Lights Against the Sea: North Sea Shipwrecks and Lighthouses, 1593–2026

A Shallow Sea Full of Ships

For two centuries London's coal came by sea. The colliers, many of them old and all of them heavily laden, sailed from the Tyne down a lee shore lined with sandbanks, and on this map of about 21,000 North Sea wrecks their route to the Thames is one long red streak. The lights came to that coast first and thickest: coal fires on towers, then the world's first lightships, moored where there was no rock to build on. Near a new light there were about 12% fewer wrecks than the trend predicted. The wrecks became rare only when sail gave way to steam, and how fast that went is the one thing this record cannot say exactly.

The wrecks come from Wikipedia's 'List of shipwrecks in …' pages, compiled by volunteers mostly from Lloyd's List, The Times and other newspapers of the day: about 40,000 casualties that could be placed in the North Sea, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat, some 21,000 of them total losses. The red patches are those losses, counted over the ten years before each date; the yellow dots are 449 lighthouses and lightships, each appearing in the year it was first lit. Watch the English coast from 1805 on: the Goodwin Sands, Yarmouth Roads and the mouth of the Tyne turn magenta one after the other and stay that way into the 1880s.

1593: The Christmas Storm at Texel

The map opens on Christmas Eve 1593, when a gale hit the Texel roadstead, where the laden merchantmen of the Dutch trade lay at anchor. About 44 ships were lost and wreckage and bodies littered Texel's east coast. The merchant-poet Roemer Visscher named his daughter Maria Tesselschade ('Texel damage') after his losses. The next year the Brandaris tower went up on Terschelling, two islands to the north-east, and it still stands as the oldest lighthouse tower in the Netherlands.

The lights of the 17th century were mostly coal fires on towers and cottages, many of them private ventures paid for by dues on passing ships: Lowestoft (1609), Dungeness (1615), the Isle of May and South Foreland (1635), North Foreland (1636) and Lindesnes, Norway's first lighthouse (1656). Trinity House, chartered by Henry VIII in 1514, ran few lights itself until Parliament let it buy out the private owners in 1836. The map counts about 17 lights in 1650 and still only about 30 in 1800, for a sea that carried thousands of ships a year.

The Coal Road from the Tyne to the Thames

As soon as the record thickens, in the 1740s, the pattern is clear: most recorded wrecks are on England's east coast between the Tyne and the Goodwin Sands. The hotspots are Yarmouth Roads and the Haisborough Sands off Norfolk, the mouths of the Humber and the Tyne, and the Goodwin Sands off Kent, the 'ship swallower', where the Great Storm of November 1703 wrecked the Royal Navy's Restoration, Northumberland, Stirling Castle and Mary and drowned over a thousand seamen in one night.

Lightships were invented for exactly this kind of sea. The first in the world was moored at the Nore in the Thames estuary by David Avery and Robert Hamblin in the early 1730s (sources give dates between 1731 and 1734), and the Dudgeon shoal off Norfolk followed in 1736, also under a patent of Avery's. Over the next century the banks off East Anglia and Kent filled with them: the North Goodwin (1793), the Gull Stream (1809), the Shipwash (1837) and the East Goodwin (1874). It was not safe work: in November 1954 the South Goodwin lightship broke both anchor cables in a storm and was driven onto the sands she was there to mark, and all seven of her crew died. The richest wreck of all sank on the other side of the sea. In October 1799 the frigate Lutine, carrying gold and silver to Hamburg, went down off Vlieland with about 240 aboard and one survivor. Her bell, recovered in 1858, hangs at Lloyd's of London.

Rocks, Lifeboats and Heroes

In Scotland the Northern Lighthouse Board was set up in 1786 and lit its first light at Kinnaird Head in 1787; its most famous work, the Bell Rock, on a reef off Arbroath that the sea covers at high tide, was lit in 1811. In England Trinity House lit Flamborough Head in 1806 and the Longstone, on the outer Farne Islands, in 1826. It was from the Longstone in September 1838 that the keeper's daughter Grace Darling and her father William rowed a coble out to the wreck of the paddle steamer Forfarshire and took off nine survivors, which made her a national heroine.

The great disasters of the age also built the rescue services. On Christmas Eve 1811 the St George and the Defence, coming home from the Baltic, were driven onto the bars off Jutland and almost 1,400 men drowned. The RNLI was founded in London in March 1824, and the stranding of the frigate De Vrede at Huisduinen near Den Helder that October, in which six rescuers died, led within weeks to the two Dutch rescue societies that later became the KNRM. A light could also mislead: in 1842 the crew of the Russian ship of the line Ingermanland took the Oksøy light off Kristiansand for another ship's lantern, believed they were far from shore, and 389 people died.

What the Numbers Say

The test is the same as on the sister maps: for every light with a researched first-lit date, count the total losses within 15 km in the 20 years before it was lit and the 20 years after, and compare the second count with what the trend for the whole sea predicted. Across about 120 lights there were about 12% fewer wrecks than expected (11% to 17%, depending on the radius). Ireland scores about 18% on the same test and North America's Atlantic coast nothing at all, so the North Sea sits in the middle. And 12% is an upper estimate: lights were built where the last years had been bad, and a bad stretch is usually followed by a calmer one anyway.

