NARRAGANSETT, R.I. (AP) – The Hurricane of 1938 decimated fishing villages and flooded cities, killing 600 people when it struck Long Island and New England with almost no warning.

Eyewitness accounts abound of the storm’s impact. But decades later, little is known about the destruction of Whale Rock Light, an offshore lighthouse toppled in the storm, and about the death of its keeper, Walter Eberle.

“Nobody knows about it,” said Barbara Bramwell, Eberle’s 77-year-old daughter, who was 10 when he died.

Eberle’s children and an underwater archaeologist are trying to piece together what happened when the hurricane struck on Sept. 21, 1938. It’s a tale, they say, about devotion to duty from a former Navy man who never abandoned his post.

“He was very heroic,” said Dorothy Roach, now 79, the oldest of Eberle’s children.

On the morning of the hurricane, the forecast called for gusty winds and choppy seas. Eberle said goodbye to his wife and six children and rowed out early for his multi-day shift at Whale Rock Light, perched on a bedrock outcropping at the entrance to a key shipping passage that led to Providence.

The light, made of cast iron and called a “sparkplug light” due to its shape, was completed in 1882, two years after the passenger steamer Rhode Island ran aground nearby. The prefabricated structure was placed on Whale Rock, about a half-mile from the nearest point onshore. Along with the beacon at Beavertail Point, it bracketed the entrance into Narragansett Bay’s West Passage.

Eberle had been working at Whale Rock Light for about a year, as the second assistant keeper. He took the job, his children believe, because he loved the sea.

It was an undesirable assignment.

The lighthouse stood exposed to the weather and battering surf, unlike others in Rhode Island that were on land or more sheltered in the bay. The keepers were isolated, with no way to communicate with the mainland. The quarters were cold and cramped. Its round walls made it feel like living in a tube. There was a lot of turnover.

“Definitely one of the worst assignments in southern New England,” said Jeremy D’Entremont, author of a book on lighthouses.

Eberle didn’t seem to mind, his children say, because he was finally closer to his family in Newport. Eberle had run away from home in Webster City, Iowa, when he was 15 and enlisted in the Navy.

He retired after 20 years and worked briefly at a chewing gum factory before taking the lighthouse job.

“He was a quite a character. He was a good father,” said Bramwell, who lives in Norton, Mass.

About the time Eberle was rowing out to the lighthouse, the unnamed hurricane was hurtling north at 60 miles per hour. It hit that afternoon, at high tide and with a storm surge that reached 15 feet in Narragansett Bay.

Whale Rock Light was punched by a roundhouse that sent the six-story structure crashing into the surf, believes David Robinson, the underwater archaeologist who has surveyed the wreckage and wants to map the site.

“It just detonated,” Robinson said.

All that remains of the lighthouse is its 20-foot-high concrete and granite base.

It’s not known what Eberle was doing when the storm struck – or if he even knew what had happened. His body was never found. He was the only lighthouse keeper who died in the hurricane.

Eberle’s wife, Agnes, got the news early the next morning from Dan Sullivan, the head keeper.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said, her children recall.

She died three years later of tuberculosis. The orphaned children – the youngest was 6 – were split up. They weren’t reunited until eight years later.

Roach said it was a hellish experience. “It seemed like the whole world was against us,” she said.

Robinson has been intrigued by the lighthouse’s saga since he was a child. He’d peer at the squarish base that, combined with the elongated rocks on either side, looked like a breaching submarine. Later, as he became a certified diver with a graduate degree in anthropology, his interest grew.

“It’s a childhood fascination,” said Robinson, 41, who works for a nonprofit group called Public Archaeology Laboratory, Inc. in Pawtucket.

Robinson has dived several times around Whale Rock, most recently in August. He’s seen the riveted iron plates that formed the exterior of the lighthouse and sections of railing that made up Whale Rock Light’s balconies.

Robinson is working with the Coast Guard, which has jurisdiction over Whale Rock Light, and state and community groups, to document the saga. He has lobbied for an informational marker at Beavertail State Park in Jamestown, from where Whale Rock Light can be seen. He also plans to create a nonprofit association – which Eberle’s children’s support – to stir up interest.

Eberle’s children are thankful for his efforts. Robinson said he wouldn’t have gone forward if they’d balked.

“The real meaning behind it is,” Robinson said as he returned by boat from Whale Rock Light on a recent weekend, “whatever kind of satisfaction or happiness that it brings to them to know that somebody cares, to remind people about their Dad and about the event that happened here.”