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Title: Lighthouses
Their history and romance

Author: William John Hardy

Release date: May 7, 2025 [eBook #76041]

Language: English

Original publication: Not Listed: The Religious Tract Society, 1895

Credits: Bryan Ness and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIGHTHOUSES ***

LIGHTHOUSES

THEIR HISTORY AND ROMANCE

Oxford
HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

[Illustration: THE FIRST LIGHTHOUSE AT DUNGENESS.

(_From a receipt for Lighthouse dues, dated December 19, 1690, in the
possession of Lord Kenyon._)]

LIGHTHOUSES

THEIR HISTORY AND ROMANCE

BY
W. J. HARDY, F.S.A.
AUTHOR OF ‘THE HANDWRITING OF THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF ENGLAND;’
‘BOOK PLATES,’ ETC.
 WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS

THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY

56 PATERNOSTER ROW, AND 65 ST. PAUL’S CHURCHYARD
1895

[Illustration: THE EDDYSTONE MEDAL, 1757.]

PREFACE

I have for some years past devoted a good deal of time to the study of
facts connected with the history of English coast-lighting, and I have
now woven together into this volume such of the scattered references to
the subject which I have found, and have entitled it, _Lighthouses: their
History and Romance_. That there is much romantic incident in connection
with our lighthouses, and that many of them possess interesting
histories, the reader of the following pages will, I think, admit; and
it is really surprising that no history of them has before this been
compiled.

I could not have obtained the facts I have here been able to bring
together had I not received constant and generous assistance from all
those in whose power it was to render it; and were I to attempt to convey
to the officials of the British Museum and Public Record Office, who have
assisted me, individual thanks, I should unduly prolong this preface. Yet
I cannot leave unrecorded my gratitude to Mr. W. Y. Fletcher, F.S.A.,
late of the Printed Books Department, in the first-named office, and to
Mr. G. H. Overend, F.S.A., in the latter.

Not one half of the facts here recorded could have been obtained had I
not received free and full access to the muniments of the Corporation of
the Trinity House. This was accorded to me through the instrumentality of
Sir Edward Birkbeck, Bart., and my good friend, his brother, Mr. Robert
Birkbeck, F.S.A. I presented their introduction to Sir Sydney Webb,
K.C.M.G., the Deputy-Master of the Trinity House, and that gentleman,
Mr. Kent, the Secretary, and Mr. Weller, one of the officials of the
department, gave me every assistance in their power and the freest access
to their records. To Mr. Dibdin and his assistants at the National
Lifeboat Institution I also desire to express my gratitude for various
information supplied, and in particular for some of the wreck incidents I
have mentioned.

I am particularly grateful to Lord Kenyon for allowing the reproduction

of two very interesting contemporary pictures of seventeenth-century
lighthouses—those at Dungeness and the Scillies; and to Mr. Mill
Stephenson, F.S.A., the Secretary of the Royal Archaeological Institute,
for the use of one of the illustrations—the Silver Model of Winstanley’s
Eddystone Lighthouse—that appeared, some years ago, in the Journal of the
Society.

My thanks are due, and I return them with pleasure, to my fellow-worker,

Mr. William Page, F.S.A., who has always brought to my knowledge any fact
connected with Lighthouse history that he came upon in his researches.

In presenting to the public the last volume which I published through

the Religious Tract Society, _The Handwriting of the Kings and Queens
of England_, I was permitted to thank the Rev. Richard Lovett, M.A., the
Society’s Book Editor, for his constant help and advice in bringing out
that work. I trust that I may be again accorded the privilege of thanking
him for his unfailing courtesy and good nature in discussing and settling
points of detail in connection with this present work.

W. J. HARDY.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I.

ANCIENT AND MEDIAEVAL LIGHTHOUSES 17

CHAPTER II.

THE TRINITY HOUSE 29

CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT METHODS OF LIGHTING 39

CHAPTER IV.

GRACE DARLING 45

CHAPTER V.

THE SPURN HEAD 53

CHAPTER VI.

THE HUMBER TO THE THAMES 62

CHAPTER VII.

THE NORE LIGHTSHIP 71

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GOODWIN SANDS AND THE FORELANDS 79

CHAPTER IX.

DUNGENESS LIGHTHOUSE 95

CHAPTER X.

ST. CATHERINE’S POINT TO THE EDDYSTONE 101

 CHAPTER XI.

SUGGESTIONS FOR A LIGHTHOUSE ON THE EDDYSTONE—HENRY WINSTANLEY 108

CHAPTER XII.

THE FIRST EDDYSTONE 120

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SECOND EDDYSTONE 140

CHAPTER XIV.

THE THIRD AND FOURTH LIGHTHOUSES AT THE EDDYSTONE 148

CHAPTER XV.

THE LIZARD 163

CHAPTER XVI.

THE WOLF, THE LAND’S END, AND THE LONGSHIPS 176

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SCILLIES 190

CHAPTER XVIII.

LIGHTHOUSES ON THE WESTERN COAST 204

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

THE FIRST LIGHTHOUSE AT DUNGENESS _Frontispiece_

THE EDDYSTONE MEDAL, 1757 7

THE BELL ROCK LIGHTHOUSE 16

THE PHAROS, ALEXANDRIA 19

ANCIENT COAST-LIGHT 38

OUTER FARNE LIGHTHOUSE 45

GRACE DARLING AND HER FATHER ON THE WAY TO THE WRECK 49

GRACE DARLING 51

MODEL OF THE FIRST LIGHTSHIP 70

 MODEL OF A LIGHTSHIP BUILT IN 1790 73

PACK OF PLAYING CARDS DESIGNED BY WINSTANLEY 116

WINSTANLEY’S EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE 129

SILVER MODEL OF EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE AFTER ALTERATION 134

RUDYERD’S EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE 141

THE EDDYSTONE BUILT BY SMEATON 149

SMEATON’S MODE OF DOVETAILING THE STONES 151

SMEATON’S CHANDELIER 154

SECTION OF THE EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE BUILT BY SMEATON 156

THE PRESENT EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE 159

WOLF ROCK LIGHTHOUSE 178

LONGSHIPS LIGHTHOUSE 182

THE WRECKER 186

ST. AGNES LIGHTHOUSE, SCILLY ISLES 193

THE BISHOP’S ROCK LIGHTHOUSE 202

THE SMALLS LIGHTHOUSE 207

LIGHTHOUSE AT HOLYHEAD 218

[Illustration: THE BELL ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.]

CHAPTER I

ANCIENT AND MEDIAEVAL LIGHTHOUSES

‘The good old Abbot of Aberbrothock

Had placed that bell on the Inchcape Rock;
On a buoy, in the storm, it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung.

When the rock was hid by the surge’s swell

The mariners heard the warning bell,
And then they knew the perilous rock,
And blessed the Abbot of Aberbrothock!’

It was very good of the old abbot so to do; but in doing what he did, he
was no better than a great many of his fellows. Marking dangerous reefs,
and leading the mariner safely into port, were, formerly, the work of
Christian charity; they were two of the many useful offices which the
Church performed when there was no one else to carry them out, and for
which we, who see the same things so much better done, often forget to
bestow upon her even a word of praise or gratitude. Bells on rocks,
marks on shoals and sands, and beacon lights used to be maintained by the
great monasteries, or by their various offshoots, in this country; and
those beacon lights, dim, flickering, and uncertain though they may have
been, were the direct ancestors of the modern lighthouse.

We do not, of course, claim for Christian charity the credit of

_originating_ the idea of these warning signals for ships. Long before
the dawn of Christianity, Lybians, Cushites, Romans, Greeks, and
Phoenicians had protected navigation by the means of lighthouses—high
columns, on the summits of which were placed fires of wood in open
grates, or lamps lit by oil, all similar in style, though on a smaller
scale, to the wonderful tower of white marble, erected at Alexandria,
nearly three centuries before the birth of Christ, by Ptolemy
Philadelphus at a cost of about £170,000 of our money.

[Illustration: THE PHAROS, ALEXANDRIA.]

Opinions differ as to whom should be ascribed the honour of paying for

this mighty work; Alexander the Great and Cleopatra have been credited
with it; but, on the whole, such reliable evidence as there is points
more to Ptolemy as its projector. This being so, we may perhaps believe
the story about the inscription that was placed upon the tower. The
architect’s name was Sostratos, and he, desiring to be perpetually
remembered in connection with the lighthouse, cut deeply into one of the
stones these words: ‘Sostratos of Guidos, son of Dixiphanus, to the Gods
protecting those upon the sea.’ Then—being assured that Ptolemy would
permit no name save his own to be remembered in connection with the
work—he coated over the inscription with a layer of cement, and placed
thereon one wholly laudatory of Ptolemy and associating his name alone
with the erection of the pillar. Time went by; monarch and architect had
been gathered to their fathers, and at last the cement began to crack,
and then drop away; bit by bit it vanished together with the writing upon
it, and the letters on the true face of the stone beneath stood out clear
and readable—then the world knew to whose skill was due this blessing to
sailors and travellers!

But it is not needful to speak further of these more ancient lighthouses,

or their builders; reference is made to them only to remind the reader
of the antiquity of coast lighting as a system. These pages concern
the lighthouses of our own country alone, and there is no evidence to
prove or suggest that the shores of England were lighted prior to the
Roman occupation. Indeed, of direct evidence of lighthouses being used
by the Romans in Britain, there is exceedingly little. The system was
extensively employed by them in Gaul, and the Tour d’Ordre at Boulogne—or
‘the Old Man of Bullen,’ as Elizabethan sailors called it—is mentioned
as a lighthouse in the year 191 A.D.; so that it is hardly likely
that the Romans would, for long, have left navigation around England
unassisted by lights.

We may, therefore, accept the ruined tower at Dover, and some similar
remains on the English and Welsh coasts, as remains of Roman lighthouses.

Whether or not, with the decay of the Roman power in England, lighthouses
fell to ruin, we do not know; probably this was so, and probably,
too, they were not resuscitated till Christianity had become firmly
established here and was teaching men charity towards their fellow men.
So early as the opening of the fourteenth century we find monks and
hermits in England, and other maritime parts of Europe, doing their best
to warn mariners of the dangers that lurked around their monasteries or
hermitages, by means of lights maintained during the season of darkness.

To the north of the island of Jersey lie a cluster of sharp-pointed

rocks, known as the Ecrehou. Sailors give them a wide berth when they
can; as well they may, for their cruel spike-like reefs stretch far, and
on calm days, when the water is not breaking upon them, they lie silently
and treacherously in wait for the passing ship.

On the largest of these rocks there was, in the year 1309, a hermitage,
or priory, served from the Norman abbey of Val Richer. Land in Jersey
had, years before, been given to support two monks here who, by day, used
to sing masses for the souls of those who had perished by shipwreck, and
then, as night closed in, kindle, and keep burning till daybreak, as good
and bright a light as they could upon their tiny building.

Here is a picture romantic enough, and research would, no doubt, enable

us to paint many such. The ruined chapels that one so often sees to-day,
perched upon a rocky crag or headland of our coast, were often, in all
probability, lighthouses to the mariner of old.

But it is not necessary to leave too much to imagination. A great deal

more can be said to prove that the maintenance of sea-lights was, in
mediaeval England, really a religious office. Most of us have heard of
(many have seen) the famous lighthouse on St. Catherine’s Point in the
Isle of Wight. It was built only at the close of the last century, but
hard by it, from the hermitage chapel on Chale Down, a light had been
nightly kept, by the monks there serving God, for more than five hundred
years. I shall tell the history of this lighthouse later on.

So, too, in 1427, a hermit who had settled at Ravenspurn—close by the

Spurn Point on the Humber—moved by the constant disasters to shipping
that he witnessed, set to work to build a lighthouse to warn vessels
entering the river of the dangers of the point; and of this lighthouse
also I shall have more to say presently.

Then on the chapel of St. Nicholas, which stood above the harbour of
Ilfracombe, there was maintained by the priests who served in the chapel
a fire of wood, which was lighted, throughout the winter, at dusk, and by
being constantly tended gave throughout the night a light that to ships
at a distance seemed like a bright star, and guided them safely into
port. The site of this chapel is yet called Lantern Hill, and a light is
still shown there from a lighthouse at night during the winter months.

In one instance, at least, the work of coast lighting was performed

by a religious guild: the Brethren of the Blessed Trinity of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne—the Trinity House of Newcastle, as it is now called.
In 1537 Henry VIII committed to this guild the general care of all
matters connected with the navigation of the Tyne, and amongst other
things which the guild had expressed its willingness to do, was to build
two towers on the north side of ‘Le Shelys,’ one a certain distance above
the other, to embattle these towers for due defence of the port, and to
maintain on each ‘a good and steady light by night,’ for the guidance of
passing ships. In 1746 these two lighthouses, one of which was movable,
were still standing; they were illuminated only by a few candles, but
were the sole lighthouses of which the River Tyne, at its entrance, could
boast.

Then, to emphasize further the fact that, prior to the religious changes
in the reign of Henry VIII, coast lighting was carried on as a work
of Christian charity, we may call to mind the traditions, so often
associated with the towers or steeples of parish churches on the coast,
that those towers or steeples had once been lighthouses. Blakeney, in
Norfolk, is one of these, Boston is another; from the summit of ‘Boston
Stump’—as the marvellously high tower of the latter church is called—we
are told that a light was formerly displayed by which sailors in the
German Ocean could shape their course to enter ‘Boston Deeps’ in safety.

The dissolution of the monasteries swept away, almost at a blow, the

men who tended these coast lights as a sacred duty, and it confiscated
the property from the profits of which such lights had been maintained.
Leland, when he travelled through England and Wales, after the
dissolution had been some little time in progress, found few coast lights
remaining: here and there he mentions them, but it is difficult, from his
language, to decide whether those he refers to were still nightly lit, or
whether he gained from the sailors and fisher-folk with whom he talked
that they had been regularly lit shortly before.

That our coast, only a little previous to the dissolution, was well
lit, and that lighthouses of some kind or other were not uncommon, we
may gather from the writer of the _Pilgrimage of Perfection_, who, in
the year 1526—when speaking of the benefit to the soul by frequent
contemplation of death—says: ‘It depresseth all vanities, dissolution,
and lightness of manners, and, _like as the beacon lighted in the
night, directeth the mariner to the port intended_, so the meditation
of death maketh man to eschew the rocks and perils of damnation’: and
that, after the dissolution, all, or the great majority, of these lights
were extinguished, we may certainly infer by a study of _The Mariner’s
Mirrour_, compiled by Wagener, a Dutch navigator, in 1586, and translated
into English two years later by Anthony Ashley. Wagener describes
minutely every object on the sea-coast of England, but does not refer to
any nocturnal lights, with the exception of those at Shields, which we
have seen were established under peculiar circumstances and only just
prior to the dissolution.

But the want of lighthouses must have been keenly felt by sailors; and
those engaged in navigation, no longer able to get what was needed as
charity, seem, after a while, to have suggested paying for it. One of the
earliest post-reformation lighthouses suggested was that at Winterton,
for which we hear proposals in 1585, just about the time that Wagener
wrote his description of the English coast. Now what was the site which
naturally suggested itself for establishing this light? Why, _the top of
the church steeple_; where, likely enough, a similar light had formerly
been maintained as an act of charity.

The proposal emanated from ‘the masters of her Majesties Navye,’ and was
made on behalf of the seamen of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk;
‘there be,’ it says, ‘many perillous sandes in the sea, thwarte of
Hasborrowe Winterton, and the towne of Great Yermouthe, wheruppon manye
shippes and men are often perished in the night tyme.’

The danger of these sands might well be avoided ‘iffe a contynuall lighte
were maynteyned uppon the steeple of Winterton,’ which might be easily
done, without any ‘greate imposition or taxation,’ if every English
ship trading by the coast, or to the East countries, paid some small
contribution.

Nothing seems to have come of this proposal, and the next suggestion we
hear of for a lighthouse at Winterton is one some twenty years later in
1607, made by the Trinity House to maintain a light, not on a church
steeple, but in a building specially erected for the purpose.

Nor was this a solitary lighthouse scheme. We hear, just then, of

another—a very mad one, it is true, but none the less interesting on that
account—for a lighthouse on the Goodwins, of which I shall speak later.
Probably there were many more such proposals before Queen Elizabeth and
her council just then, for it is impossible to conceive that men, many of
whom must have had personal experience of the benefits of coast lighting,
would be content to sit down and do without them just because the
religious changes had swept away the machinery that had before supported
them.

CHAPTER II

THE TRINITY HOUSE

Now, some time before the monastic dissolution, there had been founded in
Deptford Church a guild or fraternity of sailors who undertook to watch
over the interests of all concerned in shipping. This guild, dedicated to
the honour of the Trinity, had, by the time of which we are speaking, or
a little later—say the opening years of the reign of James I—come to be
known by the name we know it to-day, the Trinity House, and had developed
into a rich and powerful corporation possessed of important royal
charters, regulating the general management of navigation, and supporting
and administering a number of exceedingly useful charities.

But this great corporation was ambitious, jealous of the powers it

possessed, and greedy to usurp more; the superintendence of the buoys and
beacons which marked out channels by day had become vested in it, and
its governing body alleged that it was also possessed of the sole right
of establishing lighthouses.

The question had arisen in respect to one of the lighthouse schemes we

have just mentioned. It had been proposed, as pointed out, not from
charity, but as a commercial speculation. Persons had come forward and
said they were willing to establish a lighthouse at such and such a
place, and to maintain a light there throughout the night, in return
for certain tolls which they should levy on passing ships; and they had
applied to the sovereign for the necessary licence to gather the toll,
and had received the desired warrant. But, said the Trinity House,
if anybody is to have this privilege, we will; the right to erect
lighthouses and gather money for their support is surely vested in us by
our various charters and Acts of Parliament!

So began a very pretty squabble, that did not die out till hard on the
end of the last century, between the Crown, the Trinity House, and the
private lighthouse speculator or builder. The wealthy shipowners, many
of whom were probably also colliery owners, became alarmed at the number
of lighthouse projects that were quickly launched. It was all very well
to give a voluntary contribution to support one or two lighthouses at
specially dangerous points, but on the whole it paid better to lose a
ship or two now and then, and a few men’s lives, than be put to a regular
fixed charge for the safety of navigation. That was their view, and as
the Trinity House Board was largely composed of men whose interests
were identical, that was their view also. Lighthouses were considered a
luxury, and if bestowed at all the Board must be the bestowers, and the
bestowals be made as seldom as possible.

Debates in Parliament and discussions in the Privy Council followed,

and the opinion of the law officers of the crown was taken. The general
impression seemed to be that the Trinity House was really charged with
the erection and maintenance of coast lights, but that it could not
impose rates for so doing. If it wanted to do that, it must get a special
patent or licence from the crown, and this the crown might give either to
the Trinity House or to any private individual.

And so the squabble went on till towards the end of the eighteenth
century, and every lighthouse scheme emanating from a private person was
opposed with ruthless vigour by the Trinity House. The watchful care of
the present corporation for the interests of navigation, the perfect
system of its machinery, and the public spirit of all concerned in its
management, stand out in pleasant contrast to the policy and action of
the Trinity House of the past, when schemes for lighting the Lizard, St.
Catherine’s, the Forelands, the Goodwins, Dungeness, the Spurn, the Farne
Islands, and a host of others, were condemned as ‘needless,’ ‘useless,’
or ‘dangerous,’ and ‘a burthen and hindrance’ to navigation.

But despite opposition and hostility, lighthouses, for which rates were
gathered, were built in considerable numbers, so that by the first
half of the seventeenth century these welcome signals to the mariner
broke forth into the gloom of night from many a dangerous headland of
the English coast. Of course they were not erected in positions that
called for the display of great engineering skill; reefs and shoals
that lay far out at sea had to go unmarked till much more recent times.
The ever-shifting Goodwins drew forth suggestions for indicating their
dangers as early as the days of Queen Bess, but the suggestions emanated
from those whose enterprise was greater than their capacity, and came to
nought. The Eddystone lighthouse, fourteen miles from shore, was really
the _first_ great engineering triumph connected with coast lighting, and
Winstanley, with all his pedantry, deserves a niche in the Temple of Fame
for having erected a lighthouse there at all!

Floating lights, or lightships, were, I think, projected as early as

1623, though the project was not then actually carried into effect[1];
and they were proposed again, as ‘a novelty,’ half a century later
at the Nore. But the Trinity House laughed at the suggestion, and the
Nore remained without a light till 1730, or thereabouts, when the first
lightship actually established was anchored there.

But it is not fair to say thus much and no more about the Trinity House.
Its history was written not long since by Mr. Barrett, and the reader
who turns to this will see that if its ‘lighthouse policy’ was bad and
illiberal, the utility of the corporation was manifested in many other
ways; all through the reign of Charles I it was busy rendering efficient
service to the Navy. The corporation dissuaded the king from building,
merely for show, what was then a ‘big ship’—124 feet long, and 46 feet
in breadth, and drawing 24 feet of water; no existing port could take
such a ship, and no anchor or cable would hold her. The brethren might
have preached from the lesson taught by the Armada; ours were the small
craft that won in combat with the floating castles of Spain. ‘The wit and
ingenuity of man,’ say the brethren, could not produce a seaworthy craft
with three tiers of ordnance. If your majesty desires to serve the Navy,
build two ships—the same money will do it!’ It is very curious to mark
how Government got for nothing a great deal of valuable advice, and it is
not very clear when the practical control of the dockyard at Deptford
ceased to be in the Trinity House.

All this time the corporation charities were not forgotten. Besides
enlarging the almshouses at Deptford, they were building others at
Stepney, and organizing means for the relief of aged seamen, which was
practically a scheme for insurance against old age and sickness.

Let us also, before we leave the subject of the Trinity House, say
something further as to its history up to the time of the control of
all lighthouses around the English coast being vested in it by Act of
Parliament. In the angry days of the struggle between the King and
Parliament, the board was loyal to the former, and paid its debt to the
latter by being superseded in its authority by a committee. But with
the restoration of Charles II came also a restoration of the ancient
privileges of the Trinity House, which were watched over by General Monk
as master. Other famous men presided over the corporation somewhat later;
amongst them Samuel Pepys, in whose _Diary_ are many allusions to his
work there.

In the Restoration year the corporation moved from its former home to
the more central one in which we now know it, near the Tower of London.
Trinity Monday was that year kept in good style by a dinner for forty.
But the corporation did not long enjoy the comforts of its new home; the
flames of the fire of London licked round it, burnt the woodwork, and
gutted it, destroying valuable pictures and also papers and parchments
which would have drawn aside the veil that now shrouds the early
history of the fraternity. It was not till August, 1670, that the house
was built again; the rebuilding was no light matter, and in 1672 the
corporation was £1,100 in debt, and some years elapsed ere that was wiped
out. Meanwhile, every brother, elder or younger, seems to have behaved
with a public spirit, foregoing any participation in the funds of the
institution, leaving that for the poor and needy.

