched to automation.
It is there because of a spectacular shipwreck in 1909. The luxurious Pacific mail liner Manchuria went aground in a freak fog where Sea Life Park is now. The captain attributed the wreck to the absence of a lighthouse.
There was no road to Makapu'u Point then. Construction materials had to be hauled by winch 450 feet up the cliff from a ship.
The lens had been ground in Paris, one of the most powerful ever used in an American lighthouse. It contains 1,188 separate prisms and was considered a technological marvel of its time.
The first recorded shipwreck in Hawai'i took place at Barbers Point when Capt. Henry Barber in the trading brig Arthur, en route from Waikiki to Kaua'i, hit the reef in a storm.
The ship was a total loss but Kamehameha ordered his haole chief, John Young, to salvage the cargo of furs. Yet it wasn't until 1888 that the Hawaiian monarchy built a lighthouse at Barbers Point.
On Jan. 14, 1923, the schooner Bianca shredded her canvas in a gale off Barbers Point. The captain threw out his anchor to save his ship from going on the reef.
Lighthouse keeper Manuel Ferreira saw the vessel in distress and walked through the storm to the nearest telephone three miles away. The USS Sunnadin steamed from Honolulu Harbor and towed the Bianca in.
O'ahu's most familiar lighthouse is at Diamond Head, built in 1899. Before that, in 1878, a lookout station was manned there by a watchman who became a legend, Diamond Head Charley Peterson. A recluse, he never came to town, faithfully reporting sightings of ships headed for Honolulu Harbor.
Grateful merchants took up a collection for Diamond Head Charley every Christmas. He stayed on even after the lighthouse was built and didn't retire until 1902.