Measured against the trend, the clearest cases are a lightship and a Dutch island. At the Shipwash (1837) the count went from 27 to 16 when 38 were expected, and at Vlieland (1836) from 32 to 25 when 47 were expected. The North Goodwin lightship (1793 in Findlay's lighthouse list of 1861; other accounts say 1795) had 87 losses nearby in the 20 years before and 140 after, which sounds like failure until you see that the growing traffic predicted 282. Elsewhere the wrecks went up: at Flamborough Head and the Longstone the count rose faster than the trend. Part of that is the reports themselves: once a lighthouse stands somewhere, a wreck is described as 'ashore near the Longstone', and the map puts it there.

The Fall, and a Hole in the Record

In this record the peak is 1865 to 1879, with about 250 total losses a year. In the late 1880s the lists show about 100 a year (but from 1882 they hold only about half as many entries for every sea), in the 1920s about 30. Between those sits a hole: for 1891 to 1913 Wikipedia has one list per year instead of one per month, with far fewer entries, and the lists on either side of the hole are not compiled with the same thoroughness. So this map cannot say how steep the fall was, or exactly when it began. That there was a fall is not in doubt: Ireland's national wreck inventory, which owes nothing to Wikipedia, drops from about 159 recorded wrecks a year in the 1850s to about 22 in the 1930s. The causes reached the whole sea at once: Robert FitzRoy's telegraphed storm warnings, first issued in February 1861; the Plimsoll load line of 1876, which ended the worst of the overloaded 'coffin ships'; steam and steel replacing sail and wood; and radio. In March 1899 the East Goodwin lightship, linked to the shore by Marconi, sent what is credited as the first radio distress call.

Twice the red comes back, in the frames for 1916 to 1920 and for 1945. In September 1914 a single U-boat, U-9, sank the cruisers Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy in one morning and 1,459 men died; at Jutland in 1916, 25 ships and about 8,650 men were lost. After 1945 came radio navigation (the Decca Navigator, 1946), the world's first traffic separation scheme in the Dover Strait (1967, compulsory from 1977), GPS and AIS. The disasters of the modern North Sea are rarely ships lost on sandbanks. They are oil platforms (Sea Gem 1965, Alexander L. Kielland 1980, Piper Alpha 1988), ferries that sail with the bow door open or catch fire (Herald of Free Enterprise 1987, Scandinavian Star 1990) and cargo that goes overboard or burns (MSC Zoe 2019, Fremantle Highway 2023). No lighthouse would have helped with any of them. The last pin on the map is from March 2025, when the container ship Solong ran into an anchored tanker off the Humber in daylight.

How to Read the Map

The red comes in three classes, counted over the ten years before each date: orange for one or more total losses per 100 km², red for 3.5 or more, magenta for ten or more (the sister maps use other thresholds, so compare patterns, not colours). A yellow dot labelled 'lit' has a researched first-lit date; one labelled 'tower of' comes from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata and carries the year of the present tower, so the first light there may be older. Red pins tell the big stories, other pins mark changes in technology and rescue, and the small dots are about 1,250 individual wrecks: click one for its entry. Wrecks sit at the town, sandbank or headland the entry names, so positions are approximate. The sources are British, so the coasts of Norway, Sweden and the Wadden Sea are under-recorded, not safer. And because of the hole in the lists, the frames for 1895 to 1910 show no red at all but a grey 'wreck lists incomplete' wash, and the 1916 and 1920 frames count only the years from 1914, rather than show a false calm.

How the Map Was Made

We downloaded the 1,294 'List of shipwrecks in …' pages from the English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and read about 245,000 entries. Each entry links to the places it mentions; those were located with GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and with the coordinates of the Wikipedia articles themselves, and every placement was checked, because a link to Boston means Massachusetts unless the entry also names a North Sea region. The hotspots are a smoothed density of the placed total losses. The 449 lighthouses, lightships and harbour lights combine first-lit dates researched from national lighthouse authorities, Wikipedia and lighthouse histories with OpenStreetMap lighthouses (ODbL) dated through Wikidata; only researched dates were used for the analysis. The stories draw mainly on Wikipedia, with Den Store Danske (lex.dk) and the RNLI's Lifeboat journal archive for details.

Chronological Timeline

• 24 December 1593 — The Christmas storm wrecks about 44 ships at Texel
• November 1703 — The Great Storm on the Goodwin Sands
• 1731–1734 — The first lightship, at the Nore
• October 1799 — HMS Lutine lost off Vlieland
• 1811 — Bell Rock lit; St George and Defence lost off Jutland
• 1824 — The RNLI (March) and, after the De Vrede disaster, the Dutch rescue societies (November)
• September 1838 — Grace Darling and the Forfarshire
• February 1861 — FitzRoy's first telegraphed storm warnings
• 1865–1879 — Peak of the record: about 250 total losses a year
• 1876 — The Plimsoll load line becomes law
• March 1899 — First radio distress call, from the East Goodwin lightship
• November 1954 — The South Goodwin lightship lost on the sands she marked
• 1967 — Traffic lanes in the Dover Strait, compulsory from 1977
• 6 July 1988 — Piper Alpha
• March 2025 — The Solong runs into an anchored tanker off the Humber