A little after this, whilst Pepys was master of the Trinity House, the
suggestion was put forward of a compulsory purchase by the board of all
existing lighthouses. We will not speculate as to the object the brethren
had in desiring this acquisition; it is sufficient to state that its
policy towards lighthouse schemes in general was not one which could
have given the public much confidence; the time had not yet come for the
scheme proposed.

But a little more than a century later the lighthouse policy of the
Trinity House had entirely changed. The board no longer thwarted
proposals for lighthouses and lightships in places needful; it was itself
proposing them and helping, with its powerful hand, the sailor to fight
for his rights in demanding that, for the dues he paid, the private owner
should show a good and a steady light, and was furthering every project
put forth by men of science for improving the power and intensity of
lighthouse luminants.

The result was inevitable. Sailors, merchants, the people at large,

began to look upon the corporation as every one looks upon it to-day—as
a public-spirited institution, labouring its hardest in the interests of
navigation. So it came about that in the year 1836 privately maintained
lights were altogether extinguished, and the entire control of our
lighthouse system handed over to the corporation that now directs it.

[Illustration: ANCIENT COAST-LIGHT.]

CHAPTER III

ANCIENT METHODS OF LIGHTING

So much for the general history of coast lighting. The reader will now
wish to hear something about the luminants used of old, and of the
improvements that have been made in the system of lighting. It has been
said that the lighthouses of the ancients were tall columns, on the tops
of which grates were placed, and in these fires of wood or coal were kept
burning. The mediaeval lighthouses of England were, some of them, of
similar construction, but there were varieties; if the light was placed
on the steeple or tower of a church or chapel it would probably be of
the kind mentioned; but if the light was shown from _within_ the tower,
candles or oil lamps would be used. The hermits of the Ecrehou refer to
the _fire_ which they kept burning all night to warn passing vessels; the
monks or hermits of Chale, in the Isle of Wight, displayed a light of
candles or oil in the top story of their tower, which was an octagon with
windows on every side.

After the Reformation the use of oil seems at first to have been entirely
laid aside; a few of the lighthouses erected were lit by candles, but
coal or wood fires certainly illuminated the majority. Given a properly
filled grate and a fair breeze, this was certainly the best kind of light.

But towards the close of the seventeenth century it entered into the
mind of economical man to enclose his coal or wood fire in a lantern
with a funnel or chimney at the top. This saved the fuel, but, for that
reason, it did not improve the light, and the fire, no longer fanned by
the sturdy sea-breezes, needed the constant use of bellows to maintain a
flame. Sailors complained a good deal of these shut-in lights, which were
tried at Lowestoft, the North Foreland, and the Scilly Islands, and after
a while the lanterns were removed; but coal or wood fires were used as
lighthouse luminants as late as 1822.

The situation of the Eddystone—miles from the mainland, with no space

for fuel-stacking—rendered it necessary to think of some other luminant
than a fire of coal or wood, and candles, a considerable number of them,
of course, were used there from the date of its first construction till
comparatively recent times, when oil lamps were substituted.

The use of oil as a luminant for lighthouses did not—after the

Reformation—come in till almost the middle of the last century. This is
strange, as oil was certainly used for that purpose by the mediaeval
lighthouse-keepers. In November, 1729, a certain Thomas Corbett begged
the permission of the Trinity House to try the _experiment_ of lighting
the South Foreland lighthouse with oil. I do not know if this trial was
ever made, or what was thought of it if it were; but certainly oil was
not generally re-adopted as a lighthouse luminant till much later.
In 1763 we first hear of an endeavour to increase the intensity of the
light shown by means of a reflector. It was then successfully tried
by William Hutchinson, a master mariner of the port of Liverpool, in
connection with a rudely constructed flat-wick oil lamp; M. Argand,
a citizen of Geneva, about the year 1780, improved on this system by
his cylindrical-wick lamps in conjunction with a silvered reflector.
This is probably the form of light which _The Gentleman’s Magazine_
tells us was, in 1783, displayed from a hill near Norwood, and nightly
viewed by an astonished crowd on Blackfriars Bridge. On Argand’s system
Augustine Fresnel afterwards improved, by his large concentric-wick
lamp and lenses. Gas was suggested by Aldini of Milan in 1823; but for
many years was used only for lighthouses on piers and harbours, or in
places adjacent to gas works; and it was not till 1865 that we find gas
construction taking place at out-of-the-way lighthouse stations for the
purpose of supplying the light.

The year 1853 saw the first attempt at the use of electricity as a
lighthouse luminant; a series of experiments with it were then carried
out under Faraday’s supervision at the South Foreland. Nine years later
Drummond tried the lime-light at the same lighthouse.

But there is yet one feature in the system of coast lighting which
deserves attention. The difficulty felt by mariners in _identifying_
a particular light when seen, was evidently experienced as early as
the opening years of the last century, when lighthouses had begun to
materially increase in number. It was not, however, till 1730 that we
find any plan of distinction put forward. In that year Robert Hamblin, a
barber at Lynn, patented his invention ‘for distinguishing of lights for
the guidance of shipping,’ which was, that at each lighthouse station
the lights should be placed ‘in such various forms, elevations, numbers,
and positions that one of them should not resemble another,’ and he
undertook—as soon as the distinguishing features were agreed upon—to
prepare and publish a chart of the coasts of England and Wales, in which
such lights should be distinctly expressed. It is probable that in a
measure Hamblin’s plan was acted upon, as lights erected after this date
were mostly arranged in groups.

But the really effectual method of distinguishing one lighthouse from

another is that at present in use, of _hiding_ the light shown for a
certain number of minutes or seconds, varying at different lighthouses.
It is unnecessary to dwell upon the constructive skill displayed in the
machinery by which this temporary eclipsing is produced; but of the
antiquity of the system it is our province to speak. It seems to have
been first tried at Marstrand, a once thriving port of Sweden, some
twenty miles to the north of Gottenburg, and its effects and utility were
discussed in maritime circles throughout the world. But France alone,
of the various countries that considered the new system, adopted it;
long before we in England had taken any steps in the matter, France had
given public notice that the French coast would be illuminated by lights
which might be known one from another by the differences in the periods
of their being visible or eclipsed, and the French government issued an
explanatory chart.

So much for the general history of coast lighting. Now that we have
seen with what vigour the lighthouse battle was fought in the past,
and the fierce opposition that has been offered to almost every
lighthouse scheme put forward, we shall not wonder that such ‘luxuries’
as lighthouses did not rapidly multiply on the English coast; a century
ago there were not forty on our shores from Berwick round to the Solway
Firth. Of some of these we shall speak in subsequent chapters, again
reminding the reader that the general acquirement of all lighthouses by
the Trinity House took place in the year 1836, and that, for many years
before that date, the policy of the Trinity House towards lighthouse
schemes had entirely changed. As I said at the close of the last chapter,
all selfish hostility to privately maintained lights had ceased, and the
Trinity House was working in the true interests of navigation, and its
only desire for the entire control of our English lighthouses was that
in regard to their management the very best should be done that could be
done.

CHAPTER IV

GRACE DARLING

With the exception of the lights at the head of Berwick pier, those on
the Farne Islands, on the Northumbrian coast, off Bamborough, are the
most northerly in England. Legend tells us that from a now ruined tower
on one of the islands a light was formerly shown as a warning to passing
ships; and if that was so, then in all probability it was one of those
lights of which we have already spoken as being supported by charity, and
was tended by a monk or hermit from the famous monastery of Holy Island.
Such light would, of course, have been extinguished at the dissolution of
the religious houses, and no other, however dim or flickering, marked the
dangers of the Farne rocks till the year 1776. Proposals were made for a
lighthouse on these islands some hundred years before, by a certain Sir
John Clayton, who put forward many schemes for lighthouses, as objects
of profit, at many points on the coast, but nothing came of it; it was
crushed by the influence of the Newcastle traders, who did not relish
having to pay for it. The sailors engaged in the northern coasting
trade set these proposals afloat again in 1727, but they were stifled
before they came to anything, though the then secretary to the Trinity
House admits that he has heard ‘judicious commanders’ speak well of the
suggestion.

[Illustration: OUTER FARNE LIGHTHOUSE.]

However, opposition—honest or the reverse—kept the Farne rocks without a

lighthouse till the year 1776, when the first of the two that at present
light them was set up. The second, on the Longstones, was built in 1810,
and it is this latter that has become familiar to us as the scene of
Grace Darling’s heroism.

It was customary, sixty or seventy years ago, to place a family in

charge of a lighthouse—a man, his wife, and one or two children, all
of whom, male and female, if above a certain age, received a trifling
salary, and were looked upon—women and girls quite as much as men and
boys—as assistant light-keepers; indeed, there were women light-keepers
appointed by the Trinity House so late as 1860.

An arrangement such as this was adopted at the Longstones lighthouse;

William Darling, his wife, and their daughter Grace, a girl of
twenty-one, trimmed and tended the lights as recognized officials of the
Trinity House.
Grace was born at Bamborough, but she had gone with her parents to live
at the Longstones when but a few months old. In this desolate home she
had grown accustomed to every form of weather; the laughter of a summer’s
breeze equally with the wail of a winter’s gale had been her cradle song.
As she grew up, she spent the time she was not helping her parents, in
rowing and fishing, and when ten or eleven years old her father could
trust her to manage the lighthouse boat even in the roughest weather.
Grace was no scholar—her opportunities of acquiring information were
obviously limited—but she could read and write well, and she made good
use of the former accomplishment, eagerly drinking in every scrap of
information that her father’s twenty or thirty books contained regarding
acts of courage and daring performed by the toilers of the sea either in
peace or war. Her great ambition was that, one day, _she_ might have the
opportunity of emulating the example of those whose deeds she loved to
study.

That opportunity came to her at last. At dusk, on September 6, 1838, the

wind that throughout the day had been freshening was blowing considerably
more than half-a-gale, and in the teeth of this the steamer Forfarshire,
hailing from Hull and bound for Dundee, passed between the Farne rocks
and the Northumberland coast. The ship was ‘labouring’ heavily, and
Grace, as well as her father and mother, eagerly watched her progress
till night closing in hid her from their view.

With the darkness the wind blew yet more fiercely; all through the night
it raged with unpitying fury, and the watchers on the Longstones talked
long and anxiously over the vessel that had passed them. Darling did not
like the look of her, or the way the storm seemed to be handling her.
Neither father, mother, nor daughter took any sleep that night: when
not busy tending to the light or wiping the spray from the glass of the
lantern they peered into the darkness, thinking perhaps they might catch
a glimpse of some signal of distress either from the steamer or some
other vessel, yet no light or signal was observable.

[Illustration: GRACE DARLING AND HER FATHER ON THE WAY TO THE WRECK.]

But the first rays of morning revealed to Darling that his apprehensions
for the Forfarshire were well-founded. On Hawkers Rocks, a mile away
from the lighthouse, could be seen the remains of the wrecked vessel,
the remnant of her living freight clinging to it. What could be done? It
seemed madness to launch the lighthouse boat in such a gale, but Grace
begged her father to make the attempt; she would go with him, she said,
and God, she felt sure, would give them strength to perform the daring
enterprise.

We know what happened. Darling yielded to his daughter’s prayer, and the
survivors of the Forfarshire, few in number it is true, but all that
outlived the fury of that awful night, were brought by Grace and her
father safely back to the lighthouse and carefully nursed by the humane
keepers till the weather changed and they were taken to Bamborough.
Thus the ambition of Grace’s life had been realized; she had tested her
courage, and it had not failed her.

All along the Northumbrian coast the news of the daring deed spread
with wonderful rapidity: presents and letters were heaped upon Grace
Darling in a manner she had never expected. The Trinity House granted the
‘family’ leave of absence from the lighthouse, and the Duke and Duchess
of Northumberland entertained them at Alnwick, where, on leaving, Grace
was presented with a purse containing £700. Her exploit was the talk of
London and of all England, and the print-sellers’ windows gave a liberal
display of her portraits.

She received all these tokens of approbation with an unaffected pleasure

that added to her charms and her popularity, but her naturally retiring
disposition would not allow her to accept the offer of an enterprising
theatre manager to appear nightly on the London boards.

[Illustration: GRACE DARLING.]

Neither were offers of a more permanent nature—offers of a heart and

home—accepted by her; the very exploit that had made her famous seemed
to bind her affections more closely to her insular home and her duties
there. She spent the rest of her days on the lighthouse, helping her
father and mother as before, and only paying an occasional visit to the
mainland. Though innumerable accounts of her early days and of her daring
exploit exist—the latter is the subject of poem, song, and story—we hear
little of her subsequent life, or of the time when the illness which a
few years later terminated fatally first manifested itself. She died
on October 20, 1842, and was buried in the churchyard at Bamborough.
Her death was the signal for a fresh outburst of literary commemoration
of her daring act; but no more appropriate tribute to her memory exists
than the lifeboat now stationed at Bamborough, which bears her name, and
which, winter after winter, renders good service to vessels wrecked or in
distress, often on the very reef on which the Forfarshire stranded. Grace
Darling is not forgotten by the stalwart Northumbrian sailors who man
that lifeboat; her story and the song in praise of her courage has been
taught to them by their fathers and mothers, and they may yet be heard to
sing it, as in their well-fitted boat, possessed of the latest appliances
to ensure safety, they make their way to some sinking ship, and think of
the frail girl and her father, who in nothing more than an open rowing
boat risked their lives to save a perishing crew.

CHAPTER V

THE SPURN HEAD

Passing southwards from the Farne, the next lighthouse of which there is
anything like ancient mention is Tynemouth; probably the monks at this
important northern offshoot from St. Alban’s Abbey had shown a light
from their priory, and when we first hear of the lighthouse there in the
seventeenth century it was in great ruin. At Flamborough Head we have
Camden’s authority for saying that the name was derived from a Roman
pharos there; but there is no evidence of a mediaeval lighthouse at this
spot, and before coming to one of these we must pass on to the Spurn
Point, at the mouth of the Humber.

Here a lighthouse was erected in 1427, under circumstances which are in

themselves interesting and romantic; so, in accordance with a promise in
the first chapter, I will tell the story somewhat in detail.

The coast between Flamborough Head and the Wash has undergone very
remarkable changes within historic times: the old chroniclers record
very frequent inundations of the low-lying lands, and finally the entire
washing away of a thriving port-town which sent a couple of members to
Parliament. Its destruction—so the chroniclers say—was due to the extreme
ungodliness of the inhabitants, who, such as escaped a watery grave, fled
higher up the Humber to the then insignificant village of Hull, and soon
raised it into a centre of commercial activity. These folk did very well,
and, we will hope, lived to repent of their former wickedness; but how
about the poor wretches who had been carried into eternity unrepentant?
This was the thought that weighed on the pious mind of a monk at Meaux
Abbey, and so strongly did it impress him that he determined to leave his
brethren and lead a hermit’s life near the submerged town, spending his
days in prayer for the perished souls.

Persons fired with religious enthusiasm sometimes forget to have a due

regard for the minor requirements of the law. This is exactly what the
pious monk from Meaux Abbey did: he endowed his hermitage with certain
property from the profits of which he and his successors could support
themselves, but he quite forgot to get the king’s licence for such a
gift, which was, of course, a gift in mortmain. Now all this happened
in the closing years of Richard II’s luckless reign, and so much were
the crown officers busied in other and weightier matters, that no one
ever found out what a terrible thing Brother Matthew had done till Henry
of Lancaster had been proclaimed king. A heavy pecuniary fine might
have been the result of the monk’s hastiness, but for this fortunate
circumstance. By an odd coincidence, Henry’s landing in England had taken
place in the Humber close to the new hermitage which, small and mean
though it was, gave him a comfortable shelter for the night. When the
affair came to be looked into, this was remembered, and Brother Matthew
was not only speedily forgiven, but he and his successors had bestowed
upon them the important privilege of the right to take any wreck cast
upon the shore within two leagues of the hermitage.

The monk’s successor was a certain Brother Richard Redbarrow, and a very
good and charitable man he seems to have been: the constant wrecks around
him, though they yielded him considerable profit, made his heart bleed
for those who lost their lives by shipwreck. The possession of a full bag
of treasure, or a cask of dainty wine, was no compensation for the sorrow
which would fill his heart when the gray morning revealed a dozen or more
lifeless bodies stretched upon the beach, and he determined to do what
he could to prevent or lessen shipwreck, and beside his hermitage he set
to work to build a lighthouse.

Had Brother Richard possessed money enough to finish what he began, we

might never have known of his Christian work; but he had not, and in the
year 1427 he petitioned Parliament to obtain from the king the grant of a
small toll on the shipping entering or leaving the port of Hull towards
finishing his ‘beken’ tower; the cost of the light upon it he was ready
to bear.

Parliament thought it an excellent plan, and so did the king. Brother

Richard got his grant, and no doubt the lighthouse was built and did good
service for many a year to come. But in time the sea encroached, acre by
acre, till hermitage and lighthouse both disappeared, and in the general
survey of monastic property taken at the dissolution, we find no mention
of either one or the other.

But these inroads of the sea, these changes in the form of the
coast-line, made the entrance to the Humber no safer. In Elizabeth’s
days the Spurn was an exceedingly sharp headland, stretching far into
the river, and collecting around it a quantity of shifting sand and
shingle, so that the sailors of Hull determined to petition the queen in
favour of a lighthouse there which one or their own countrymen—the famous
navigator, Sir Martin Frobisher—was seeking leave to erect at the Spurn
Point, or hard by it. No doubt Sir Martin’s suit was opposed in the usual
quarter, and before he could ride down the opposition he had been carried
off by wounds from the Frenchmen’s guns, and nothing came of his proposal.

After this, in 1618, his kinsman, Peter Frobisher, put forward the same
suggestion, but it was again laughed at as a madman’s scheme, and opposed
and finally ‘shelved,’ so that ships got in and out of the Humber as best
they could, the traders preferring risk to a settled tax.

The next proposals we hear of for a lighthouse at the Spurn came in the
days of the Commonwealth; Sir Harry Vane—from whom the Lord Protector had
not yet been delivered—submitted them to the committee for managing the
affairs of the Trinity House[2], which committee actually approved the
scheme. But the Trinity House of Hull, constituted as before, liked it
not at all: a lighthouse at the Spurn, if erected, would not stand ‘three
springs,’ and the only persons it could benefit would be an enemy seeking
to enter the Humber by night; no native ship would do so mad a thing as
that for fifty lighthouses.

These arguments are obviously weak, but somehow they managed to have the
desired effect, and a lighthouse at the Spurn was once more postponed
till some years after the Restoration. Then a private individual, a
certain Justinian Angel, built one, lit it, and applied to the king for
leave to gather toll for its support. The opponents of the scheme now
raved in vain: there was the light, and with it ships _did_ come in and
out of the Humber by night, and shipwreck grew to be the exception.

Charles II gave Angel his patent, remarking to Sam Pepys, then Master
of the Trinity House, that as the patentee only asked for a _voluntary_
contribution, it could be no hardship to anybody. Sam thought it wise to
explain that, in so long opposing the scheme, the Trinity House had only
done what it deemed its duty, to which the merry monarch replied that
‘caution’ was ‘always reasonable,’ and with that safe remark passed on.

There was nothing for it now but to influence as much as possible such
shipowners as were willing to pay, against the light. The Trinity House
seems to have thought the best way to do this was to circulate wild
rumours of Angel’s huge profits; we are glad now that these rumours were
set afloat, for they drew from Angel a statement as to his expenses and
management, which gives us a very vivid picture of his lighthouse; this
is what he says:—

At most other lighthouses—he is speaking of the ‘high’ or ‘upper’

lighthouse, they were generally in pairs, a high light and a low
light—the grate was fastened to a back like a chimney, and exposed only
one way to the wind, namely, ‘that to the seaward,’ whilst in the low
light there would be exhibited ‘two or three candles closed in with
glass.’ But at the Spurn things were of necessity quite different. Here
the fire on the high lighthouse must needs show ‘all round,’ and so it
was entirely unscreened, standing upon ‘a swaype’ fourteen feet above the
top of the lighthouse tower, and burning a vast amount more coal than a
fire partly screened would burn; besides, the fire needed to be specially
‘bright,’ and so only ‘picked’ coal was used, which cost threepence a
chaldron more than ordinary coal.

Then the cost of repairs was exceptional; in such an exposed situation

the flames, fanned by a winter’s gale, blazed so fiercely that often
three or four of the iron bars of the grate would be melted in a single
night. Then the consumption of fuel would be enormous, and ‘four pair of
hands’ was too little to feed the greedy furnace and keep it up to the
requisite height.

If the ‘high’ light was costly to maintain, the ‘low’ light was—as a
‘low’ light—even more so: for at the Spurn this, too, was given by a coal
fire instead of by the usual candles, and so cost as much ‘as two such
lights elsewhere.’

In addition to all this, the carriage of coal to the Spurn Head was
unusually costly, for the way from the nearest spot at which the
Newcastle boats could discharge their coals lay, half of it, over soft
sand, into which cart wheels sank deeply, and half over ‘a sharp shingle’
that lamed the oxen that drew it.

Light-keepers’ salaries were, too, a heavy item; two men and a competent
overseer were always needed at the Spurn, and on rough and boisterous
nights much additional help was required.

Altogether, from the first lighting of the lights in November, 1675, to

Christmas, 1677, the expenditure had amounted to £905, and the receipts
to £948, a profit of £43 in two years and a month.

Charles II thought this was not out-of-the-way; he gave Angel further

powers and facilities for gathering his tolls, and at last the grumbling
and the moaning died away, not to be renewed till nearly a century later.
Then there were worthier grounds for them: the owner was lord of the
manor within which the Spurn lighthouses stood, and he would not move
them to a position rendered necessary by the continued alteration of the
sand banks.

Parliament was applied to, and with an airy disregard of the claims of
private property, vested the lighthouse rights in the Trinity House of
Deptford Strand—the very body that had for so long fought against the
erection of lighthouses at the Spurn at all. Armed with these rights the
Trinity House promptly rendered the old lighthouses useless by erecting,
in a position where they really assisted navigation, those at present
standing, and they called to their aid, as architect and engineer, John
Smeaton, who had just then won his laurels by the wonderful stone tower
he had built on the Eddystone rocks.

