Ida Lewis

Lewis was fifteen when her father, keeper of the Lime Rock light in Newport harbour, had a stroke, and she took over the work: rowing her siblings to school, carrying supplies, and tending the lamp. Four months later she made her first rescue, pulling four young men out of the water after they capsized a boat. Over the following decades she went out again and again, in winter, sometimes without stopping to put on a coat, and the recognised count of lives she saved is eighteen; local people always said the real number was higher.

She was not officially appointed keeper until 1879, long after she had been doing the job, and was for a time the highest-paid keeper in the country because the government could not credibly pay her less. Newport made her a local celebrity — a national magazine put her on its cover, and President Grant came to shake her hand — and she found the attention tiresome and kept working. She was still keeper at sixty-nine when she died at the lighthouse. The harbour bells were rung for her. The rock now carries her name.