Sautter's catalogue of 1858 provides a useful comparison. Plate 43 illustrates specified lanterns for French state vessels, including separate sidelight mountings for paddle steamers and screw steamers. The catalogue also lists commercial models with their own numbers and prices.

The distinction is between the pattern of the equipment and the light it was required to show. An authority could specify a particular construction, while a commercial maker offered its own design to meet the lighting regulations. Two lanterns could therefore perform the same duty without having identical housings or mountings.

A match with a documented pattern is more useful than a general resemblance to a "naval" lamp. A commercial lantern's maker and approval marks may provide a different route to identification; see Identifying a Ship's Lamp.

An Admiralty Pattern number refers to a specified design or item of equipment. It should not be read as the serial number of the individual lantern, or confused with an inspection mark recording that a lamp passed examination.

For an attributed naval lantern, record the complete wording and number, together with the maker's name and any other marks. A pattern number becomes useful when it can be matched to a description, drawing or securely identified example. On its own, it does not establish the lamp's manufacturing date.

"Admiralty regulation" in an advertisement needs different treatment. Miller & Sons exhibited their "Patent Admiralty regulation lights" at the Great Exhibition of 1851, but that wording should not be taken as proof that every such lantern served aboard a naval vessel. The background is covered in The Road to Regulation.

Fishing lanterns offer some of the more distinctive objects in this group. Coastal fishing-boat lanterns survive with a clear front lens and coloured side ports, and some carry the word "Trawling". Their glass arrangement should be compared with the Coastal Fishing Boat Lantern examples rather than assumed to be an ordinary combined sidelight.

A pair of separate lanterns can also be informative. Compare the housings, fittings, maker's marks and numbers before treating two loose lamps as an original pair. Matching red and green glass is a clue to investigate, not sufficient evidence on its own.

An ordinary navigation lamp found aboard a fishing vessel need not have been a special fishing light. The rules distinguished a vessel actually fishing from one proceeding without working her gear.

Portable lanterns and sliding coloured plates are worth examining as construction features, not merely as incomplete versions of larger fixed lights.

Article 6 of the 1863 regulations allowed portable sidelights for small sailing vessels where fixed lights could not be carried. The lanterns were to be painted externally in the colour of their light and provided with suitable screens. This gives a specific historical reason for preserving red or green paint; see Painted Ship's Lamps.

Article 9 described a lantern for open fishing boats and other open boats with a green slide on one side and a red slide on the other. The appropriate colour was to be shown in time to approaching traffic.

Surviving slide guides and coloured plates can therefore be part of an intended lighting arrangement. They should be recorded before assuming that the lantern has been altered.

Some distinctions depended on how ordinary lanterns were arranged. A tug could carry matching Masthead Lights vertically, while a Towing Light is a separately defined light. A loose masthead lantern does not identify its former vessel as a tug.


Pilot vessels likewise used a prescribed combination of lights and signals. Their historical requirements are described in The French Decree of 28 May 1858.


A red all-round lantern also needs more evidence before it can be assigned to a particular service. For lamps associated with a vessel's condition rather than its trade, see Not Under Command.

Primary: Order in Council, Osborne House, 9 January 1863, articles 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9; Order in Council, 14 August 1879; Washington Conference recommendations, 1889; Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 10 June 1948, rules 3, 4 and 15, published in the British Treaty Series in 1954; French decree on ships' lights, 28 May 1858, reproduced in L. Sautter & Cie, Phares et fanaux lenticulaires, Paris 1858, pp. XIX–XX, with plate 43 and the price list; Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 1851, vol. II, pp. 662–663, for Miller & Sons' regulation lights.

Secondary: J.F. Kemp, Factors in the Prevention of Collisions at Sea, 1973, appendix II; R. Bahr, MPhil thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998, for Miller & Sons and the Great Exhibition.