Of the disused lighthouses, as they appeared some twenty years before

they were rendered useless by Smeaton’s buildings, we have a curious
description, written by the then secretary to the Trinity House: the
coals, he says, are placed in ‘a bricket or cradle of iron,’ which is
suspended on a beam and hoisted or let down at pleasure. The upper light
was then shown on the top of the tower, whilst the lower was placed
against the tower on a platform a few feet from the ground. Perhaps it
was this somewhat unusual arrangement with the beam that Dr. Johnson had
in his mind when he described, in his Dictionary, a lighthouse as ‘a
high building at the top of which lights are _hung_ to guide ships at
sea’—certainly not a very accurate description of a lighthouse as the
thing was then generally constructed and arranged.
CHAPTER VI

THE HUMBER TO THE THAMES

Leaving the Humber, and coming southwards to the mouth of the Thames, we
pass some of the earliest post-Reformation lighthouses erected—Winterton,
where we have seen a light was proposed to be shown from the church
steeple in 1585; Caister, Yarmouth, Corton, Lowestoft, Orfordness, and
Harwich; at all which places, and many others, lighthouses were erected
in the early part of the seventeenth century.

There was a lighthouse at Caister some few miles south of Winterton, set
up about the year 1600; soon afterwards we have a quaint account of the
way in which this was maintained. It did not aspire to the dignity of
being a coal fire; the building was merely a meanly constructed wooden
tower with a lantern at the top, lit with candles—or _should_ have been
lit with candles: but mark the italics—_should_. How was it actually
illuminated? A contemporary report shall tell us. ‘Often but one candle
of six to the pound ... or at the most two’ burnt in the lantern. This
was insufficient: wrecks happened in consequence, and the shipowners
grumbled louder than ever at having to pay dues. As stated before, the
lighthouse at Caister was in the hands of the Trinity House, and it must
be said to the credit of that body that on learning of the defects, it
did its best to remedy them.

An inquiry was held, and revealed a sad laxity of duty in the appointed
keeper. He ought to have lived at the tower, but he did not. Such a
residence, when we consider the position of the Caister lighthouse, must
have been solitary and dreary enough, and we can scarcely wonder that the
keeper left his employment and went to labour more congenial. But he was
dishonest over his retirement: he did not put his intention into writing,
but went off without notice, and deputed ‘the preparing, lighting, and
watching’ of the candles to an old and decrepid woman who dwelt some
miles inland, and who, as might have been expected, was unable to perform
her task with regularity. To reach the lighthouse, she had a lengthy
walk; and in the teeth of an easterly gale she found this more than her
strength could bear; thus on many a winter’s night she had to retrace
her steps without accomplishing the object of her journey: so that often
when most needed no light at all showed from the Caister lighthouse. A
new keeper was appointed; he was to live at the lighthouse, to light his
candles—three in number—at sunset, snuff them, and replenish them as
needful till ‘fair day.’

Surely a lighthouse, well and regularly tended, was needed at Caister!

There was not, there is not, a more dangerous bit of coast on the eastern
shore of England. Caister sandbanks rival the dreaded Goodwins in their
terrors for the luckless ship that is driven upon them. Now, with a good
system of signalling from the adjacent lightships, and with two or three
well-appointed lifeboats, the loss of life is often considerable, and
many are the risks run by the lifeboat crews in their gallant efforts
to rescue the shipwrecked. Here is the story of one such risk, and it
is typical of dozens more that have happened since lifeboats have been
placed near Caister.

It was just midnight on March 11, 1875, when the schooner Punch, on her
voyage from Newcastle to Dublin, ran upon the shoals off Caister. It was
a ‘dirty’ night, pitch dark, and blowing hard from the east. The sands,
partially uncovered at low water, are quicksands as the tide flows,
and a ship once fairly driven on them has little hope of getting off
again; as for her crew—well, there is now this hope for them, that the
lifeboat-men will see the signals of distress and hazard their lives to
save them. The crew of the Punch knew what the grasp of Caister sands
meant, and up flared their signal fires so soon as she struck. The
waves, as though eager to secure for the greedy sands their prey, broke
over the vessel in quick succession and dimmed the fire; but there was
a plentiful supply of tar and oil on board, and their signals blazed up
again. Then the lifeboat-men saw it and hastened to them. As their boat
neared the sands her crew could see, by the fire flaring on deck, that
the hulk was gradually sinking down, and that there was a stretch of
uncovered sand still around the ship. Before their eyes, almost within
speaking distance, the Punch would be sucked into the sand, and with
her the half-dozen men on board! There was but one thing for it—anchor
the lifeboat to the sand and jump on to the shifting mass. Leaving a
couple of men in the lifeboat, her coxswain, heaving-line in hand, leaped
overboard, followed by a number of his crew, and went staggering and
stumbling towards the wreck—at one moment only ankle-deep in water and
the next high up to their shoulders. And so they waded on for a hundred
yards in the fury of the winter storm. They called to the crew, and the
crew answered them. Think what the feelings of those sinking men must
have been, their gratitude to their deliverers. One threw a line from
the deck, and it was clutched by the foremost of the rescuers, and, a
communication once established, the schooner’s crew were one by one
hauled through the broken water over the quicksand to the lifeboat,
and with them the lifeboat-men rowed to shore. Yes, to shore, but not
to rest! They had barely got to their homes when the cry was raised
again. ‘Another ship on the sands!’ It was morning then, and back to the
lifeboat they hastened, and a second time rowed out. Alas! their journey
was in vain. Help had come too late, and only masses of tangled rigging,
planks, and broken spars floated over the sands—the ship and her crew lay
buried within them.

Oddly enough, we do not hear of any early lighthouse at Yarmouth. In the

official catalogue of lights on the Norfolk coast the date of the first
lighthouse of the Yarmouth group is that at Gorleston, said to have been
established in the ‘fifties.’ But there was a lighthouse here nearly
two centuries before; and Molloy, in his treatise on sea-law, in 1676,
refers to the ‘great and pious care’ by King Charles II in erecting a
lighthouse at Gorleston, or ‘Goldston,’ as he spells it, ‘at his own
princely charge,’ from which expression we are, I suppose to imagine that
his Majesty kept up a lighthouse at his own expense: the thing seems
improbable and requires confirmation before we can accept it as truth.
Lighthouses in the neighbourhood at St. Nicholas Gatt were proposed and
for a time established by Sir John Clayton between 1675 and 1678, and we
find the seamen of Yarmouth still clamouring for them in 1692. In the
seamen’s petition the loss to shipping, for want of them, is very clearly
set forth; one petition says that as many as two hundred ships perished
on the sandbanks there during the gale on one winter’s night.

A lightship now marks the dangers of Corton sands, some few miles further
south of Yarmouth than St. Nicholas Gatt. But Corton was one of the
places at which Sir John Clayton proposed to erect a lighthouse long
before. When the Trinity House had crushed all his other lighthouse
projects he offered the corporation something handsome to approve of a
light at Corton only, but it would not: multiplicity of lights, it said,
confused the navigator, and its own lighthouse at Lowestoft did all that
was needed.
At Lowestoft, in 1778, were made the earliest experiments with
reflectors; a thousand tiny mirrors were placed in the lantern, and with
such success that the flame of the oil lamp appeared at sea, some four
leagues off, like a huge globe of fire.

The lighthouse at Harwich is memorable for quite a different reason.

It played—or rather was intended to play—an important part in English
politics. When at the eleventh hour James II and his advisers were trying
might and main to ward off the Dutchman’s coming, and when the Trinity
House officials, acting under Pepys’ orders, were busily engaged in
removing buoys and altering the position of familiar coast marks, the
small, or lower, lighthouse at Harwich was an object of consideration.
It was—so went forth the order—to be ‘removed’ and set up in another
place.’ But how? The operation could not be _rapidly_ performed, for the
building was a solid bit of masonry, and all depended on haste. A happy
idea at last struck some one: the Dutch ships would be as easily misled
by an erection of canvas, and that, ‘with the utmost secrecy,’ could be
stretched on a timber frame, carried to the place appointed, and set up
in less than an hour, whilst a charge or so of gunpowder would at the
same time level the real lighthouse.

Whether this was ever done we do not know: the Trinity House records
which tell the first part of the story are silent as to that point; but
if it was, it certainly did not serve the object in view, for the Dutch
ships, when they came, steered a very different course, and, as we all
know, landed in quite another part of England.

[Illustration: MODEL OF THE FIRST LIGHTSHIP.

_From the Trinity House Museum._]

CHAPTER VII

THE NORE LIGHTSHIP

Coming southwards from Harwich, we are soon at the mouth of the great
water-way to London and in view of the Nore light. This is the first
lightship of which we have had occasion to speak in particular, though
there are now many stationed along our eastern and northern coasts—one of
them, that on the Dudgeon Sands, being almost as old as the Nore.

We have seen the spirit in which the Trinity House of 1674 regarded the
proposals, made by a lighthouse speculator, to establish floating lights
at the Nore and at some other parts; it regarded the proposition as that
of a madman. Well, it sounds an odd opinion to us to-day, but really it
is no more odd than the opinion expressed, sixty or seventy years ago,
by men who knew of what they talked, as to locomotive steam-engines and
railway capabilities in general.

We do not hear of another proposal for floating lights at the Nore till
1730. Robert Hamblin had then devised a scheme for getting the whole
of the lighting of the English coast into his own hands, and the dues
therefrom into his own pocket. His plan was to fix floating lights at
short distances from the shore, in such positions as would render the
existing lighthouses absolutely useless. It was a bold stroke, and so far
successful that he actually got his patent from the crown and established
some of his lights, amongst them that at the Nore.

But his reign was short: the Trinity House addressed a powerful
remonstrance to the law officers of the crown, the owners of private
lighthouses joined in the complaint, and Hamblin’s patent was speedily
cancelled.

But before the cancelling he had parted with any rights he possessed
under his general patent with regard to the lightships at the Nore and at
one or two other points, and in 1732, the purchaser, David Avery, placed
a lightship at the east end of the Nore Sands. After circulating in
shipping circles very glowing accounts of the benefits which this light
would yield to navigation, he began to ask for his tolls, and by a little
judicious dealing with the Trinity House he managed to get that body on
his side in doing so. This is what he did. He arranged that the Trinity
House should itself apply for a new patent from the crown—not in general
words, but simply for a lightship at the Nore—and that he should take a
lease of this patent, when granted, for a term of sixty-one years at a
yearly rent of £100. When we remember what the traffic in and out of the
Thames was, even in 1730, we shall see that Avery must have made a good
profit on the £100 a year he paid the Trinity House.

[Illustration: MODEL OF A LIGHTSHIP BUILT IN 1790.

(_From the Trinity House Museum._)]

The lightship at the Nore turned out fairly successful. Of course the
arrangements for securing her in her position were of a very primitive
type. Even now, with the strongest of cables and anchors, a lightship
will sometimes break away from her moorings and scud before the gale.
That is why the United States Government is replacing lightships by
pile-lighthouses wherever the thing can be done. But in 1732 these
breakings-away were far more frequent, and the first lightship at the
Nore broke her moorings twice in three months of that year.

As a consequence, the number of lightships around the English coast did

not rapidly multiply. However, every few years saw some improvement
in the anchoring arrangements of these vessels, and the benefit, the
utility, of lightships—when once they could be trusted to keep their
positions—became more and more apparent. To-day we have between forty and
fifty of them round the coast of England.

The lighting arrangements on lightships were also, at first, very rude

and unsatisfactory. Small lanterns—each containing a cluster of tiny
candles that needed to be constantly replenished—were suspended from the
yardarm of the vessel’s mast, and these, on a gusty night, were often
blown out, and occasionally blown bodily away. Yet such arrangements were
not altered till early in the present century, when Robert Stephenson
invented the form of lantern at present used, which surrounds the mast
of the lightship. Inside this lantern is a circular frame, on which are
fixed Argand lamps with reflectors, and each light and each reflector
swings, by means of gimbals, so that, let the lightship roll or plunge
as she may, the light is always steady and kept perpendicular by its own
weight.

We do not know with certainty what was the staff, or crew, maintained
on one of these first lightships, but there were few lights to trim and
manage, and there is reason to believe that, when everything with regard
to coast lighting was done as cheaply as could be, there was but one man
to perform the tasks. Surely the loneliness of his life is too awful to
contemplate. Even at the Eddystone and other isolated lighthouses the
keeper was changed but seldom, and it is not likely that the lightship
guard was oftener relieved.

The effect of such economical management must have been disastrous to the
interests of navigation. Sudden death, illness, or accident might, at any
moment, have rendered the single keeper incapable of lighting his lamps,
and dire disaster to vessels, trusting to see the light, must, almost of
necessity, have followed; but before long things were better ordered, and
two men were kept in every lightship.

The immobility, so far as _progress_ is concerned, of a lightship renders

life upon one particularly tedious. Roll or pitch she may, but forward
she never goes—that is, if all keeps well with her anchor and chains.
It is of this that present-day dwellers on lightships most complain—the
dull monotony of a life at anchor. Even the Flying Dutchman’s penance had
advantages over it; he, at any rate, witnessed continual change of scene,
he was permitted to enjoy the rest of progress.

But monotony is about all that a modern lightship keeper has to complain
of, and even that is reduced to a minimum by the latest regulations. A
keeper nowadays has never less than three companions; the Trinity House
boats pay him frequent visits, bringing fresh water, fresh victuals, and
a supply of books and papers; and he can now, in many cases, by means
of the telegraph or telephone, speak with the shore whenever needful.
Besides, by her build, finish, and fittings, a modern lightship is, to a
sailor, a really comfortable home. Each of these vessels costs between
three and four thousand pounds to turn out complete and equipped for
service.

Of course some lightship stations are much more lonely than others. The
ever-passing stream of traffic in and out of the Thames renders the Nore
one of the ‘gayest’ lightships on which to be stationed, and consequently
one of the most popular. Life there is free from that singular and almost
overpowering melancholy so wearying to the men at, say, the Seven Stones
lightship, anchored midway between the Scillies and the Land’s End;
indeed, the two stations cannot be for a moment contrasted. You might as
well compare life ‘lived’ in Piccadilly with life ‘passed’ in a by-road
at Finsbury Park.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GOODWIN SANDS AND THE FORELANDS

Four miles seawards from Deal lie the Goodwin Sands, and the deep water
between the two is known as the Downs—the great historic resting-place
for ships, naval and mercantile, the scene of the gathering together of
many a noble fleet of British war-ships, whose broadsides have helped to
make England the mistress of the seas. The Goodwins shelter the Downs:
that is their one good service, and surely the mariner pays dearly for
it! No more treacherous shoal exists than that ever-shifting mass, that
greedy monster that lies beneath the surface of the water, and grasps in
the clasp of death every luckless vessel driven within its reach.
Deep in the Goodwin Sands lie the wrecks of centuries, the treasure of
many lands. And the stories of those wrecks, what stirring reading they
would be were they recorded! In the great storm of 1703—of which I shall
speak later on in telling the story of the Eddystone—thirteen men-of-war
were driven on the Goodwins, dashed to pieces, and their crews engulfed
in the rising tide. Now, in our own day, each succeeding winter brings
some fresh piteous tale of disaster from the Sands, some grievous loss of
human life which happens, despite the undauntable courage of the men who
man the lifeboats stationed along the coast from Broadstairs to Dover.
Our hearts bleed as we read of the lifeboat which, notwithstanding all
that human skill and pluck can do, reaches the Goodwin Sands too late:
there has been no unnecessary delay since the signal of distress was
first noticed, no hanging back by the crew, no thought for their own
safety. Simply the actual impossibility of reaching the wreck in time.

This is the story we read of yearly; and though it may fill us with
sorrow for the sufferings of the luckless men and women on the wrecked
ship, we can at least say, as we lay aside our newspaper, All was done
that could be done to save them. Few, thank God, are now the occasions on
which we cannot say this; but the loss of the Gutenberg, on the evening
of New Year’s Day, 1860, is one of them. It was a wild night, bitterly
cold, and the snow fell so thick that her pilot could not see the light
from the lightship, and she struck the Goodwins about six o’clock. Her
signals of distress were seen from Deal, but there was then no lifeboat
stationed there, and the Deal boatmen telegraphed to Ramsgate, ‘Ship
on the Goodwins.’ The lifeboat-men there were ready as usual, and they
hastened, as was customary, to the harbour-master to get permission for
the steam-tug to tow them out.

The harbour-master was an important person, and he felt the dignity of

his office. Perhaps he did not like the unceremonious way the would-be
crew had come into his presence; one sometimes forgets to be duly
respectful when the lives of an unknown number of one’s fellow-men
are at stake, and may be saved by haste; any way, he heard this news
from the breathless spokesmen without much visible sympathy. ‘Have the
distress-signals been noticed at Ramsgate?’ he inquired.

‘No,’ cried the sailors, ‘at Deal; Deal has telegraphed here, and we
want your orders for the harbour-tug to tow us out to the Sands.’ The
harbour-master smiled. ‘That, I fear, is not official intimation,’ he
said, and continued the discharge of important duties at his desk!

Ramsgate was astir? The official answer had somehow not been received by
the knots of sailors who thirsted to save life with the admiration the
harbour-master perhaps expected.

Further telegrams came from Deal at 8 and 9, that signals of distress

were still going up from the Sands, and an angry crowd _demanded_ the
use of the tug, that, with steam up, lay in the harbour. ‘Go in your
own luggers, if you will go!’ shouted the harbour-master, whose official
dignity was now relaxing into official indignation; but he knew that was
practically an impossibility.

Then, at 9.15, came the welcome cry, ‘A signal from the South Sand
lightship.’ The benevolent harbour-master forthwith untied the red tape
that held the steam-tug to her moorings; and towing the lifeboat behind
her, she plunged into the storm. On she went, steaming her hardest
towards the Goodwins, and as those on board her and on the lifeboat
neared the Sands they saw the lights of the breaking ship; nearer still,
and the cries of the perishing crew could be heard. The lifeboat is set
free, her sail hoisted, and she makes for the Sands!

The lights disappear, the shouting ceases, and presently a faint light
shines from the sea nearer to them. Then, through the blackness of the
night, the lifeboat crew can see a ship’s boat coming towards them; a
rope is thrown, and she is hauled alongside the lifeboat. The men, five
in number, drenched and exhausted, are taken on board: these are the
remnant of the Gutenberg’s crew of thirty-one, that for nearly four hours
clung to their ship as the waves dashed her to pieces on the Goodwins,
and were sacrificed to an official’s ‘sense of duty!’

But what about the history of attempts to mark with lights the dangers
of what legend calls the once cultivated estate of Earl Godwin? These
dangers were well known to the mariner of old, and have for long been
sung in sea-song. But the ever-shifting nature of the sands left the
lighthouse builder of bygone days without hope of the possibility of
placing upon them a warning to navigators of their exact position.

However, ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’: the enthusiast and
the mad speculator were often in evidence in the days of good Queen Bess.
Those days of leaping and bounding prosperity that England then saw, as
she followed new paths to fortune, encouraged such beings, and amongst
them was one who came to court with a project to build a lighthouse on
the Goodwins.

The projector was Gawen Smith; his proposals did not begin with this
of which we have spoken. He had been an applicant for office before;
a vacancy had happened in ‘Her Majestie’s bande,’ one of the drummers
having been gathered to his fathers, and Gawen considered he was just
the man for the post, for he could ‘sounde on the drumme’ all manner of
‘marches, daunces and songys.’ Had it been the post of chief-engineer for
draining the Lincolnshire fens, our friend would, no doubt, have been
able to make out a good case for his own fitness for the appointment.
Poor man! his application for the band vacancy was never answered, so far
as we know; perhaps Secretary Cecil thought him a better sounder of his
own trumpet than beater of her majesty’s drums!

But he was not daunted by failure to get an answer: in due course came
the application which has made him of interest to the reader of these
pages—the suggestion for a lighthouse on the Goodwins.

He tells Cecil that he has been ‘down upon the Goodwin Sands,’ in sundry
parts of them, and though he found the place ‘very dangerous,’ yet by
the May following he would be ready, if permitted, and if the queen
would grant him the leave to gather toll—to build a beacon, ‘fyrme and
staide uppon the foresaid Godwyne Sande,’ twenty or thirty feet above the
high-water level; which beacon should, by night, ‘shewe his fyre’ for
twenty or thirty miles, and be seen by day for hard on twenty miles.

It was no ordinary lighthouse that Gawen was going to build there. Should
there—despite this wonderful erection—happen a wreck upon the sands, the
beacon-tower would be an abiding-place for the shipwrecked, as it would
furnish room for forty persons above the highest point to which the waves
had been ever known to reach.

He had one other request, and when compared with the vastness of the
undertaking, it was a modest one; it was that the queen would give him
£1,000 when he should deliver to her hand ‘grasse, herbe, or flower,’
grown upon this desolate, shifting mass of sand, and £2,000 when the soil
should be so firm that his tower would bear the weight of cannon for the
defence of the channel!

Cecil carefully folded up the application and endorsed it: ‘The demands
of Gawen Smith touchinge the placing of a beacon on the Goodwyn Sandes’;
and there the matter ended.

Years went by, Gawen Smith died—probably a disheartened speculator;

winter gales blew luckless vessels on the Goodwins; and the greedy shoal
drank in life and treasure as before; but no project came prominently
forward for indicating its danger till the year 1623. Then a more
rational proposal was made, and made by men of a very different stamp
from Gawen Smith. John, afterwards Sir John, Coke, a nautical expert,
proposed means by which a light might be exhibited upon the Goodwins.

Unfortunately we do not know exactly what his proposal was, but that
it was practical we may guess from the fact that the English and Dutch
mariners approved it and were ready to contribute to its support, and it
is almost certain that a moored vessel, showing a light by night, was
suggested. If so, we have in this proposal the first suggestion of a
lightship: the reader will see in a moment on what I base this theory.

Sir John Coke’s scheme came to nothing, and a like fate attended those
put forward soon afterwards by Capt. Thomas Wilbraham and the Mayor of
Rochester and others which were for the same kind of light, whatever
that was; but in 1629—four years after Charles I’s accession—almost the
same persons petitioned the king for licence to light the Goodwin Sands.
In this case their petition is extant, and we see what they propose.
After setting forth the dangers of the sands in the usual terms, they
state that they are ready, in order to warn vessels of those dangers, to
maintain at their own costs, ‘_a light upon the main_’ at or near the
Goodwins, ‘whereby every meanly skilfull mariner’ could, on the darkest
night, safely pass the place of danger. I think the expression ‘upon the
main’ must here mean the main or open sea, especially as the words ‘at
or near the Goodwins’ immediately follow: that expression cannot refer
to the _mainland_, eight miles off at its nearest point, for lights at
the two Forelands were then already established, and the expression ‘on
the main’ would not have been used if a tower built on the sand had been
intended. There is, I think, but one way of interpreting this and the
earlier proposals, and that is, that they were each of them for afloating
light or lightship at the Goodwins.

Besides maintaining this nocturnal light, the petitioners undertook

to constantly provide ‘a sufficient company of strong and experienced
men, with vessels, always in a readiness to relieve such as by day, or
night, through extremitie of weather, should unhappily be forced upon the
sands’: presumably, then, more than one vessel was to be kept permanently
moored at the Goodwins, each craft being provided with boats, and with
such life-saving apparatus as was then known, so that assistance could
at once be sent to any ill-fated ship that ran upon the Sands. In return
for all this the petitioners craved leave to levy one penny from every
English ship passing through the Downs and three-halfpence from every
‘foreigner,’ besides an allowance for salvage in respect to the cargo
of any wrecked ship that the petitioners or their servants happened to
rescue.

The petition bears no endorsement, so that we cannot tell what was

done upon it: the proposal as to the payment of dues probably defeated
it, especially as lights, for which a tax had been demanded, had been
established only a little before at the Forelands. These were, neither of
them, very elaborate buildings, nor, we should fancy, efficient lights:
each was built of timber and plaster, and had at its top a lantern
in which were stuck a few candles. The Trinity House offered a most
strenuous and relentless opposition to the Foreland lighthouses, which
were set up by Sir John Meldrum, and felt bound to inform King Charles
that there was ‘no necessity for such lights’ and that an imposition of
a rate for their support would a grievance to navigation: in times of
‘hostility,’ the Trinity House went on, ‘such lights would be a means
to light an enemy to land, and bring them to an anchor in the Downs’;
and moreover, ‘in a chase by night’ ships would be brought to where the
king’s ships and our own merchantmen rode peacefully at anchor, and
then these pursuing vessels might, on dark nights, by mistake board
either those frigates or merchant ships without either having time to
demonstrate what she was. True, it might be urged that, ‘in time of
hostility,’ the Foreland lights could be put out; yet, meanwhile, they
would so far do mischief as to acquaint strangers with our coast in every
part; so that in time of war they night get through the channel by night
without lights ‘merely by their depths.’

The Trinity House at Dover had similar objections to such costly follies
as lighthouses. ‘We at sea,’ it wrote, with professional contempt, ‘have
always marks more certain and sure than lights—high lands and soundings
which _we_ trust more than lights’; ‘and,’ continued these superior
persons, ‘the Goodwins are no more dangerous now than time out of mind
they were, and lighthouses would never lull tempests, the real cause of
shipwreck.’ If lighthouses had been of any service at the Forelands, the
Trinity House, as guardians of the interests of shipping, would surely
have put them there!

The real objection to the Foreland lights—their dimness and general

badness—was never once mentioned; the outcry against the lighthouses
was by those who had to pay for them, the shipowners and merchants; and
from their point of view good lights or bad were equally objectionable.
Probably the king—who must have been getting quite used to these
extraordinary outbursts of eloquence every time a lighthouse was proposed
_anywhere_, and who was beginning to have a shrewd suspicion as to
the motives that caused them—knew how much of this expressed alarm
was genuine. He stayed, for a little time, Sir John Meldrum’s patent,
empowering him to gather tolls for the Foreland lighthouses, and then
granted it, ordering his Admiral of the Narrow Seas to arrest vessels
that would not pay.

We do not know if Sir John Meldrum, after this confirmation, improved his
system of lighting; let us hope he did; but it is doubtful, for the same
ramshackle towers, well patched with timber and iron, were not replaced
with more substantial structures for more than sixty years afterwards. A
new tower, of flint and lime, was set up at the North Foreland in 1694,
and then a coal fire was used to light the lighthouse. This was soon
after completely gutted by fire, and for a long time the only light shown
there was a lantern, containing one candle, stuck on a pole!

After a while a tower of brick and stone was raised, and it is probable
that some part of this forms the lighthouse we see at the North Foreland
to-day; then the owners went back to their coal fire again, and kept
it up so badly that bitter complaints arose from those who worked the
Channel trade. Inquiry was held, and it was found that the grates were
but half filled with fuel.

This was scandalous, for the profits of the two Foreland lights had
grown—I am speaking of the opening years of the last century—to be
enormous. The Trinity House thought the outcry offered a reasonable
pretext for acquiring possession of the lights, but the crown officers
would not transfer the patent; they only warned the patentee to amend his
light, and he did so. Then, in 1727, the Trustees of Greenwich Hospital
bought both lighthouses, and possession of them remained in that charity
till the general transfer of lighthouses to the Trinity House, some sixty
years ago.

One of the first things the trustees did was to close in the open coal
fire at the North Foreland, and so save their coals. The plan succeeded
no better there than at other lighthouses at which it was tried:
shipwreck on the Goodwins became much more frequent, and sailors said
that often they could see the outline of the Foreland before they got a
glimpse of the fire on the lighthouse; and so the lantern was taken off
and the fire was left to burn unshaded till 1790, when the tower was
raised one hundred feet, to its present height, and a lantern lit with
oil lamps supplanted the coal fire altogether.

Of the history of the South Foreland lighthouse there is not a great

deal to record; yet, from a scientific point of view, that lighthouse
certainly demands attention, from the fact that many of what have been in
turn regarded as the most approved methods of coast-lighting have been
first put into practice there. It was suggested as an experiment station
so long ago as 1729: magnifying lenses were first used there in 1810.
In 1853, Faraday made his initial experiments there with the electric
light as a means of coast illumination; and there—nine years later—the
lime-light was first applied for a similar purpose. Having said this much
we may leave the South Foreland light, for of its history and romance we
know little, practically nothing.

But before we pass on to Dungeness lighthouse a word more must be said

about the Goodwin lights. We left their history in 1629 very far from the
date at which a light was actually placed upon them. Nothing came of the
suggestion then made to indicate the dangers of the Sands by means of
floating lights, and the existence of lighthouses on the North and South
Forelands, for which heavy dues were payable, gave little hope of success
to any project to light the Goodwins. As a consequence we hear of no
subsequent proposal for a lightship there till well on in the eighteenth
century, that is, after the practicability of this form of coast
illumination had been actually demonstrated at the Nore and the Dudgeon.

But the then proposers of the lightship at the Goodwins were only two
poor pilots, who could not be expected to carry on a battle with so
powerful an antagonist as the Trinity House. The secretary of that body,
writing, about the year 1750, of the pilots’ humane but ineffectual
effort, congratulates himself that so crushing had been their defeat,
that his Board was unlikely to be troubled again with such ridiculous and
tiresome suggestions. The Trinity House, he observes, ‘was not fond of
them!’

However, times changed as the years went by: the Trinity House, and those
for whom it spoke, grew larger-minded, had greater scientific knowledge,
and were more public-spirited. Thus before the end of the century of
which we have been speaking, the Trinity House had itself established a
lightship at the Goodwins—the first of the three which now warn mariners
of the presence of the Sands.

Of course these lightships are not as useful as lighthouses; but it is

pretty certain that to do what Gawen Smith wanted to do in the days
of Queen Bess—reclaim the Goodwins and build a lighthouse on them—is
practically impossible. Projects for doing this came before the Trinity
House in plenty during the first half of the present century, one being
to enclose that part of the Sands called ‘Trinity Bay’ and form it into
a harbour of refuge; and, according to the author of _Memorials of the
Goodwin Sands_, the Trinity House itself, at the close of the seventeenth
century, made trial borings, to great depths, to see if a solid bottom
could be reached: it could not.

But although it may be impossible to build a lighthouse on the Goodwin

Sands, it must not pass unnoticed that between 1840 and 1850 at least two
temporarily successful attempts were made to erect what their inventors
termed ‘refuge beacons’ on the Goodwins: one of these was a mast forty
feet high, sunk into the sand in a strong frame of oak, on which mast
was fitted a gallery—never less than sixteen feet above high-water mark.
This gallery, so its inventor stated, was capable of holding thirty
or forty persons. In it a supply of food and drink could be left in
a properly protected case, and a flag, which the shipwrecked persons
who availed themselves of the refuge could immediately hoist, and thus
acquaint the coastguard on the mainland of their presence there. The
gallery could be reached by means of a chain ladder from the sands, and a
‘basket chair’ was kept in readiness in the gallery, in which might be
placed persons too exhausted to ascend the ladder; this would be easily
lowered and hauled up again to the top. This wonderful erection stood for
nearly three years and then disappeared—whether run down or washed away
nobody knows. It would be interesting to learn if during that period the
wonderful paraphernalia was ever put in operation, if any shipwrecked
mariners availed themselves of the refuge gallery, and if so, whether or
not they found a comfortable meal awaiting them!

On the whole, then—though it is perhaps dangerous to predict that

anything is impossible—it may be stated as exceedingly improbable that
the Goodwin Sands will ever be turned into _terra firma_, or that a
lighthouse will be built upon them; and without penetrating into the
secrets of the official breast, it may be taken as correct that such is
the opinion of the present Trinity Board. Could such a work be carried
out, its advantages would be, of course, enormous. As a fortification and
place of defence of the Downs and Channel its value is incalculable, and
that, as some of us may remember, was the opinion of our great commander,
the Duke of Wellington.

CHAPTER IX

DUNGENESS LIGHTHOUSE

After passing the Goodwins the pilot of the southward-bound ship can sail
on with little to trouble him till he gets near Dungeness. That was a
very ‘nasty’ spot till marked by a lighthouse; the surrounding flatness
added to the dangers, for over the long stretches of shingle and sand
the steeple of Lydd Church rose up clear and distinct, looking in the
twilight to those at sea like ‘the forme of the saile of some talle
shippe’—so said the mariner of James I’s reign,—which led the steersman
to shape his course ‘confidently’ that way, with a result that, darkness
closing in, his ship would run upon the far-stretching sands with but
slender chance of getting off again in safety.

What light, if any, charity had maintained at or near Dungeness before

the dissolution of the monasteries we know not; but certainly for
long after it none was placed there, and shipwreck to an enormous
extent happened each winter; in one over a thousand lifeless bodies
of shipwrecked victims were collected at and near the ‘nesse,’ and
merchandise to the value of £100,000 perished there.

No wonder, then, that when, in the very early years of the seventeenth
century, lighthouse building began as a financial speculation, the
speculators hit upon Dungeness as a spot at which a lighthouse was
necessary and expedient. And it is wonderful to find that arguments were
seriously put forward against this project.

A little prior to the year 1616 Sir Edward Howard, one of the king’s
cup-bearers, built a lighthouse at Dungeness, and petitioned the crown
for leave to gather toll for its support. The Trinity House offered an
uncompromising opposition; nevertheless James I gave Sir Edward the
licence he sought. But Sir Edward found that the dues were paid with
reluctance, and was glad, ere long, to part with his interest in the
lighthouse to one William Lamplough, Clerk of the King’s Kitchen, on
whose behalf the crown, by its customs officers, interfered, directing
that the tolls should be paid.

That was too much for the shipowners and the Trinity House. They were,
in 1621, eagerly promoting a bill in Parliament for the ‘suppression’ of
the lighthouse, which they described as a nuisance to navigation; but
Parliament would not interfere with the king’s grantee, and the end of it
was that Lamplough was told by the crown that he must keep a better light
at Dungeness than he had lately done. The remonstrance was, no doubt,
needed; for it seems that the coal fire which at first had illuminated
the lighthouse had been replaced by a few candles, which were kept badly
‘snuffed’ and gave a wretchedly poor light.

But the opponents of lighthouses did not rest with the improvement in
the lights. The Trinity House continued to excite opposition, and the
corporation of Rye—quaint, sleepy old Rye, then very wide awake to its
own interests—seems to have considered it a favourable opportunity for
possessing itself of some one else’s property without paying for it. It
remembered that the first idea of a lighthouse at Dungeness emanated
from a townsman of Rye, and begged the gentleman at Lincoln’s Inn who
fought their legal battles for them, to draft a Bill to be prosecuted
in Parliament for vesting the title to the lighthouse in the mayor and
jurats of Rye, who promised to bestow the profits on the repair of their
much decayed harbour. That man of law was also a man of the world. In
acknowledging their instructions, he advised the jurats to ‘make Mr.
Speaker’ their ‘friend’; he evidently thought that so doing assisted
Parliamentary procedure considerably!

Perhaps the jurats neglected this sage advice: perhaps the price of
friendship was too high. The Bill was drafted, the man of law did his
part, but there the matter ended: the Bill remained a bud, it never
blossomed into an Act, and Lamplough’s patent again resisted attack;
he, in 1635, pulling down the then existing tower, and building one
altogether more substantial, that stood till a century ago, when the
lighthouse now there was erected.

We hear no more of the ‘hindrance’ and ‘inconveniency’ of Dungeness

lighthouse after this; its popularity was general, so much so that when,
in Cromwell’s time, the Earl of Thanet, who was the ground-landlord,
threatened the then owner, whose rent was in arrear, ‘to pull downe’
the structure, the latter did not pay, he only appealed to England’s
Protector, who held that it was not a fitting state of affairs that ‘the
safety of many lives and of the State’s ships should be left to the will
of the Earl of Thanet’—and he granted the owner protection.

After the Restoration there was a deal of squabbling over, and confusion
about, the title to Dungeness light. The former owner had forfeited his
right to it for adhering to the crown, and now the crown was once again
a power in the land, and the ‘Parliament man,’ to whom the lighthouse
land been given, would not quit, alleging a title by purchase; but into
all that the reader need not go. The only point in it that will interest
him is that at least one, probably more, of the Winstanley family had an
interest in the title. Can these Winstanleys have been ancestors of Henry
of Eddystone fame? If so, then we have, perhaps, a clue to what gave him
the idea of erecting a lighthouse as an object of profit.

A coal fire continued to light Dungeness till the completion of the now
existing lighthouse, 110 feet high, in 1792. Then eighteen sperm-oil
lamps took the place of the flickering fire, and shone steadily out to
sea. This third lighthouse at Dungeness was built under the direction of
Wyat, after the model of Smeaton’s lighthouse on the Eddystone. It now
stands more than five hundred yards from the high-water mark, though when
first it was built, it was barely a hundred, so rapidly has the neck of
shingle grown.

This increased distance was becoming somewhat misleading to passing

ships, so the Trinity House has placed a small revolving light nearer
the sea, and in connection with it a siren fog-horn, which latter was a
present from America. The utility of the fog-horn is great, though it
renders a foggy night spent in the neighbourhood of Dungeness anything
but tranquil.

But then, not many people—that is, people unused to the songs of the
modern sea siren—are likely to spend a night at or near Dungeness.
True, there is now a railway to it, and there are a few houses built
around the lighthouse. These are tenanted by people whose work is in
some way connected with it, with the coastguard duty, with Lloyds’
signalling station, with the new lifeboat, or with the Dutch ‘Consulate,’
an ambitious title bestowed upon a grocer’s shop whose fortunate owner
happens to have a patent from the Netherlands Government in connection
with signalling vessels of that nationality that pass the ‘Ness.’ These
people _are_, probably, pretty well used to the siren’s cries, which are
particularly frequent during autumn and winter nights, when fogs hang in
the Channel.

Some twenty years after the present lighthouse was built, a violent
storm, accompanied by thunder and lightning, swept round it, and the
lightning, striking it, cracked it in such a way that it was at first
thought necessary to pull down the whole structure and set up a fresh
building in its stead. But the cracks were carefully filled up with
cement, the tower was bound round with iron hoops, barrel fashion, and
now it stands as firm as ever. If it is taken away, it will be because
Nature’s work in lengthening the shingle banks renders it useless where
it is.

CHAPTER X

ST. CATHERINE’S POINT TO THE EDDYSTONE

There is not much to say about the lighthouses along our southern coast
between Dungeness and St. Catherine’s, in the Isle of Wight; but the
lighthouse at this latter place has an interesting history.

What now remains of the ancient building tower, octagonal without but
square within, which consists of four distinct stories; the two lower
were entered from an annexe building, whilst the two upper were mere
stages reached by ladders. The beam-holes may still be seen, and they
show that this was the arrangement. Two entrances to the tower remain—low
and narrow doorways, one exactly over the other; the upper being the
narrower of the two. The basement is lit by a couple of square-headed
windows, not very wide, with arched lintels in the inner face.

Such is the ancient lighthouse of St. Catherine’s as we see it to-day;

certainly a picturesque ruin, and certainly possessed of interesting
and romantic associations. The spot was already a hermit’s cell in the
year 1312, when the Bishop of Winchester admitted Walter de Langeberewe
to ‘the hermitage on the hill of Chale, dedicated to St. Catherine the
Virgin.’ Whether or not it was then part of the hermit’s duty to light
and trim a lamp in his hermitage to warn vessels of the presence of St.
Catherine’s Point, hard by, we do not learn; but we know, now, that this
was no unusual task for the occupant of a hermitage.

Two years after Walter’s admission, that is, in the winter of 1314, a
ship—one of a fleet chartered by some merchants of Aquitaine to bring
over a consignment of wine into England from the vineyard of a monastery
in Picardy—went ashore near the hermitage, and soon the force of the
waves dashed her to pieces, scattering her cargo, which was, most of
it, washed ashore. Her crew escaped safely to land, and then gathered
together as many of the casks as they could, which—thinking that the
owners would imagine all had been lost with the ship—they proceeded to
dispose of, for the best terms they were able to make, to the inhabitants
round about.

But in process of time the true story of the wreck travelled over the
Channel and reached the ears of the merchants of Aquitaine, who forthwith
brought an action in the English courts against the sailors and those
who had bought the shipwrecked cargo. In the end damages were awarded to
the merchants, and the incautious purchasers supposed that the matter had
been brought to a conclusion. But it was not so; the Church—the monks
in Picardy—had been wronged, for the wine really belonged to them; the
merchants had only the consignment of it; and so the pope interfered
and held that the purchasers must atone for their illicit trading. He
decided what form the atonement should take: Walter de Godeton, one of
the largest buyers, was to establish in the hermitage of St. Catherine a
priest who would offer continual prayer for those perished at sea, and
he was also to build a tower adjoining the hermitage, from which a light
should nightly be displayed to warn passing ships of the danger of St.
Catherine’s Point. The ruin which we see to-day is evidence that this
part of the papal direction was duly carried out. What was the subsequent
history of this lighthouse, we do not know; but at the general sweeping
away of hermitages and oratories this useful light seems no longer to
have been maintained.

In the seventeenth century, and again in the eighteenth, schemes were

set on foot for re-erecting a lighthouse near the ruined tower of St.
Catherine’s, though none was actually established at the spot till just
at the end of the last century. That is the date at which the lighthouse
now standing there was erected—a lighthouse famous throughout the
maritime world for the extraordinary brilliancy of its light, given by
electricity.

Weymouth and Melcombe Regis were important ports during the Middle Ages,
and it is possible, nay probable, that some system of guiding incoming
vessels by night existed there in early times; but if it did, all trace
of it is lost. Portland Hill seems a natural place for a lighthouse,
yet the first we hear of one there is quite at the beginning of the
last century, when Captain William Holman’s petition to erect one was
submitted to the Trinity House.

The board considered that at the spot suggested the land was so high and
the water so deep, ‘to the very shore,’ that lights were needless; adding
that the duty proposed would add to the already heavy burdens borne by
the shipowners. The report concludes with the argument, used before in
other cases, that had lights been needed at Portland, the board would
have suggested them. Not perhaps convinced with this method of argument,
the corporation of Weymouth and the seamen of that port again urged
the actual necessity for a lighthouse. Their petition and those that
succeeded it were, however, ‘shelved.’

But the value of lighthouses was getting to be too widely appreciated

for a scheme like that at Portland to be crushed, because it was thought
that ‘navigation’ paid enough for light dues already. The seamen
clamoured and raised public opinion on their side, and so the Trinity
House thought the best thing to do was for itself to propose lighthouses
at Portland, which it did, and obtained a patent on May 6, 1716.

The superior economy of the ‘closed’ fire-light was then, as we have

seen in other instances, attracting attention, and the fire at the
higher lighthouse at Portland was arranged on that plan; but it did no
better there than elsewhere, and in 1731 we find the mariners ‘who used
the western trade’ urging the Trinity Board to ‘open’ the fires on the
lighthouses there, and allow the smoke to escape, instead of dimming and
clouding the glass.

But probably ill-keeping had as much as anything to do with the badness

of the lights, which was frequently a subject of complaint by nautical
men. In 1752 we get a curious picture of the condition in which the
lights were maintained: two brethren of the Trinity House, who had been
sent to consider the position of a proposed lighthouse at the Lizard,
thought well to inspect those at Portland, and approached them on a
summer’s evening by sea. ‘It was,’ they say, ‘nigh two hours after sunset
before any light appeared in either of the lighthouses.’ Then, in the
lower light, there came a faint glimmer, which continued for about an
hour, and ceased. Half an hour after, a light appeared in the upper
lighthouse, and gave a very fitful light, only showing at intervals for
the first hour, and then ‘gave a tolerable good light,’ though not so
steady as the lower.
The two brethren asked the captain of their boat if this state of
things was the rule or the exception, and received an answer that the
ill-keeping was the rule; the lights never showed in time, and often
not all through the night. It must be said to the credit of these two
brothers that they suggested that the captain and his friends, who ‘used
the coasting trade,’ should memorialize the Trinity House on the subject.

West of Portland, none of the other headlands from that, as far as

Plymouth, were marked by lighthouses till within a hundred years ago—that
is to say, as far as we know. What may have been the case before the
dissolution of the monasteries cannot now be definitely ascertained;
there are many ruined chapels along the coast between these two points,
and there is a legend connected with that which stands on the hill above
Torquay, to the effect that it was founded by a sailor who had been
rescued from shipwreck near the spot, and who—as a thankoffering for
safety—gave money to support a small band of monks from Torr Abbey to
keep a light there for the benefit of ships going up and down the Channel.

But when we reach Plymouth we are practically opposite the best known
lighthouse in England, the Eddystone. The history of this isolated
building does not perhaps go back very far; yet it is certainly as
interesting and full of incident as that of any of which we have yet
spoken.

CHAPTER XI

SUGGESTIONS FOR A LIGHTHOUSE ON THE EDDYSTONE—HENRY WINSTANLEY

Though comparatively modern, the history of the lighting of the Eddystone

rocks, if we begin it with the _suggestions_ for such a laudable scheme,
commences a good deal earlier than many people imagine; that is to say,
it was _not_ originated by Henry Winstanley. On March 1, 1665, the Duke
of York, as head of the Admiralty, considered and referred to the Trinity
House a petition from Sir John Coryton and Henry Brouncker for leave to
erect ‘certain lighthouses’ on the south and south-west coast of England,
which was at that time entirely unlit. They suggested placing ‘coal-fire
lights’ on the Scilly Islands, the Lizard, Portland Hill, the Start, at
St. Catherine’s in the Isle of Wight, and on the Eddystone!

The scheme, save for the proposed lighthouse at the Lizard, was a new
one, and the suggestion to light the Eddystone rocks, thirteen miles from
land, was an entire novelty; it had not been proposed in post-Reformation
times, and the most devotional and adventurous monk or hermit can surely
never have looked upon those wave-washed rocks as a possible home,
however much their loneliness might have attracted him.

When the Trinity House came to consider the proposal, the lighthouse at
Scilly was that generally approved: the alternative proposals had then
dwindled down to one, namely, that for the Eddystone. The brethren ‘well
knew’ that the spot—‘the Edie Stone,’ as they call it—was one on which
the projected work ‘could hardly be accomplished’; but they were sure
that, ‘if a lighthouse be settled upon the Edie Stone, it might be of
as great use as other lights in his majesty’s kingdoms.’ As to what was
proposed to be gathered for support of this light, the Trinity House
considered that 2_d._ a ton from vessels that would have its benefit
would be amply sufficient, and the brethren held that ‘the natives of his
majesty’s kingdoms’ should be, by authority, free from paying anything
at all; if these terms were agreed to, they had nothing to say against a
lighthouse at the Eddystone.

Here then, in 1665, we have an interesting expression of opinion as to a

lighthouse on the Eddystone and—as we have said—the earliest proposition
for such a building. Perhaps the proposers, on reflection, considered
their scheme too adventurous, too costly to allow of possible profit;
at all events nothing further was done in the matter of any of the
lighthouses suggested.

But the commerce of Plymouth, and its importance as a seaport for the New
World, were then growing year by year, and the number of vessels to and
from America and the West Indies that had to run in jeopardy by reason of
the Eddystone shoal was very rapidly increasing. We are not, therefore,
surprised to find another scheme for a lighthouse on these rocks put
forward at no very distant date.

It was presented to the ‘Court’ of the Trinity House, and came under
consideration on February 11, 1692. The minute of the proceedings reads
as follows:—

‘Proposall’s of Walter Whitfield, Esqʳᵉ, read. Where, under the authority

of the corporation, he will undertake, at his own charge, to erect a
lighthouse upon Dunnose, and to secure the Eddistone from being obnoxious
to the navigation, upon such conditions as to the allowance for the
charge of setting upp and maintayning thereof, and a share of the
profitts arissing therefrom, as shall be agreed on; he being, besides,
to be at the whole trouble and charge of obtayning subscriptions and
of procuring and passing the King’s letters patent for the same. Which
said proposals having been considered and debated, it was the opinion
of the Board that a light upon Dunnose would be unnecessary, if not
altogether useless; but, on the contrary, one uppon the Eddistone would
be of great use and benefit to the navigation. And thereupon it was
ordered that he should be desired to explain himself, whether he meant
the setting a lighthouse upon Eddistone: and if so, what he estimated his
charge thereof would be, and what he would be content to take from the
navigation.’

This is the record of the first step taken towards establishing the
famous lighthouse at the Eddystone, with which, hitherto, the name of
Henry Winstanley has been alone associated. Who was Walter Whitfield,
where he came from, what was his profession, and what led him to turn his
mind to lighthouse erection, we do not know; but it is certain that, as
he soon after explained, it was by means of a lighthouse on the Eddystone
that he proposed to indicate the dangers of those rocks; and though we
may rightly regard Winstanley as the _builder_ of the first Eddystone
lighthouse, we certainly cannot properly regard him as the _projector_
of the scheme. The credit for this must be given first to those who
suggested it in 1665—Sir John Coryton and Henry Brouncker—and secondly
to Walter Whitfield, whoever he may have been.

In his ‘explanation’—offered in March, 1692—Whitfield entered into more

detail as to what he proposed with regard to the Eddystone. It was that
he should build there ‘a substantiall lighthouse’ wholly at his own
charge, on condition that the Trinity House would be ‘assistant to him
therein’ and allow him the entire profits for the first three years, and
then one half the clear income for the term of fifty years; on the expiry
of this lease, the ‘sole profit’ to revert to the Trinity House, in
whose name the patent was to be applied for. The proposal was judged ‘so
reasonable’ that the board immediately accepted it, with a proviso that
Whitfield should pay them twenty shillings a year for the first three
years of his term.

By the middle of June, 1692, preliminaries had been so far settled that
the petition to Queen Mary—William III was absent abroad—for the grant
of a patent for a lighthouse at the Eddystone had been placed in the
hands of the Earl of Pembroke, then master of the Trinity House, for
presentation to the queen. The earl duly gave it in; on the 20th of the
month it was referred to the law officers of the crown, and they reported
in its favour on the 11th of July.

But, for some reason, the patent was not granted till two years later,
June 20, 1694, and after that there was another mysterious delay of two
years before anything further was done; then, on June 10, 1696, another
agreement was entered into between Whitfield and the Trinity House.
There are some important differences between the terms of this agreement
and that of 1692; they are far more advantageous to Whitfield, who is
to enjoy the entire issues of the lighthouse for five years, and the
moiety for fifty. Directly after this last agreement, the lighthouse was
commenced—not by Whitfield at all, but by Henry Winstanley.

The delay in the actual grant of the patent, and then—that granted—in
the commencement of the work, not by Whitfield but by Winstanley, is
noteworthy, and points to this: Whitfield, on receiving intimation that
the sought-for patent would be granted, made some preliminary experiments
on the Eddystone; these so far convinced him of the hazardous nature of
the undertaking that he hesitated to take up the patent, but at length
did so. He then made further experiments, which confirmed his estimate of
the dangers and difficulties of the work, and he was, perhaps, induced
to abandon it on Henry Winstanley, more venturesome and enterprising
than himself, stepping in and offering to erect the building if more
favourable terms were conceded. This, likely enough, is the explanation
of the delays and of the second agreement between Whitfield and the
Trinity House. Of an agreement between Winstanley and Whitfield I have
failed to find any trace; but it is probable that one was entered into;
at all events, there is the authority of a contemporary document at the
Trinity House for stating that Winstanley himself finally undertook the
erection of the Eddystone lighthouse, under the authority of the Trinity
Board, _at his sole expense_.

Let us pause for a moment in the narrative of the Eddystone’s history,

and consider what is known of Henry Winstanley. He was born, probably,
at Littlebury, a mile from Saffron Walden, in Essex, about the year
1646. The names of his parents are not known, but one of his brothers
was Robert, the author of _Poor Robin’s Perambulations from Saffron
Walden to London_. Of Henry’s early life and education we have but
slender particulars. That he travelled abroad we may judge from a
statement made by himself that he had _seen_ the most renowned palaces
of France, Germany, and Italy; and the probability is that his tour was
undertaken with a view to obtaining proficiency in art—a profession in
which he was certainly successful. Both as a draftsman and an engraver he
distinguished himself, and worked more with ‘an eye to the main chance’
than most persons gifted with artistic power; for he appears to have
selected subjects for his labours that would attract the observation
of, and appeal directly to, the wealthy. He engraved the Manor House at
Wimbledon, and dedicated his work to its opulent and noble owner, Thomas
Earl of Danby; he drew and engraved a vast picture of Audley End House,
of which building he was, in 1694, clerk of the works, and he sent his
picture, with a characteristic letter, to the Earl of Suffolk: that is
the letter in which he refers to his early travels on the Continent. To
mention one of his minor productions as a draftsman, there is now amongst
the collection of playing cards at the British Museum, a pack designed
and executed by Winstanley.

[Illustration: PACK OF PLAYING CARDS DESIGNED BY WINSTANLEY.]

Besides being an artist, Winstanley distinguished himself in the science

of mechanics, though the particular branch of that science in which he
seems to have laboured was rather of the order to astonish than to yield
profitable scientific result. His house and garden at Littlebury bristled
with mechanical contrivances of every description. If you chanced to
tread upon a particular board in the passage, forthwith a door at the end
of it flew open, and out sprang a skeleton and stood before you; as you
sat yourself comfortably on a seat in the summer-house, before which was
a duck-pond, the seat on which you sat was promptly swung round into the
centre of the pond. In London he exhibited some of his contrivances with
considerable monetary profit, and his moving wax-works held their own at
Hyde Park Corner till 1709.

Whatever wealth he possessed came to him either by some of the means

described, or by inheritance. Jean Ingelow’s sprightly poem about the
Eddystone lighthouse, beginning,—

‘Winstanley’s deed, you kindly folk,

With it I fill my lay;
And a nobler man ne’er walked the world,
Let his name be what it may,’

tells how the ‘lovely ladies’ flocked to his London shop, where he
followed the trade of a mercer, and anxiously inquired after the arrival
of his homeward-bound ships, bringing the fabrics in which they yearned
to clothe themselves; but the poet here follows an error into which
many writers have fallen. There is no evidence that Henry Winstanley
was a mercer; so that, whatever circumstances determined him to put a
lighthouse on the Eddystone, it was not the loss of one of his own ships
with a costly cargo of rich novelties in stuffs from abroad! Rudyerd,
the architect of the _second_ Eddystone lighthouse, _was_ a mercer,
whose shop was on Ludgate Hill—hence probably the mistake arising from a
confusion of the two men.

So much for the personal particulars connected with Henry Winstanley; in

the next chapter we will resume the history of the actual construction
of the Eddystone lighthouse, about which we have much more definite
information.

CHAPTER XII

THE FIRST EDDYSTONE

Winstanley tells us that work was commenced in 1696. Government so far

smiled upon the undertaking that the guardship Terrible was appointed to
accompany both Winstanley and his men on their journeys between Plymouth
and the rock; the log-book and journal of this vessel afford us authentic
details of the progress of the building. On Saturday, June 6, we find
that Captain St. Loe and ‘the Ingineer’ were taken from Plymouth to the
Eddystone. But their stay on this occasion was of short duration. The
regular work began on July 14, and the plan seems to have been to bring
the Terrible to an anchor at a short distance from the Eddystone, and
then to despatch Winstanley, and such workmen as he took with him, in
the long-boat, to the rock, leaving them to work all day and fetching
them back at night; such entries as these in the log being typical of
the rest: ‘July 15—proving calm, sent the Ingineers (sic) by long-boat
to work; we lying by, off and on, all day. At night they came on board
us again. 16th, at 4 a.m., sent the long-boat with the Ingineers to the
stone again, returned at night,’ and so on. The Terrible was, except when
pursuing some French privateer that chanced to come in sight, in pretty
constant attendance, Commissioner St. Loe often coming out from Plymouth
to visit the work. Not unfrequently the man-of-war lay off ‘the stone’
all night. Except for an occasional rough day, which prevented Winstanley
and his men landing, work was kept on continuously till August 15, when
the Terrible was ordered to Ushant, and we hear no more of the works that
year.

Winstanley tells us something of what this first year’s work comprised.

‘The first summer was spent in making twelve holes in the rock, and
fastening twelve great irons to hold the work that was to be done
afterwards.’

It was his hope to finish the Eddystone lighthouse in the second year’s
work—that is, if he could get adequate assistance from the naval
authorities at Plymouth. It was—so he told the Trinity House, and
the Trinity House told the Admiralty—his intention to begin work so
soon as the calm summer days permitted it. And on June 30, 1697, the
commissioners of the Navy wrote to Commissioner St. Loe informing him
of the fact, and directing ‘all possible encouragement and assistance’
to be given ‘for the effecting an undertaking that may lead to so much
public good, by means of the guardship Terrible and her boats and men,’
not only for the carrying off and bringing on shore, when occasion should
require it, the persons employed in this work, ‘but for defending them
from any attempts that may be made by the enemy for obstructing the same,
unless the guardship and her boats be otherwise employed on his majesty’s
service’—in such case some other man-of-war at Plymouth was to take the
Terrible’s place. This it seems was an additional favour granted at
Winstanley’s request, since, by want of an arrangement of that kind, a
great deal of valuable time had been lost in the past.

Now let us see what the log of the Terrible for 1697 has to tell us.
Presumably Winstanley and his men had been taken to the Eddystone prior
to June 14, on which date we find the Terrible ‘standing off’ the rock,
and guarding it; but we have no note of her having landed any one upon
it. The next two or three days were spent on similar duty, the vessel
anchoring each night in Cawsand Bay, and proceeding to the Eddystone
at daybreak. On June 25, Commissioner St. Loe came on board and the
Terrible at once sailed with him to the fleet cruising in the Channel,
returning to Plymouth Sound at night. From the 27th to the 30th she
appears to have been fog-bound off Fowey, and here we may leave her to
return to what was meanwhile passing on the Eddystone.

It would seem that Winstanley and his men had, this year, not returned at
night to the guardship, but had slept on the rock, the Terrible returning
each morning to guard them; but, as we see on June 25, St. Loe, without
following his instructions by making other provision for watching the
Eddystone, should the Terrible be otherwise employed, had put himself on
board the guardship and sailed to the fleet. On returning to Plymouth she
appears to have endeavoured to resume her position off the rock, but, in
the fog, missed her way, and finally cast anchor, much to the west of it,
off Fowey, and here she remained for the next three or four days.

This was a grand opportunity for the French privateers. Probably on the
first day of the Terrible’s absence, one of their vessels, ‘a small
French challoope,’ as she is called, sent her boat, manned with thirty
armed men, who, landing on the rock, soon overpowered Winstanley and his
handful of labourers, and forcing them into the guardship’s boat stripped
them stark naked, cut them adrift, and carried the engineer back to the
privateer, which, on taking all on board, steered away to sea[3].

How the luckless workmen in the Terrible’s boat got back to shore we do
not know, but by some good fortune they must soon have done so, and have
given intelligence of what had happened; since, within a few days—namely,
on the afternoon of the 28th—information of this affair had actually
reached the Admiralty. On the following day, Josiah Burchett, the
secretary, addressed an apparently well-deserved rebuke to St. Loe:—

‘ADMIRALTY, _June 29, [16]97_.

‘SIR,

... ‘The Board are surprised to heare of the Enginer who was
erecting a Light House on the Eddystone being taken away by a
French boate and carryed to France, and the more soo because
the order sent you relateing to this matter particularly
directed that they should have the assistance of the Terrible
guardshipp, together with her boates and men, when she was not
employed on other necessary services, not only for carrying
off and bringing the workmen a shore, but for defending them
from any attempts which might be made on them; and it is the
direction of their Lordshipps that you doe let them know how it
comes to pass that these people had not a sufficient strength
to defend them from the enemy according to the said orders,
and you having been short in the relation of this unhappy
accident, the Board would have you informe yourself, as well as
possibly you can, how this whole matter happened and give them
a particular account there of.’

More to the point than this inquiry made of Commissioner St. Loe, was the
request made by the Admiralty on the following day to the Commissioners
of Sick and Wounded, that they should get Winstanley exchanged ‘as soon
as possible may be.’ This was apparently done, and the prisoner, none
the worse for his short captivity[4], was at work upon the Eddystone
with his former workmen by July 6, when the Terrible made an early start
from Plymouth and landed those whose business took them to ‘the stone’
by eight o’clock. Narcissus Luttrell makes two references to the event,
one on July 3, 1697: ‘The Lords of the Admiralty have sent to France to
have Mr. Winstanley, the engineer, who was taken off the Edistone rock,
near Plymouth, exchanged according to cartell.’ Ten days later he records
the fact that Winstanley had returned, ‘being exchanged according to
cartell.’ Narcissus, it may be here observed, himself became personally
and financially interested in the Eddystone later on. The rule seems
now to have been for the Eddystone party to return to the Terrible at
or about sunset, and sail back to Plymouth; a method more cautious, but
which evidently impeded the progress of the work, since they often lay
weather-bound at Plymouth for several days, as the summer was a very
stormy one. It is noteworthy that when Sunday was a fine day the ox or
the ass was pulled out of the pit without hesitation.

It is curious that Winstanley himself makes no mention of this exciting

occurrence. All he says of the second year’s work is that it was spent
in making a solid body or round pillar, twelve feet high and fourteen in
diameter, which, when finished, gave him and his men more time to work on
the stone itself, and ‘something to hold by.’

In the early part of the third year, 1698, the wooden pillar was
raised, which, to the vane on the top, was eighty feet high. Being all
finished, with the lantern and all the rooms in it, ‘we ventured,’
says Winstanley, ‘to lodge there, soon after midsummer, for the greater
dispatch of the work.’ By so doing the engineer and his men received a
sharply enforced lesson, which taught them to judge, by comparison, what
a winter’s gale would be like on their sea-girt home, and what might
be the isolation and privation of those whose lot it would be to dwell
there during a considerable part of the year. The very night of taking up
their residence on the rock, a fierce storm raged in the Channel; waves
broke over the building, drenching the inmates and their scanty store
of provisions, washing away their building material, and filling them,
all unused to such exhibitions of Nature’s fury, with the wildest alarm.
The storm continued for several days and nights, and it was only on the
eleventh day that their boat from Plymouth was able to venture near the
Eddystone. We can imagine with what thankful hearts Winstanley and his
men came on board her, and returned for rest and refreshment in more
secure quarters.

Before long the engineer and his men returned to the rock, and must have
laboured with considerable energy, since by November 14, 1698, the whole
structure was complete, and the tallow candles—for such was the lighting
power used in the first Eddystone lighthouse—lighted. It is not difficult
to picture the satisfaction with which Winstanley watched the ray of
light, slight and dim as it was, penetrating into the darkness of that
November night, his triumph at the accomplishment of his task, and his
charitable satisfaction at the thought of its benefit to his fellow-men.

Here is the wonderful work which his fertile imagination had produced.
One has only to glance at it to see how deficient it was in every
requisite element of stability, how it was susceptible to the action of
the storm. Its polygonal form rendered it peculiarly liable to be swept
away by the waves; whilst the upper part courted every wind of heaven,
being ornamented with large wooden candlesticks, and burdened with
useless vanes, cranes, and other ‘top-hamper,’ to use a sailor’s phrase.
Had Winstanley been seeking to erect a Chinese pagoda, his work would
have been singularly successful.

Its gaudy painting, with suns, compasses, and mottoes, was all in
keeping: the last included _Post tenebras lux_, _Glory be to God_,
_Pax in terra_. The rooms included a kitchen and accommodation for
the keepers, a state-room, finely carved and painted, a chimney, two
store cupboards and two windows. This is Winstanley’s own description
accompanying the engraving. In this picture he complacently fishes from
the state-room window. How unlike other lighthouses! It was a tower of
defence; it possessed a kind of movable shoot on the top, by which he
could shower stones upon an enemy attacking the building on any side. How
characteristic of the man—the jeers and warnings of his fellow-men only
excited his obstinacy.

[Illustration: WINSTANLEY’S EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE.]

The question of returning to the mainland did not then much disturb the
minds of the dwellers in the lighthouse. They had purchased experience by
their recent incarceration, and had no doubt with them a good store of
provisions. When, however, a month had passed, and no boat had been able
to come to them, these provisions had dwindled, and the inmates of the
lighthouse must have been beginning to tire of their lodging, to yearn
for the comfort of the home fireside—especially at the festive season
then so near upon them. At last only three days before Christmas, the
Plymouth boat came out with relief-men and provisions, and carried back
Winstanley and those with him to the shore: ‘We were,’ says the engineer,
‘almost at the last extremity for want of provisions, when, by the
providence of God, came two boats’ with supplies, ‘and the family that
was to take care of the lights.’

At Plymouth tidings of the appearance of the light had, no doubt, been

eagerly sought after, and each incoming vessel questioned on the subject.
When the first news reached port we cannot say, but it must have done
so early in December, as on the 17th of that month, the Trinity House
ordered the following notice to be inserted in _The London Gazette_ and
posted at the various ports of the kingdom, in which, as we see, allusion
is made to the fact that the light had then been ‘for some time’ kindled:
‘The Masters, wardens, and assistants of Trinity House having at the
request of navigation[5], with great difficulty, hazard, and expense
erected a light-house upon a dangerous rock called the Eddiston, lying at
the mouth of Plimouth Sound, as well for the avoiding the said rock as
for the better directing of ships thro’ the channell and in and out of
the harbour aforesaid. They doe hereby give notice that the said light
hath been kindled for some time; and that being discernible in the night
at the distance of some leagues, it gives entire satisfaction to all
masters of ships that have come within sight thereof.’ This being so it
was expected that vessels would cheerfully pay the dues for its support,
sanctioned by the king’s patent.

We do not learn when the ‘family’—sent to the lonely rock just before
Christmas, 1698—was relieved, or of what that family consisted. If it
included a man and his wife only, then it is to be hoped that the couple
selected had either won the Dunmow flitch or would at least be deserving
of it; the Eddystone rock would have been close quarters for a pair not
happily matched.

[Illustration: SILVER MODEL OF EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE AFTER ALTERATION.]

It is probable that early in the following year, 1699, Winstanley

returned to the Eddystone to see how the structure had borne the wintry
blast. He found it unshaken, but he also found that it was not nearly
high enough; the sea, dashing against the rocks, being frequently thrown
above the lantern, and often for long together completely hiding the
light. He therefore determined, besides strengthening the foundations,
to take down the upper part of the building and rebuild it, as shown in
the silver model of it here figured. This was so much higher than that
removed that the total elevation was 120 feet. Even with this alteration
Winstanley tells us that in great storms the sea ‘flies, in appearance,
100 feet above the vane.’
That William III took a personal interest in the Eddystone lighthouse is
proved by the fact that, through Major-General Trelawny, he commissioned
a certain Thomas Bastin, the brother of an officer in the army, and a
man who tried to ease the pinch of poverty by sketching various notable
buildings, to make for him accurate pictures of Winstanley’s work both
before and after its alteration; these, in January, 1702, were hanging in
one of the king’s apartments at Kensington. How we learn the fact is that
his majesty had forgotten to pay Mr. Bastin’s little bill, which came to
£30, and so there is some correspondence on the subject in the Treasury
papers.

Besides the _natural_ dangers of Eddystone there were some that we may
term _artificial_, to which those who resided there were exposed. We
have seen how, during the progress of the work, the men from a French
vessel swooped down on the undefended workmen and treated them in no very
agreeable manner; but it was not only from foes that the ‘islanders’ were
liable to attack: ‘Spare us from our friends’ might well have been their
motto had they coveted one. What days those were, those days of vigorous
‘pressing’ for sea service! there was recruiting then, with a vengeance.
Perhaps it was needful, perhaps it was not; any way, it was carried on
with a want of discrimination too often apparent in those whose hands
are tied up with red tape, for we find that even the light-keepers of
the Eddystone—or at least the male portion of them—were not safe from
the press-gang’s grasp. They were ‘pressed’ into his majesty’s service,
though very speedily released.

There is not much history of the first Eddystone lighthouse, after its
completion, handed down, so we may pass quickly to its closing chapter;
and a tragic one it is. When altering his building in 1699, Winstanley
had laughed at the fears of the inmates who, on many a night during
the previous winter, had verily believed their last hour had come. He
wished he might be there during the fiercest gale that ever swept the
Channel, for his lighthouse was as safe as a castle. This was a bit of
bravado. Men of scientific experience had pointed out the defects in the
construction of Winstanley’s wonderful work—defects which we have only to
look at our illustrations to see for ourselves, and which are almost as
apparent after the alterations in the building.

But despite all that was said to him, Winstanley persisted that his
lighthouse was perfectly secure. We know what happened. How his wish to
be in the lighthouse under circumstances that would test its strength to
the utmost was gratified, and what was the result.

An old man, who was alive in 1780, could perfectly remember the scene
at the Barbican steps, Plymouth, when, with every appearance of ‘dirty’
weather, Winstanley persisted in setting off for the lighthouse on the
afternoon of November 26, 1703. But the story of the great storm that
raged that night and the following day has often been told—too often to
bear repetition here. Inland, almost as much as at sea, its fury and
its fatal consequences were experienced. Around Winstanley’s house at
Littlebury it whirled dead leaves and broken wood against the window
panes, and shook the very building itself to and fro, yet but one
thing, one ornament, fell to the ground—that was the silver model of the
wonderful lighthouse. At what hour this happened we do not know, neither
do we know the exact time at which the Eddystone lighthouse, with its
inmates, fell into the sea, so we cannot say if there was any agreement
between the two; but there were not wanting many folks who lived round
about in the Essex farms and villages who firmly believed that the fall
of the silver model was Mrs. Winstanley’s warning of the tragedy at
Plymouth.

The memory of that terrible gale lingered long in the minds of those
who experienced it; the papers of the day are filled with accounts of
pitiable disasters and of hairbreadth escapes; but no incident made
a deeper impression in the mind of the public than the overthrow of
Winstanley’s lighthouse—‘going souse into the sea like the Edistone’[6]
was a favourite saying long after other incidents in the hurricane had
been forgotten.

Apart from everything else, the destruction of the Eddystone lighthouse

was a very heavy financial loss to Mrs. Winstanley: the principal part of
her husband’s capital had been invested in the undertaking; he had, we
learn from official papers, expended on the building and maintenance of
the lighthouse at the time of its destruction, £6,814 7_s._ 6_d._—for
this vouchers were forthcoming—and he had received from dues £4,721
19_s._ 3_d._, which left him at least £2,000 and more out of pocket; but
it was also shown that quite £1,000—for which the vouchers had perished
in the lighthouse—had been paid by Winstanley, from first to last, over
the building, so that his estate was the loser of something over £3,000
by the disaster.

That being so, Mrs. Winstanley might reasonably look, with assurance of
success, to the petition that was quickly presented to the crown—pointing
out that she was a fit and deserving object for the bestowal of a pension
from the royal bounty. After due time had been wasted in official
correspondence this was given in the shape of a donation of £200 and
pension of £100 a year.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SECOND EDDYSTONE

It was unlikely that the Eddystone lighthouse, which in the few years of
its existence had proved so beneficial to navigation, would be allowed
to remain for long unrestored, more especially as the loss of life and
treasure upon the Eddystone reef, which followed on the destruction of
the lighthouse, bore terrible testimony to its utility. John Lovett,
a London merchant, purchased Winstanley’s interest in the patent, and
entered into an agreement with the Trinity House, by which it was
arranged that the corporation’s name should be used in applying to
Parliament for licence to gather tolls for a new Eddystone lighthouse so
soon as it should be erected. Parliament readily passed the requisite
bill, and the new building was commenced.

The structure then raised is generally spoken of as ‘Rudyerd’s

lighthouse,’ being built and designed by the John Rudyerd already
referred to, who was, as we pointed out, a silk mercer in Ludgate Hill.
A silk mercer is not, perhaps, quite the man we should go to nowadays to
act as architect and engineer for a lighthouse; but to him his fellow
merchant, Lovett, entrusted the erection, and Rudyerd, aided by a couple
of shipwrights from Woolwich Dockyard, set to work and erected a wooden
tower built, for some distance up, around a core of granite, which
managed to withstand for more than half a century the gales that swept
the Channel, and might, for all we know, have been standing there to-day,
had it not been consumed by fire.

[Illustration: RUDYERD’S EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE.]

In erecting the tower, Rudyerd and his shipwrights had much the same
difficulties to contend with as Winstanley: the sudden storms and the
sudden descents of the press-gangs each in turn considerably hindered the
work; and at last it became necessary for government to grant special
protections from pressing for all those in any way engaged in building
the lighthouse. These protections are interesting documents; they give a
minute description of the personal appearance of the person protected,
and prove incidentally that many, indeed most, of the men that had been
employed by Winstanley were again employed by Rudyerd; altogether the
staff of workers and boatmen numbered about twenty.

As the men employed by Rudyerd had also worked on the first Eddystone
lighthouse, they would naturally possess a lively recollection of
the exciting incident of the descent of the French privateer already
described; and one cannot wonder that they now asked for something more
than protection from the press-gang’s grasp—they demanded that of a
man-of-war to watch by the rock so long as they worked there; and without
it they would not go. The Admiralty saw no necessity for such waste of
a ship’s time; it argued, in well-framed official language, that the
men’s fears were vain, since on the previous occasion the French king had
severely punished his officer who took them prisoners, and had at once
sent back Winstanley himself ‘with encouragement.’

But the workmen were not to be talked into going to the Eddystone
unprotected by British guns. Winstanley may have been treated with
the courtesy described, but _they_ had not been; they had the vivid
remembrance of some time spent at sea in an open boat and in the costume
of galley slaves.

At last the Admiralty gave way, a man-of-war was set apart for service
at the Eddystone, and the timber tower, that for long had lain ready at
Plymouth, was towed out to the rock, set up on the site of the former
lighthouse, and before very long—on August 28, 1708—the candles in the
lantern were illuminated.

From first to last Rudyerd’s lighthouse had cost Lovett hard on £10,000;
but, as his lease was to be for ninety-nine years from the time of
kindling the lights, he might reasonably have considered he was making a
profitable investment. Yet, like so many lighthouse speculators, he was
doomed to disappointment. Difficulties were experienced in collecting the
dues, and troubles and annoyances of various kinds continually arose,
with the result that he died, probably a ruined man, not long after the
building was finished; the fortune over the Eddystone lighthouse was made
by his successors in title—the mortgagees of the undertaking who came
into possession on Lovett’s death.

Of incidents connected with the history of the Eddystone under their

ownership we do not hear much; Rudyerd’s structure was obviously
more secure than Winstanley’s, yet for many years it was not without
considerable anxiety that the friends of those in charge of the
lighthouse awaited tidings of the safety of the building after any
particularly heavy storm had swept the Channel. But as year by year these
left the lighthouse unshaken such alarms subsided, and we find that the
post of keeper of the Eddystone lights was one keenly sought after.
The principal thing those stationed on the rock had to complain of was
occasional shortness of their food supply. For a considerable time
the provision of this was left to the owners’ agent, one Pentecost
Barker, whose diary has been preserved. Now, whether from Mr. Barker’s
bad management or from his employers’ stinginess, those on the rock,
according to the entries in his journal were left much too often with
insufficiency of food and insufficiency of candles for the lantern.
See what he enters under December 8, 1729: it was ‘a day of terrible
perplexity’ to him, for the ‘people on the Eddystone’ had no candles.
Without casting a slur on his memory, we cannot but think that this was
his own fault, for, says he, this ‘so teazed and fretted’ him that he
had a fit. This was very sad; but there are other entries in his diary
which suggest that the fit may have been produced not so much by mental
agitation as by what he took to allay it!

As most of us know, Rudyerd’s lighthouse was entirely destroyed by fire

in December, 1755, after an existence of forty-eight years. How this
fire originated is uncertain; probably the candle-flames, blown by an
unusually strong gust of wind, came in contact with the woodwork of the
lantern and set it alight. The fire was discovered at two in the morning,
as one of the keepers went from the watching-room to snuff the candles,
and it spread with amazing rapidity. There were then three keepers on the
rock, and these had, each of them, very narrow escapes from burning; yet
only one death could be directly attributed to the fire. This was of an
old man of ninety who, as he stood on the rock gazing open-mouthed at the
progress of the flames, swallowed a portion of molten lead. Helpless with
agony he was lifted into the relief boat that came out to the rock, and
on its reaching Plymouth was carried to the hospital, where he lingered
for several days; after death, the surgeons opened his body, and found in
it a lump of lead weighing seven ounces.

CHAPTER XIV

THE THIRD AND FOURTH LIGHTHOUSES AT THE EDDYSTONE

The destruction of the second lighthouse at the Eddystone could not have
happened at a more unfortunate time, for the long dark nights of the next
few months were the worst in the year for vessels passing up and down
Channel in proximity to the rock. It is strange, therefore, that, though
the proprietors took in hand the rebuilding of the lighthouse immediately
after the fire, the means, then well known, of marking dangerous shoals
by a lightship, were not sooner taken. No lightship was placed by the
Eddystone rock till the August following the fire.

The man consulted by the proprietors about rebuilding the lighthouse was
John Smeaton, who, by the way in which he carried out the work, won for
himself a fame that has lasted till to-day. The lighthouse built by him
withstood the storms of years, and, as we most of us remember, it was
only in 1881 that it was deemed necessary actually to remove it and to
build another lighthouse on another part of the Eddystone rocks.

[Illustration: THE EDDYSTONE BUILT BY SMEATON.]

When Smeaton first met the proprietors he alarmed their economical

feelings by proposing to build a stone and not a wooden lighthouse; but
so powerfully did he urge the ultimate saving that would be effected by
having a building of this more durable material that he left them with
an order to carry out the work as he thought fit, and he started off to
Plymouth to execute his commission.

[Illustration: SMEATON’S MODE OF DOVETAILING THE STONES.]

Many were the difficulties he encountered; the mayor of the town would
not lend him the Guildhall as a room in which to piece together his
models—he thought it would ‘spoil the floor’; for the same reason the
keeper of the Assembly Rooms refused the use of his chief apartment;
it was, he said, the only decent dancing-floor in Plymouth, and his
life would be a burden to him if he permitted it to be spoilt—there
was a large feminine population at Plymouth! Then Smeaton had the same
trouble with the press-gangs that Winstanley and Rudyerd had experienced.
His workmen, too, caused him some anxiety; there were many incipient
‘strikes’ among them, and though he seems to have known how to deal with
such outbreaks, they naturally retarded the work and ruffled his temper a
great deal.

Smeaton’s troubles with the press-gangs certainly seem a little

remarkable, as we read of them. Surely in the half century that had
elapsed since Winstanley and Rudyerd had been annoyed by such outbursts
of official vigilance, even government departments must have become more
enlightened. Yet here, in 1755, and during the next two or three years,
we find the officers of the ‘press’ acting with a want of discrimination
equal to that their predecessors had displayed fifty years before, and
repeatedly hindering the good work being carried on at the Eddystone by
‘pressing’ the workmen and boatmen into the king’s service. It must be
said, in fairness to the heads of the Admiralty, that, when the matter
was brought to their notice, they speedily directed the men’s release;
the officers’ excuse generally was that they did not _believe_ the
men’s story, that they were employed on ‘Eddystone service’; so Smeaton
soon saved this excuse being made by painting on the main-sail of the
Eddystone store-boat a large picture of the lighthouse, and by giving to
each of the workmen a stamped silver medal[7] which served as a talisman
in case the press-gang interfered with them on shore.

Smeaton began work at the stone-yard at Mill Bay, Plymouth, in March,

1757, and shortly afterwards on the rock itself; and on August 24, 1759,
the last stone of the lighthouse had been fixed in position. On it was
engraved the short but expressive motto: _Laus Deo!_

What a contrast was the whole building, even to this devout utterance,
to the production of Winstanley’s fantastic imagination; yet, perhaps,
a less fanciful mind, a less imaginative disposition than his, would
not have hazarded what, in his day, was regarded more or less as a mad
project, and so the possibility of the lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks
might have remained undemonstrated.

[Illustration: SMEATON’S CHANDELIER.]

The corona in which the candles were to be placed, and all the ‘tackle’
for hanging it, reached the Eddystone on October 17, and Smeaton tells
us with pride that, in less than half an hour after its arrival, it was
placed in position and the candles fixed in the sockets prepared for
them. Then the signal was given to the lightship, hard by, that her
services were no longer required, and she, hoisting her sail and hauling
up her anchors, made her way back to Plymouth. At dusk Smeaton lighted
his candles, and found, to his great satisfaction, that by opening vent
holes at the bottom of the lantern he could keep down the temperature,
and so, in summer, prevent the candles from melting—a feat which
Winstanley and Rudyerd had failed to accomplish.

The light in the new lighthouse was pronounced excellent, and boats
coming within hail of the rock told of the testimony to its goodness that
incoming vessels had brought to Plymouth. Smeaton might well be proud of
his work—and so no doubt he was; but he showed no anxiety to return to
shore to receive the plaudits and congratulations of mankind. He, and
some of his helpers, waited in the lighthouse, attending to its duties,
till the two men he had selected as keepers arrived there; then he and
his companions sailed back to Plymouth. Thus, as Smeaton himself writes,
after ‘innumerable difficulties and dangers, was a happy period put to
this undertaking,’ without loss of life or limb.

From that day to this not a night has passed on which the Eddystone
rocks have been unmarked by a light, though, as the reader was reminded
a little way back, Smeaton’s building no longer performs the duty of a
lighthouse. As the illuminating power was in Winstanley’s time, so it
remained until the opening years of the present century, when a general
improvement in coast-lighting was being adopted. It is really surprising
that candles, with the trouble they necessitated, lasted so long as
they did as lighthouse luminants, for we must remember—what the present
generation is probably forgetting—that candles in those days needed
continual snuffing to keep them bright; and it is amusing to read in
Smeaton’s account of his lighthouse the evident pride with which he
refers to a contrivance, worked by the Eddystone clock, which sounded a
gong every half-hour, so warning the keeper on duty that he must apply
his snuffers to the four-and-twenty candles in the lantern!

[Illustration: SECTION OF THE EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE BUILT BY SMEATON.]

The improved lighting at the Eddystone came into operation on the

Trinity House acquiring possession of the lighthouse on the expiry of
the lease—that would be about the year 1807. Very soon afterwards it
was discovered that the rock on which the building stood was becoming
undermined by the action of the tide. Robert Stevenson was consulted
in 1813, and for the next sixty years the records of the Trinity House
show that repairs to the lighthouse of some kind or other were being
carried on almost continuously. But this stopping cracks, underpinning,
and shoreing up could not go on indefinitely; and in 1877 the board
resolved to instruct Sir James Douglas, its late engineer-in-chief, to
build a new Eddystone lighthouse on a neighbouring rock which offered a
perfectly solid foundation—the improved diving appliances of modern days
of course rendered possible a much more complete submarine examination
of the spot selected. It is worthy of note that, whilst engaged in
their explorations, the divers found a number of relics of the first
lighthouse, including the weights of the large standard clock that had
given Winstanley and his keepers the time, and which the waves had
swallowed up a hundred and seventy years before, when the unstable and
fantastic tower was blown into the sea.

The present Eddystone lighthouse differs in many important respects from

Smeaton’s; instead of the tower being a curved shaft from its foundation,
Sir James Douglas has designed his building with a cylindrical base,
which not only prevents the waves from breaking against the tower itself,
but provides a convenient landing-stage and exercise ground all round the
lighthouse, a boon which a recent visitor to the lighthouse tells us is
greatly appreciated by the keepers.

About incidents connected with the erection of this fourth lighthouse on

the Eddystone it is scarcely necessary to say very much, for they are
in the recollection of most of us. Both the foundation stone and the
last stone of the tower were placed in position by the present Duke of
Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, late Master of the Trinity House, the former in
1879 and the latter in 1881. Dangerous as was much of the work performed,
Douglas could say at its completion, as Smeaton had done, that from it
there had resulted neither loss of life nor injury to limb; yet some
of those engaged in the building operations experienced hairbreadth
escapes: Mr. Douglas, a son of Sir James, was standing on the old tower,
superintending its un-building, when a portion of the machinery employed
struck and hurled him towards the sharp rugged rocks seventy feet below;
had he fallen upon these, he must inevitably have been dashed to pieces.
The workmen on the tower, on the rocks, and in the supply-boat, were
powerless to help or save him, and, silent and horror-stricken, waited
the end. Suddenly a shout burst from the lips of all, ‘Saved!’ and the
young engineer was borne high above the angry rocks on the breast of one
of the huge waves that rolled in from the westward, and quickly rescued
by the men in the supply-boat.

[Illustration: THE PRESENT EDDYSTONE LIGHTHOUSE.]

Granite is the material of which the present lighthouse is built, and

the blocks are skilfully dovetailed together, so as to give the building
the strength of solidity; indeed, for five-and-twenty feet from the
base it is actually solid, with the exception of a large water-tank let
into the granite. It stands 130 feet above the high-water mark, and so
in height exceeds any of its predecessors. The light is given by an
oil lamp fitted with a burner which was invented by Sir James Douglas,
and which possesses illuminating power equal to that of a quarter of a
million candles—more than six thousand times the power of that shed from
Smeaton’s light. It is visible at sea for over fifteen nautical miles,
so that in a westerly direction its range overlaps that shed from the
Lizard, the lighthouse of which we shall speak next.

The living arrangements in the new Eddystone are the most approved,
and all is done to render the keepers’ isolation as little irksome
as possible. Irksome to a certain degree it must always be—the very
isolation necessitates that, and this is frequently prolonged beyond the
period intended; for communication with the rock on the days arranged
is not always possible, and it is since the erection of the present
lighthouse that the keepers’ food supply has been on one occasion nearly
exhausted. When the boat from Plymouth at last effected a landing it
was found that those on the rock were reduced in their store to a few
biscuits.

So much for the history of the four lighthouses that, in turn, have
marked the Eddystone reef; but before speaking of the next lighthouse
along the coast that claims our attention, there is one word more to
be said about the third Eddystone. Smeaton’s massive tower was—on the
present lighthouse being completed—taken down, stone by stone, and
re-erected on Plymouth Hoe, where, as a landmark, it still renders
service to the mariner. Thus the curious reader may see for himself what
his ancestors a few generations back regarded, and rightly regarded,
as the most wonderful lighthouse ever erected. If he likes he can go
within it and see the interior arrangements just as they were when the
building stood on the Eddystone—the candelabra in its original position,
the clock which reminded the keepers of ‘snuffing time’ for the candles,
and besides these, sundry relics of John Smeaton himself. Then, if in
after days, when far from Plymouth and its bright and breezy Hoe, he
desires to refresh his memory, to call to mind what the old lighthouse
was like, he has only to pull out of his pocket any current copper coin
of the realm, and there, to the left of Britannia, he will find a small
but faithful representation of the building which won for its builder so
famous a name.

CHAPTER XV

THE LIZARD

Now let us pass on to the Lizard Point, where the massive whitened
lighthouse with its four towers is quite one of the features of the
Cornish coast. This excellently ordered building, with its wonderfully
powerful light, was erected in 1752, and as the keepers narrate the fact,
the majority of sightseers feel that they are in quite an antiquarian
atmosphere, and think—even should their minds momentarily revert to the
lighthouses of the ancients—that they are at least looking upon one of
the oldest English lighthouses. The reader of these pages will not allow
such historic errors to possess him; the thought that will cross his
mind will be,—Strange that so important a point on the English coast
should have remained unlit till 1752, so long after the building of
lighthouses—though opposed and hindered in quarters where they should
have been welcomed and encouraged—had become general all along our shores.

Certainly it was strange that no lighthouse, that is, none with anything
but a most limited existence, was placed on the Lizard till 1752; but a
lighthouse was there for a short time, considerably more than a century
earlier, and it is the history of that lighthouse, full as it is of
incident and romance, that claims our attention here.

Unlike the rest of such buildings erected in post-Reformation times, this

lighthouse owed its existence to philanthropy—to a desire on the part of
one who well knew the treachery of the coast, the long reefs of rocks
(now near the surface, now far below it) that stretched seawards; one who
lived within hearing of the breakers’ roar, and the cry of shipwrecked
men and women, that so often rose above the howling of a winter’s gale.
Many a time he, with such of his servants as were willing to turn out
from home and battle with the wind and rain, had spent long hours in
aiding as best they could the maimed and helpless victims washed ashore,
and had tended to their wants beneath the shelter of his own roof.

This heroic Cornish gentleman was Sir John Killegrew; early in the year
1619 he began to take active measures towards placing a lighthouse on the
Lizard Point. He confided his project to a friend, Sir Dudley Carleton,
the future Lord Dorchester, then English ambassador at the Hague, and
it is likely enough that from him he first learned of the necessity of
obtaining a royal charter for the good work he had in hand—that is to
say, if he was to gather any toll towards its support. He was not a
rich man, and so felt the necessity of doing this; for the expense of a
nightly fire was quite beyond his means, though he was willing and able
to bear the cost of the actual erection of a tower on which that fire was
to burn. So he asked that, for the sum of ‘twenty nobles by the yeare,’
the king would allow him, entirely at his own cost, to erect a lighthouse
at the Lizard, and, for a term of thirty years, collect from ships that
passed the point such voluntary contribution as the owners, by their
captains, might be disposed to offer. This, it will be said, was not a
very exorbitant demand; nor indeed was it, but it touched a principle,
and, as we shall see, one which in the end proved fatal to success.

The Council considered the petition; then by the king’s command submitted
it to the Trinity House for opinion! This opinion, in due course, was
delivered. It began by giving our Scotch-born sovereign—who perhaps did
not know much of so southerly a part of his dominions as Cornwall—quite
a nice little geographical account of the Lizard; and it arrived at the
conclusion that it was not ‘necessarie nor convenient on the Lizard
to erect a light, but, _per contra_, inconvenient, both in regard of
pirates, or foreign enemys; for the light would serve them as a pilot
to conduct and lead them to safe places of landinge; the danger and
perill whereof we leave to your majesty’s absolute and profound wisdom.’
Well-chosen words these—‘Absolute and profound wisdom!’ If anything was
likely to win a favour from James I, it was an expression of admiration
for the mental abilities which—be it said to his credit—he really
believed he possessed.

But James I, though he might be pleased, probably knew how much genuine
alarm the Trinity House felt at the Lizard and other lighthouse schemes
put forward about that time, and he took _cum grano_ what was said,
despite the flattery that enwrapped it. That is one reason why, in the
face of such a very hostile report, Killegrew got what he wanted; the
other is that, following some sage advice which his friend Carleton had
given him, and making friends at court, the Cornish knight had become
possessed of a share of Buckingham’s friendship, and what ‘Steenie’ said,
James did—or, as in this case, what ‘Steenie’ asked to do, James gave him
permission. As Lord High Admiral of England, Buckingham, in July, 1619,
granted the sought-for patent in the terms of the petition, but with
a clause compelling the patentee to immediately extinguish the lights
should the approach of an enemy be apprehended.

Killegrew had been in London to press his suit, and he now returned to
Cornwall in high spirits with his patent. He must have pushed forward the
work with considerable energy, as within a few months of his return he
was able to tell his friend at the Hague that the ‘tower or lighthouse’
was already ‘well forward,’ and that he hoped, by God’s assistance, to
finish it by the end of September and to light it ere the storms of
autumn and winter began. But the task had not been an easy one in many
ways, one of them being the difficulty in obtaining labour. The fact was
that the Cornish folk round about, born and bred to wrecking—most of
the houses near the Lizard were built of ‘the ruins of ships’—were no
friends to any project that would rob them of their ill-gotten gains.
Says Killegrew, the work had been far more costly than he anticipated,
and chiefly because of the difficulty of getting labour. Why? The writer
shall tell us:—

‘The inabytants neer by think they suffer by this erection. They affirme
I take away God’s grace from them. Their English meaning is that now they
shall receve no more benefitt by shipwreck, for this will prevent yt.
They have been so long used to repe profitt by the callamyties of the
ruin of shipping, that they clayme it heredytarye, and heavely complayne
on me.’
Here is a vivid and a terrible picture of life amongst the dwellers on
the Cornish coast. Killegrew felt that the lighthouse would rob these
people of their gruesome harvest, and if it did, then he saw better times
ahead. ‘I hope,’ he went on in the same letter, ‘they will now husband
their land, which their former idell lyfe hath omitted in the assurance
of theyr gayne by shipwrack.’

The lighthouse, a substantial structure, built of lime and stone, was

completed well before Christmas, 1619, a supply of coal laid in, and a
fire nightly kindled, which, wrote Killegrew, ‘I presume speaks for yt
selfe to the most part of Christendom.’ The cost of maintenance came to
about 10_s._ a night, and that, added to the expense of building, had by
the next January put him out of pocket £500; so that his limited funds
were nearly exhausted. Yet the ‘voluntary contribution’ he had asked had
not brought him in a single farthing; shipwreck had materially decreased,
but not a vessel putting into Plymouth or Falmouth had given anything
towards the support of the Lizard lights; the thank-offerings for safe
deliverance, which his sanguine imagination pictured being offered by
grateful mariners, came not at all.

There was now nothing for it, since sailors would not, or rather could
not, pay out of gratitude, but to seek for a compulsory levy. He sent in
his petition for this to the king, who in turn sent it to the Trinity
House, which body answered much as before, save that the condemnation
of the _absurdity_ of a lighthouse at the Lizard was more vehement and
emphatic on the suggestion of _compulsory_ payment! But against this
manifestly insincere condemnation, Killegrew received, thanks no doubt
to Carleton, very influential testimonials from Holland, and these
decided the king to grant the requisite patent. He had, it may be said,
additional grounds for so doing, since, besides the favour of the Dutch
navigators, English seamen came forward and spoke to the benefit of
the light; contribute they could not—their masters, hostile to every
lighthouse scheme, would not allow that—but speak they could, and they
did so, fearlessly and without reserve.

Thus, when Killegrew’s pockets were nearly empty, he, in conjunction with
a certain William Mynne, Secretary Calvert’s brother-in-law, obtained
from James I licence to gather a halfpenny a ton from all passing vessels
towards the maintenance of the Lizard lights.

Killegrew’s patent did him very little good; the shipowners refused
point-blank to pay, and they, with the Trinity House at their backs,
cried so loudly and so much, and stirred up such powerful interest, that
James cancelled his grant, the Lizard lights were extinguished, and
Killegrew ended his days considerably the poorer for his philanthropic
venture.

But the official extinguisher was not applied to the lights without a
protest, an indignant protest, from many who, when they spoke of the
utility of Killegrew’s work, knew of what they were speaking. Our naval
sea-dogs, as fearless of the threats of wealthy traders and powerful
corporations as they were of an enemy’s broadside, spoke up manfully for
the Lizard lights. Sir William Monson, good seaman as ever sailed, who
had won his laurels fighting the Spaniard, admitted that ‘in time of war’
such a light might be dangerous, but ‘in time of peace’ held it most
necessary. ‘The art of navigation,’ he said, was not so certain that a
man might assume to himself what land ‘he should fall withall, nor the
time,’ and so ‘it were fit men should be furnished with as many helps as
can be devised’; and he vouched for it that he himself, ‘in his return
from the southward,’ had oftener ‘fallen with the Lizard’ than with any
other point.

Then, speaking as one who had too often tasted the weariness of a
lengthy voyage, he continued that there was no man who had been long at
sea, but would be glad to ‘make’ the land of his destination as quickly
as he might; and, said he, men would be bolder to ‘bear in’ with the
shore of England if they knew that ‘a light upon the Lizard could be
seen by them seven or eight leagues off’—the distance he was informed
Killegrew’s light had been seen at sea. So much for the ‘comfort’ of
the light to vessels that had met with no mishap: how much more it would
be appreciated in case of accident may, he says, be gauged by example of
some wounded traveller on land, losing his way on a dark cold night, and
espying a light in a cottage or hearing a ring of bells, by either of
which he may be directed to a haven of rest.

Then he tells of some of his personal adventures when off the Lizard
Point in the Armada days, thirty years before. Many a good prize could
then have been secured, and many a sound English ship saved, had light
shone forth from that perilous headland. It had been said, too, that the
light would help pirates in the Channel; that, says Monson, need not
stand, for ‘I say the tenth of ten thousand ships that sail that way is
not a pirate’; and he asks the king and his advisers to consider, ‘after
that,’ if it were fit ‘to take away a light by which men receive so much
good.’

However, despite this testimony, and more like it, Killegrew’s light was
put out—the tax for its support was a burden, and so it must go. The
accounts of the Plymouth corporation record the expenditure of money For
‘pulling down’ the Lizard lighthouse, which the shipowners considered
‘burthensome to all ye countrie.’ Ten years later, Sir William Killegrew,
of Pendennis Castle, a kinsman of Sir John, applied to the king for a
renewal of the patent in his favour. ‘I am so bold,’ he writes, ‘as to
desire the king to grant the patent to me.... ’Tis a thing all seamen
desire,’ and they wondered by what unjust complaints so great a benefit
was lost. ‘Every year many ships are [now] wrecked for want of it, and I
am,’ wrote Sir William, ‘at the entreaty of all men, desired to set it up
again.’

But no answer was returned to that petition, and when, some thirty years
later, Sir John Coryton proposed a lighthouse at the Lizard, the Trinity
House, in condemning the suggestion, wrote triumphantly that a former
lighthouse there had been found _altogether useless_ and very quickly
‘discontinued.’

So it was that no lighthouse was established at the Lizard till after

the middle of the last century, when that we now see was erected. It was
proposed in 1748 by a certain Captain Farrish, who suggested building a
lighthouse there which should show four lights. These proposals were made
to the Trinity House, not to the crown, and that body—after arranging
that the speculator should, when the lighthouse was built, hold it of
them for a term of sixty-one years at a rent of £80 a year—offered no
opposition to the scheme. The patent was applied for in the corporation’s
name, and granted.

What became of Captain Farrish, we do not know; but he figures no more,

after this, in the negotiations with the Trinity House—a Mr. Thomas
Fonnereau taking his place. He built the lighthouse and took the profits
for the sixty-one years.
As agreed, the petition to the crown for the patent was made by the
Trinity House, and it is strange to note how, by the irony of fate, that
corporation is forced to make therein the most of every point on which
Sir John Killegrew had relied, and which it had so uncompromisingly
condemned!

By the close of 1751 the four towers of the lighthouse were nearly
completed, and early in the following year the size of the grates in
which the four fires were to blaze, and of the lanterns which were to
envelop them, were being actively considered by Fonnereau and the Trinity
House. The lighthouse and its final completion were quite the talk of
the day in the West of England, and the kindling of the fires on the
evening of August 22, 1752, was watched by thousands of spectators, who
had flocked to the Lizard from the adjacent towns and villages. Though it
was the middle of the eighteenth century, there were doubtless many in
that Cornish crowd who did not regard this establishment of a lighthouse
with quite as much satisfaction as those who had our sailors’ welfare
at heart; wrecking, and the love of it, had yet a place in the heart of
Cornishmen—and of the Cornishwomen too, for that matter: the keenest
searchers after the harvest of the sea were not, by any means, _all_ of
the sterner sex!

Coal fires, shut in by glass, did no better at the Lizard than elsewhere,
and very soon came complaints from all sides of the feebleness of
the Lizard lights; yet Fonnereau made no change. The plan worked
economically, and that is probably all he cared about. But better days
for the mariner were at hand. The Trinity House, by the end of the
century, was growing into something very different from what it had been;
public-spirited men sat at its council-board, and so soon as Fonnereau’s
term expired the corporation took over the control of the lighthouse,
substituting oil lamps for the shut-in coal fires. A great deal of
structural alteration was needed for this, and whilst it was being
carried out no better light was given than that of ordinary lanterns lit
by oil and fastened on poles or masts.

Such lights were, of course, entirely inadequate, and to minimize as

much as possible the inconvenience, the Trinity House bade its labourers
work their hardest, week-day and Sunday alike. This was too much for the
piety of the neighbouring clergy, magistrates, and villagers. To them the
safety of numberless sea-borne souls was as nought to the evil example
set by the wicked carpenters and stonemasons who worked at the lighthouse
on the Lord’s day. The parson of Lizard Town called these men into his
study, read them a serious lecture, and with threats of legal prosecution
frightened them out of doing another stroke of work that Sunday. Before
the next a happy compromise was arrived at: considering the urgency
of the case, the parson and magistrates would say nothing so long as
operations were suspended during service-time!

So, in due course, the alterations were made, the new lanterns completed,
lit with oil, and a better and steadier light given than had been
obtained before—a light so good and so steady that, as they saw it, some
of the inhabitants were heard actually to complain of it. The light given
by Fonnereau’s coal fire was so fitful that it had not really spoiled
_business_ very much; but with the new lights—why, a wreck would never
happen at all! It was the Trinity House now, and not Sir John Killegrew,
that took God’s grace from these simple Cornish fisher-folk!

Oil was burned at the Lizard till the spring of the year 1878, when—after
numerous experiments had been made—the complete system of electric
lighting now in use was introduced at a cost of very nearly £15,000, and
a fog-horn erected equalling, if not exceeding, in the discordancy of its
note, that at Dungeness.

CHAPTER XVI

THE WOLF, THE LAND’S END, AND THE LONGSHIPS

Soon after a lighthouse had been built at the Lizard, the dangers of the
Wolf Rock, that lies between that point and the Land’s End attracted
the attention of the Trinity House. The rock takes its name from the
wolf-like howling of the waves that once washed through it—noises that
were silenced, years before the lighthouse was proposed there, by the
superstitious fishermen, who, caring not for such uncanny music, filled
up the cavity with stones. At first the idea of a lighthouse on the Wolf
seemed impossible; the Eddystone lighthouse had been difficult enough
to erect, and here were far greater difficulties to be encountered—less
space on which to build, and less capability of landing materials. It was
therefore proposed to fix on the rock the copper figure of a wolf, which
was to be so constructed that the air passing through it would produce
the howling sounds which in times past had, to a certain extent, acted
as a safeguard to mariners by warning them of the presence of danger.
The figure was duly constructed, but the force of the waves that, even
in smooth weather, broke over the rock, rendered all efforts to fix it
ineffectual, and the idea had to be abandoned.

Then a bell-buoy—similar to that which the venerable abbot had placed on

the Inchcape Rock—was suggested for the Wolf. But the fishermen did not
like this; it would, they said, frighten the fish, and they threatened,
were it put there, to cut it away. The fact is, the fishermen at the
Land’s End were, like their neighbours at the Lizard, not over anxious
for any indication of danger—anything that would _prevent_ shipwreck.

So the idea of marking the Wolf was, for a while, abandoned; but the
progress in the science of lighthouse construction made during the early
years of this century, and Robert Stevenson’s successful erection on the
Bell Rock, suggested that perhaps, after all, a lighthouse might be built
on the Wolf. Stevenson was asked to consider the matter, and after doing
so he undertook to put one there at a cost of £150,000. Why his offer
was not accepted we do not know; possibly the figure was too high. At
all events, instead of a lighthouse, a beacon—first of oak and then of
wrought iron—was the only indication of this treacherous rock till the
year 1860, when the Trinity House, unwilling that the dangers of the Wolf
should only be indicated by day, set about erecting the lighthouse that
now stands there, and which rises to the height of 110 feet.

[Illustration: WOLF ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.]

It took nine years to finish, and certainly the task of building it

did not prove _less_ difficult than was anticipated. Every variety of
engineering trouble presented itself, but only to be overcome by those
entrusted with the work. The ordinary reader could not grasp all these,
even were they set out before him; but he can at least realize that,
as but two feet of the Wolf Rock are dry, even at dead low water, the
lighthouse builders can, at the commencement of their operations, have
had but a remarkably short time each day available for work.

Earlier by far than any idea of placing a lighthouse on the isolated

Wolf, was that for building one at the Land’s End. This place was talked
of as a western harbour for England in 1702, and an estimate for making
one there, at the cost of £30,000, included the expenses of erecting a
lighthouse. But nothing came of this harbour scheme, and three years
later, high and low lighthouses were proposed at Porthdenack Point and on
one of the headlands—probably that on the north—of Whitsand Bay. These
also were never actually commenced. Perhaps it was felt that, whilst the
Carn Bras—a mile to the west of the Land’s End—and the group of rocks
around it remained unmarked, to build lighthouses at the Land’s End would
not have been of much service. And who, in those opening years of the
eighteenth century, would have suggested a lighthouse on the Carn Bras?
True, Winstanley had placed such a building on the Eddystone; but the
storm had soon blown it bodily into the sea, and the stability of the
second lighthouse there was still untried.

So the dangers of the western extremity of Old England were left to do

their worst for home-coming ships for nearly a hundred years more; then
the Carn Bras was marked by the now famous ‘Longships’ lighthouse.

This rock stands over seventy feet above the sea at low water, and the
lighthouse upon it is, to the top of the lantern, fifty-two feet. The
light, a flashing or revolving light, is produced by nineteen oil lamps,
fitted with Argand burners, and there is in connection with the building
a fog-bell and fog-explosive.

The situation of the Cam Bras is lonely in the extreme, but, so far
as care and forethought can make it so, residence there is really
comfortable. Besides the lantern, the lighthouse consists of three
stories—the lowest for coals, water, provisions, and stores; on the
second is the living-room and kitchen, and the third is the keepers’
sleeping apartment. Three men are always in residence on the rock, whilst
a fourth—regularly employed by the Trinity House—resides in one of the
neatly kept cottages at Sennan Cove, set apart as homes for the keepers.
This fourth man is in readiness to go at once to the rock in the event
of his services being needed, to replace a keeper seized with illness or
injured. No keeper is supposed to stay on the Carn Bras more than four
weeks in succession, though it often happens, especially in winter-time,
that the ‘guard’ cannot be regularly ‘relieved.’

[Illustration: LONGSHIPS LIGHTHOUSE.]

This uncertainty in the communication necessitates keeping at the

lighthouse a considerable store of provisions; more indeed—so, on
one occasion, thought an economically minded and newly appointed
inspector—than was actually necessary. A fortnight’s provision on a
place only a few miles from shore! The thing was ridiculous. He had
come out to the Longships on a fine, bright morning, when the sea was
docile as a tame cat, and had reached the lighthouse without difficulty
or discomfort; had he possessed a little more experience, he would have
known that the sea thereabouts soon loses its temper, that its smiles
quickly change into angry scowls. As it was, he bought his experience
that day, for whilst he looked carefully round the building, and
lectured the keepers for their extravagance in demanding stores for
so long a time, the sunshine of the morning was hidden, and the wind
began to freshen. At first it only whistled through the lighthouse, and
made louder speaking necessary, but soon it ruffled the surface of the
water, so that the waves beat against the rock and the spray from them
was driven up to the windows of the living-room. This did not look like
getting back to Sennan Cove by noon, as Mr. Inspector had intended,
and ere long it was blowing a gale of wind. Then his heart sank. As for
the keepers—well, history does not record their feelings; but as even
officials are human, they must surely have chuckled (inwardly, of course)
at the demonstrative lesson their recent lecturer was receiving as to the
uncertainty of communication with the Longships.

Needless to say, the Sennan boat did not return for him that day, nor
that evening; no, nor not on the next, nor the next, nor the next.
Not till a week had run did the weather allow a boat of any kind to
get near the Cam Bras. Poor man! let us hope he made the best of his
incarceration; any way, it is recorded that he was not afterwards heard
to complain of the keepers’ foresight in ordering in a good stock of
provisions at a time, a store that would leave a little margin in case of
accident.

Those who have read James Cobb’s fascinating story, _The Watchers on the
Longships_, will notice how strangely the present orderly management
of the lighthouse, and of everything connected with it, contrasts with
the happy-go-lucky arrangements for maintaining the light that existed
in the lawless days when first it was established. The philanthropic
schoolmaster who lived hard by the Land’s End, and by whose exertions the
Longships lighthouse was established, was no creature of the author’s
imagination; and, with the recollection of Killegrew’s struggle against
popular prejudice fresh in our minds, we can well believe that Cobb’s
powerful picture of life and sentiment amongst the Cornish wreckers is
not over-painted.

[Illustration: THE WRECKER.]

No man did more to fight against this terrible ‘custom’ than the late
Rector of Morwenstow, a desolate seaside village on the coast of North
Cornwall. When he came there some sixty years ago, he found that not only
the fishermen, but the small farmers whose farms lay near the coast,
looked to the wrecks that happened to supply them, to a great extent,
with food and household necessaries, and they regarded anything which
would lessen shipwreck more or less as an interference with their just
rights and privileges. Worse than this, they did not hesitate to procure
shipwreck. The men and women of Morwenstow were wreckers, and nothing
better. It was right, they argued, to till their ground to get as fat a
harvest as they might, and it was fair to lure ships to destruction, so
as to make the most of the harvest the sea would bear them.

The rector’s servants had a good store of wrecking and smuggling stories
to tell; some of them not reflecting too much credit on his predecessors
in the rectory. Here is one of them:—

At Morwenstow and many other seaside parishes in Cornwall it was the

rule, if a shipwreck happened near by in service time, to bring word of
it to the parson, who generally announced the fact to the congregation,
and they, be it said, did not remain much longer to worship.

There was one parson who did not think this hasty departure quite fair
on him, hampered as he was by his clerical robes. One day a piece of
paper was handed to him as he read the service, on which was written news
of a vessel driving towards the rocks below. The parson finished the
prayers, but instead of going to the pulpit walked towards the font. The
congregation never stirred; they only thought their minister was about
to perform a christening. The sound of the parson’s voice coming from
the west end of the church made them turn round, and there they saw him
in outdoor attire, his clerical garb laid aside, and not at the font but
at the door, his hand upon the handle. ‘My Christian brethren,’ said the
reverend gentleman, ‘there’s a ship wrecked upon the rocks below; _this
time we’ll all start fair_;’ and so saying, off he ran towards the rocks,
his flock, you may believe it, following him pretty closely!

You could not get a Cornishman to look on wrecking as a crime. ‘I don’t

see, sir,’ said a very pious old parish clerk one day, ‘why there’s no
prayers for _foul_ weather; we always prays for _fair_ weather, but the
foul makes us richer.’ How can you wonder at such a sentiment when
Cornwall, or rather the Scilly Islands, had a good saint, St. Warna, who
sent wrecks in time of distress, and to whom the people would pray for a
demonstration of her mercy in exceptionally bad seasons!

CHAPTER XVII

THE SCILLIES

The Scillies were the home of at least one religious fraternity in

pre-Reformation days; and surely, when we consider the situation of
these islands, we may accept it as probable that the inmates of such
houses—following the usual rule—displayed some kind of nocturnal light
to aid vessels coming from the west or from Ireland. But this is only
surmise; the first we hear of a project for erecting a lighthouse on the
Scillies is in 1661. The Trinity House then condemned the scheme, but
twenty years later itself proposed an exactly similar thing, and obtained
from the crown a patent to carry it out and to gather toll for its
support. It so happens that at this latter date Sir John Clayton had also
suggested a lighthouse in the Scillies, and he naturally wrote a stinging
letter to the Trinity Board, taxing them with activity in the good work
only when they feared that some one else would undertake it; but with
that we need not trouble ourselves. The corporation, as we have said,
got the patent and built the lighthouse. Some of the incidents in its
building, and in the first few years of its existence, are interesting
and characteristic, and illustrative of the life and spirit of Western
England.

One of the first steps that the Trinity House took in the work was to
write to Sir William Godolphin, then Governor of the Scillies, asking him
to recommend to the surveyors being sent out, persons of local knowledge
whose word could be relied on and who were not wreckers. This was
certainly a wise step, for the surveyors found, on arriving, that most of
the islanders regarded them ‘with an evil eye,’ and cared for lighthouses
no more than they did for ‘crowners’ inquests.

By the middle of May, 1681, all was ready for the surveyors’ start: plans
and drawings of the proposed lighthouse were prepared, and government
so far assisted in the undertaking that it gave the Trinity House
opportunity of purchasing any materials required from the naval stores
at Plymouth; it also furnished the surveyors with one of her majesty’s
yachts to convey them to Scilly.
The lighthouse to be erected was to be certainly substantial—brick-built,
circular, four storeys high, with walls six feet thick at the base, and
all timber used was to be ‘of the best English heart oak.’ Its solidity
has paid, for the lighthouse at St. Agnes, Scilly, of to-day is, in the
main, that put there more than two hundred years ago.

Altogether it was quite the most important lighthouse undertaking on

which the Trinity House had as yet embarked, and it was with considerable
anxiety that it awaited the arrival of the surveyors’ first report; this
reached the board on July 20, and told that all had so far gone well, and
that a site for the building had been selected at ‘Agnes,’ some three
miles from ‘the Bishop and Clerk rocks.’ The superintendent of the works
was not over-pleased with his lodging, which, though the best the island
afforded, he considered dear at half-a-crown a week, for it was, he said,
but ‘little better than a hogsty.’

Before the end of September the board heard of the completion of the
lighthouse, and that a fire had been lit upon it, which was plainly seen
from the Land’s End. Eighty chaldrons of coal were ordered from Swansea,
and the regular lighting was fixed for October 30 next, due notice to
that effect being given in the _Gazette_, and at Billingsgate and the
Custom House, whilst letters announcing the fact were also written to
the English merchants in the Canaries, Spain, and Portugal. Last, but
not least, collectors were appointed at the different southern ports to
collect the dues from incoming or outgoing ships.

[Illustration: ST. AGNES LIGHTHOUSE, SCILLY ISLES.

(_From a receipt for lighthouse dues in the possession of Lord Kenyan,

dated December 19, 1690._)]

The old receipts for the payment of such dues are interesting, from the
representation they give of the lighthouse in question. The light was
given, as the reader will notice, from a coal fire enclosed in a lantern,
having a funnel in the roof: this is the earliest instance of one of
these enclosed coal fires. It was not successful, as we know, for the
smoke collected in the lantern and dimmed the light, and the fire needed
constant attention to keep it bright; it was, however, continued here for
a long time, because it was economical.

But the Trinity House, before the year was ended, had to consider a
difficulty in connection with the Scilly lighthouse much more serious
than an insufficient or dim light—it had to consider the conduct of
an unfaithful servant. It had wisely declined to appoint as keeper
any one born and bred in islands where it was well known that the
inhabitants preyed on human life and lured mariners to shipwreck; but it
unfortunately did not suspect danger from one who had only gone out to
live there since the lighthouse had been in progress, and this want of
suspicion led to the appointment of a man who before three months had
elapsed proved himself to have become a _wrecker_.

One dark and rainy night, just before Christmas, 1680, the fire on the
Scilly lighthouse, which home-coming vessels had been told to expect, did
not shine forth. On came a richly laden ship, sure of her position and
safety, as no light was visible, and only when too late was warned by
the sound of the waves as they broke upon the rocks, of her proximity to
the reefs that lie around the Scillies. To attract attention and bring
help she discharged her cannon, and then, but not till then, the fire on
the lighthouse shot up bright and clear. Doubtless the keeper and his
accomplices had watched the lights of the approaching vessel, and allowed
the fire to slumber till she was actually upon the rocks: then, in the
hope, perhaps, of escaping condemnation, should the matter reach the ears
of his employers, he fanned his fire into flame. But his ruse did not
succeed, nor could it well have done so, since he was found, but a few
hours after, in company with the greedy band of wreckers on the rocks,
and much of his plunder was subsequently discovered hidden in the heap of
coal that stood ready for use beside the lighthouse.

Similar troubles ensued with subsequent keepers, though no such flagrant

case was discovered; but it was often needful to caution those engaged
in looking after the lighthouse to avoid ‘meddling with wrecks,’ which,
despite the presence of a lighthouse, seem to have been not infrequent,
and to avoid ‘drinking’ and the company of wreckers. There is other
evidence that for a long time to come the keepers were too much hand and
glove with the inhabitants of the islands to avoid suspicion. Altogether
this first lighthouse that the Trinity House had built for fully fifty
years, and certainly the most elaborate one, cost the board a good deal
of annoyance and a good deal of money; so much of the latter, that the
Duke of York, then master, was asked soon after its erection graciously
to ‘forego’ his annual allowance on account of the poverty of ‘the
House,’ which he graciously did.

It will be remembered that in the autumn of the year 1707 Sir Cloudesley
Shovell’s vessel, and the fleet accompanying it, were cast away on the
Scillies, Sir Cloudesley and many others perishing. On that occasion the
keeper of the lighthouse took time by the forelock, and, quite as soon as
news of the disaster reached London, there came from him an assurance as
to the ‘goodness’ of his light when the wreck occurred. The board made
no answer till it had heard some of the sailors who escaped, and these
all agreed that, on the occasion, the light was dim in the extreme, owing
they believed, to ‘the foulness of the glass.’

The admiral’s body was carried by the tidal current to Porth Hellick,
and there found burial till it was exhumed and removed to its present
more dignified resting-place in Westminster Abbey. If you go to Porth
Hellick, the fisher-people round about will show you the very spot of
his temporary burial—not a blade of grass grows upon it! If you ask them
they will tell you the reason. A Cornish sailor, on board the admiral’s
ship, warned the officer in command of the nearness of the rocks of
Scilly, and bid him beware. This was intolerable, and the man, though
he had ventured, from his local knowledge, to tell his superior of
approaching danger, was judged by Sir Cloudesley guilty of a gross breach
of discipline, and ordered forthwith to be hanged at the yardarm. Here
he was hanging when the vessel struck the rocks. Of course tradition
says that the disaster was but a due punishment of the admiral for his
injustice and a response to the curses of the sailor, who had before his
execution repeated the 109th Psalm, and made its imprecations applicable
to those at whose hands he was dying. Sir Cloudesley, so the story goes
on, was not drowned in that shipwreck, but was washed ashore, exhausted
from exposure, close to the spot in question. On his finger glistened
a diamond set in a most precious ring: the man who found him could not
resist this wonderful heaven-sent gift, and, lest the wearer should
hinder him from getting it, battered out of him the little remaining life
he possessed, and buried him in the sand.

There is a common Cornish superstition that over a sinner’s grave the

grass will not grow; and that is why the ground which covered the
admiral’s body still lies bare. Mark the deliciously national sentiment
displayed in the story. The murdered man, not the murderer, is the
sinner! It was no crime in the wrecker’s law to slaughter a man, or a
woman either, on whose body was valuable jewelry or costly raiment; the
worth of that jewelry or raiment was regarded, as Sir John Killegrew told
Carleton, as ‘God’s grace’ sent to them!

If you dip into Cornish legend you will see this illustrated over and
over again. And more: not only was it no murder to kill the living man or
woman who might hinder you from gathering in the harvest of the sea—the
harvest that God sent you: it was no murder to kill the revenue officer
who tried to stop you in gathering the harvest your illicit trade sent
you. The graves of some of these officers used, a couple of generations
ago, to be shown in the Cornish churchyards, bare of grass, and the
reason was that those who lay beneath them were murderers—murderers
because in doing their duty to their king and country they had brought to
the scaffold some notorious smuggler who likely enough, as a wrecker, had
slaughtered some half-drowned victim of shipwreck to strip his body!

But this is a digression; let us resume our narrative of St. Agnes

lighthouse.

As a result of the lax keeping of the lights, Whiston’s mad proposals

were made to Parliament in 1716; he suggested that from one of the Scilly
Islands there should be discharged into the air, at intervals throughout
the night, huge fire-balls, to warn mariners of their whereabouts. But
people only laughed at his suggestions, and nothing came of them.

Later on we hear that the ‘badness’ of the Scilly lights was ‘the talk
of the Exchange’; and indeed it seemed that each successive keeper fell
more or less into the evil habits of his predecessor: the idle life led
many into drunken habits, and that probably accounts a good deal for
the lax keeping. ‘You drink so much,’ wrote the Trinity House Secretary
to one keeper, ‘that you are not fit for business.’ This was in 1740,
and the particular keeper was no doubt the man referred to by Robert
Heath—a writer on the Scilly Islands in 1750—as having kept his fire so
badly that often it was scarcely visible on the neighbouring island of
St. Mary. ‘Some,’ continues Heath, ‘think that often this keeper left
his fire _unlit_ all through the night,’ or else kept it so low that by
daybreak nothing but lifeless embers filled the grate.

However, things mended soon after this: the Trinity House placed
better-class keepers at St. Agnes—men of better education and less likely
to be contaminated by the ill-example of the inhabitants of the islands;
and after the closed-in coal fire had been changed, in 1790, for a
powerful oil lamp, we hear no more complaints about the Scilly lights.
The then owner of the islands bought the cradle, or grate, in which the
coal fire had burned, and turned it into a flower-stand, which he placed
in the wonderful gardens at Tresco, where it may still be seen—certainly
it is an interesting relic.

[Illustration: THE BISHOP’S ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.]

The lighthouse at St. Agnes remained the most westerly in England till
the year 1858, when that on the Bishop’s rock was erected; it is a
massive structure of grey granite. A much less solid erection—similar
in construction to that upon ‘the Smalls,’ of which I shall presently
speak—was all but completed some eight years before; but on the night of
February 6, 1850, the whole affair was demolished by the force of a storm
which snapped off the iron supports that had been fixed into the rock, as
though they had been so much matchwood.

CHAPTER XVIII

LIGHTHOUSES ON THE WESTERN COAST

After turning the south-west corner of England we find few existing

lighthouses with anything like respectable antiquity; indeed, the voyager
along our western shores of a century and a half ago was almost entirely
without lights to guide him. At the monastic dissolution, however,
matters were probably otherwise; one of the few lighthouses mentioned
by Leland as surviving the commencement of the religious changes is at
Pendinas, or Cape Cornwall, near St. Just: ‘There is,’ he says, ‘at this
point a chapel of St. Nicholas and a pharos for light for shipps sailing
by night in those quarters.’ Then we have seen that the monks maintained
lights at Ilfracombe[8], and the number of ruined chapels and hermitages
along both the southern and northern banks of the Severn, on the islands
in its midst, and on the coast of South Wales, leaves us in little doubt
that, when these buildings were tenanted, and discharging the functions
for which they were intended, the mariners’ path was not unlit.

Before, however, we come to talk of lighthouses to the north of the

Bristol Channel, the story of that of Burnham, at the entrance of the
port of Bridgewater, must be told. There was no lighthouse there till
early in the present century, but the small craft—fishing boats and the
like—could, after nightfall, shape their course so as to avoid some
treacherous banks by means of a light placed nightly in a fisherman’s
cottage on the sandhills close to the sea; it had been first put there,
years before, by a fisherman’s wife to show her husband where to anchor
his boat on return from fishing. But at the time of which we speak it no
longer served that purpose, for the fisherman had ere that found a watery
grave. The wife was then a tottering widow, crazed by the grief that her
husband’s death had caused her, and one form of her insanity was that he
would yet come back, and so, night by night, she trimmed the lamp and
placed it in the window that he might find it burning when he brought his
boat to shore. Then it pleased God to rest her troubled spirit, and the
lamp was lit no more.

No mariner’s chart marked the widow’s light, but the fishermen of Burnham
had learnt to know it and to appreciate its benefit in making the port;
so when it ceased to burn they set to work to see how a similar or a
better light might be maintained there, and the parson of the place, more
perhaps out of good-nature than from an eye to business, offered to build
a small lighthouse if they and others using the port would contribute
some trifling sum towards its support. They consented, the patent was
obtained, and the parson duly built his lighthouse. Certainly he can
never have regretted doing so, for the trade of Bridgewater increased,
the tolls yielded him quite a respectable income, and when, after an
existence of some thirty years, it was acquired by the Trinity House he
got £13,500 for his rights.

That is the story of Burnham lights: the lighthouse one sees there to-day
was put up in 1836, very shortly after the Trinity House had bought out
the parson. About the other lighthouses on the Bristol Channel, on either
bank, there is not much to say, so we will pass on to consider some of
those on the Welsh coast.

Probably one of the first attempts to erect a lighthouse here, as an

object of profit, was not made till fully sixty years after such an
undertaking had been projected for the east coast. In 1662, and again in
1665, petitions to the crown requested leave to set up lighthouses on
St. Anne’s Head, at Milford Haven. A patent was duly granted and the
buildings erected, but—likely enough through opposition in the usual
quarter—the lights therein were not maintained, and the buildings fell
into decay. The scheme was, however, successfully revived in the closing
years of Queen Anne’s reign, Joseph Allen, the then projector, paying the
Trinity House £10 a year in order to stop opposition—as things went, he
got off cheap.

[Illustration: THE SMALLS LIGHTHOUSE.]

Another sixty years or so after this, ‘the Smalls’—a group of rocks off
St. David’s Head—were first marked by a lighthouse. The project to put it
there was a bold one, and surely would never have been dreamed of had
Winstanley not taught lighthouse projectors that isolated rocks might
form a field for their labours. The proposal came from a wealthy Quaker
merchant at Liverpool named Phillips, who said it was his mission in life
to perform ‘a great and holy good to serve and save humanity.’ How could
he better do this than by building a lighthouse, and by building it on
the then almost unlit coast of Wales? It was just the kind of profitable
philanthropy that a man of his tenets would love to indulge in—there was
money to be made and good to be done by it.

Call to mind for a moment the period when this wealthy Quaker set about
carrying out his design, in the year 1775, or about that time: there
were then plenty of experienced engineers in practice—John Smeaton, to
mention one—and Liverpool possessed its share of them. But to these the
Quaker did not turn: they would have their own ideas on the subject of
lighthouse building, based on practice and scientific principles: he
had his, based on economy, and so he went, not to an engineer, but to
one Henry Whiteside, a maker of musical instruments; he might not know
much about lighthouse building, but he would be ‘cheap,’ and in the
construction of his violins, spinettes, and harpsichords he displayed
considerable ingenuity.

Whiteside was young and enterprising, he liked the idea of the work
proposed to him, and before many months had passed he had laid aside his
half-finished musical instruments, and was on the Smalls with a gang of
Cornish miners, quarrying sockets in the hard stone into which were to be
fastened the iron pillars that the lighthouse was to stand upon.

Perhaps the good folk who lived along the coast gave a no more genial
welcome to Whiteside and his workmen than had the men and women of the
Lizard and of Scilly to the lighthouse builders of the seventeenth
century; perhaps they avowed that a light upon the Smalls which would
warn vessels from their doom, would take ‘God’s grace’ from them; any way
they do not seem to have given the fiddle-maker many useful hints as to
the vagaries of the waves that washed around the Smalls. They told him
the rock stood twelve feet above high-water level, and on that assurance
he and his men set to work through the calm days of summer, finding but
little to hinder them in their labour. From summer they worked into
autumn, and on till October winds ruffled the waters of the Atlantic from
hillocks into mountains, and drove an occasional wave as many feet above
the Smalls as Whiteside and his men had been used to see them wash below
it. The first big storm came up somewhat suddenly: the men were at work,
and had so far progressed that they were getting into position the first
of the iron rods that were to support the structure. To this they clung
as shipwrecked sailors cling to the masts of their shattered ships. Their
cutter, whose crew had evidently no sympathy with the workmen or their
work, made sail on the approach of the danger, and left Whiteside and his
men to shift for themselves.

All through that night the storm raged, every hour that passed angering
the waves, driving them over the rocks with greater fury and drenching
those clinging to the bending iron rod. Only when the tide had ebbed
to its lowest dared they relinquish their hold. Escape from the rock
was impossible, for no vessel could come near them in such a storm; but
Fortune smiled, and before the close of the next day the sea had so far
calmed down that their boat came to them and, wonderful to relate, every
man was brought safe to shore.

Their experience taught them that some material more elastic than iron
would have to be used in the construction of the lighthouse if it was to
stand against an Atlantic gale. As soon, therefore, as he got to shore,
Whiteside set about obtaining the requisite heart of oak, and with this
he and his builders returned to work, but before beginning to set up
their supports they soldered into the rock a number of iron rings, to
which they could lash themselves for safety should another storm—such
as that they had tasted—drive the waves over the surface of the rock.
History does not record if this happened or not, but it probably did
before the completion of the work, for that was not accomplished till
just before August 1776, when the light in the lantern was first lit, and
showed at a distance of seven or eight leagues.

Strange and fragile-looking enough, as the reader may see, was this
lighthouse built by Whiteside, but it was ‘seaworthy,’ and stood till
recently.

The charm of danger weaned Whiteside from his love of the gentle art
of fiddle-making, and he practised it no more, but became the Quaker’s
lighthouse keeper at the Smalls. He managed it profitably for his
master—let us hope he did it efficiently; but he burned in his lamps on
the average only 200 gallons of oil during the year.

The dues soon brought the Quaker in a handsome income, and with that he
was satisfied: he took no personal interest in the lighthouse or its
management, all which he left to a care-taker who lived hard by St.
David’s Head. Knowing, as this man must have known, how uncertain was the
communication with the Smalls, he should certainly have taken care that
his men on the rock were well provided with materials for maintaining the
light and with provisions for their own support. But there is evidence
that he did neither one nor the other, and that Whiteside and those with
him undoubtedly felt the neglect. Still, though the wind might rock
their dwelling, and drive the spray far above it, and though they might
sometimes regard their lot as hard and complain of it as solitary, they
seem, during the first twelve months of their residence, to have been but
once in actual alarm for their personal safety. Whiteside’s letter, and
his men’s postscript, written on that occasion, will best describe their
feelings, their evident anticipation of a fate similar to that which,
some seventy years before, had befallen the inmates of the Eddystone:—

‘FROM THE SMALLS,

 ‘_February 1, 1777._

‘SIR,

‘Being now in a most dangerous and distressed condition upon

the Smalls, do hereby trust providence will bring to your mind
this, which prayeth for your immediate assistance to fetch us
off the Smalls, before the next spring [tides], or we fear we
shall perish, our water near all gone, our fire quite gone, and
our house in a most melancholy manner.

‘I doubt not but you will fetch us from here as fast as

possible. We can be got off at some part of the tide, almost
any weather.

I need say no more, but remain your distressed humble servant,

‘HY. WHITESIDE.

‘_Postscript._ We were distressed in a gale of wind upon

January 13, since which we have not been able to keep any
light; but we could not have kept any light above sixteen
nights longer for want of oil and candles, which makes us
murmur and think we are forgotten. We doubt not that whoever
picks up this will be so merciful as to cause it to be sent to
Thos. Williams, Esq. Trelethin, near St. David’s, Wales.’

Placing their letter in a bottle, Whiteside and his men flung it into the
sea, offering up a prayer as they did so that it might reach land and
come to those able to help, ere it was too late; let us hope that their
prayer was answered. At all events there is no record of the dwellers
on the Smalls having perished on their insular home. Let us hope, too,
that after this a more generous allowance of food for the keepers and of
oil for the lamps was permitted. But all we know for certain about the
subsequent management of the lighthouse is that only two keepers were
kept there. This, no doubt, was economical, but the system possessed
serious drawbacks, as we shall see by the following incident—one of the
most exciting and melancholy in lighthouse history.

Some five-and-twenty years after the erection of the lighthouse at the

Smalls, there came about, one autumn, a spell of exceptionally stormy
weather, and no communication was had with the rock for four months.
People on shore grew naturally anxious, and the lighting of the light was
eagerly watched for as each day closed in. Would the stock of oil hold
out another night? or would the food supplies for the unhappy men enable
them to keep body and soul together, so that they might discharge their
duties? These were the questions on every one’s lips, and the safety
of the lighthouse keepers at the Smalls was the talk of every town and
village in the neighbourhood. Time after time efforts were made to carry
relief to the lighthouse, but all were fruitless; for miles round the
rock the sea ran so high that no boat could possibly have lived in it.
All that could be learnt was that crouched in the corner of the gallery
running round the lantern was one of the keepers; despite the blinding
snow and bitter cold, there he was whenever a boat got within sight of
the building.

What could it mean? Had the wretched man lost his reason, and been
driven by privation and the ceaseless cry of the tempest into a hopeless
lunatic who refused to quit the station he had taken up? It was idle to
speculate; all that was certain was that at least one whole and sane man
remained upon the rock, for the light was regularly lit at nightfall,
as could be seen from the shore, and those that brought news of the
crouching figure seen in the lighthouse gallery declared that no light
was burning in the lantern by day.

At last came a lull in the storm, the cutter reached the lighthouse, and
brought from it the two men—one alive the other dead. Sickness had seized
the dead man almost at the outset of the tempest, and despite the care of
his companion his illness terminated fatally, and left the living soul
that now returned to shore to endure a loneliness a thousand times more
lonely and more horrible from the fact that it was passed with a lifeless
body. He dared not commit that body to the waves; had he done so, the
suspicion of murder must infallibly have rested on him; and who could
then have lifted from him the mantle of suspicion? There was nothing for
it but to live with the corpse till help arrived from shore, and so he
did the best thing he could under the circumstances, and lashed his dead
mate to the ironwork of the gallery that ran outside the lantern—this was
the crouching figure that had been seen through the sleet and snow by
those who got within sight of the lighthouse.

Subsequent isolations of the Smalls have taken place—some for lengthy

periods; but no such gruesome incident has attended them. Nor, indeed,
could it well do so, for a rule was soon afterwards put in force for
this lighthouse, by which _three_ persons were always on duty there.
The wisdom and charity of this arrangement—which was soon afterwards
generally adopted at isolated lighthouse stations—has been since
constantly demonstrated, and most of us will recollect that within the
last two or three years illness seized one of the keepers at the very
lighthouse of which we have been speaking, during a storm that precluded
communication with the rock for a considerable time: the sick man’s
lot was, of course, far less hard from the fact that whilst one of his
companions was on duty, the other could minister to his wants.

Not long before the acquirement of this lighthouse by the Trinity House
it was almost demolished during the fury of a storm; the boards of the
floor of the living room, beneath the lantern, being forced up so close
to the ceiling that one of the men was almost crushed between the two
before he could extricate himself from his perilous position. After
this, the erection of a lighthouse at the Smalls more stable and more
fitted for the comfort of its inmates was undertaken: a granite tower was
completed in 1885, and it is certainly quaint to compare the accounts of
the building of this lighthouse—directed by the Trinity House engineer
and carried out by a band of from fifty to sixty skilled workmen—with the
primitive arrangements and appliances with which, a century before, the
Liverpool fiddle-maker and his half-dozen Cornish miners had set up the
first lighthouse there. But this comparison must not create in our minds
any contempt for the earlier enterprise so pluckily carried out.

[Illustration: LIGHTHOUSE AT HOLYHEAD.]

Leaving the Smalls, we pass on to the coast of North Wales, where a

lighthouse was proposed early in the reign of Charles II. There is
amongst the State Papers of that reign a petition, dated in June, 1665,
to erect ‘a double lighthouse,’ _i.e._ a high light and a low light,
at Holyhead; but there is no record of this petition being granted, or
of any lighthouse being then established there. Legend tells us that
the ancients had a pharos at this point, but within historic times the
headland was unlit until, comparatively speaking, recently.
Seven miles NNE. of Holyhead lie the Skerries, and the dangers, the
treachery, of this far-stretching shoal attracted the attention of the
lighthouse builder at a very much earlier date than the erection of the
lighthouse at Holyhead; indeed, we first hear of lighting the Skerries
in a scheme brought before Cromwell’s Council of State in 1658, for
rendering possible the nocturnal navigation of St. George’s Channel. The
scheme emanated from a certain Henry Hascard, who spoke from experience
of the need of what he proposed, as he had been ‘for long employed in
the Irish trade.’ The Council admitted the necessity of the scheme, but
nothing appears to have been done to carry it into effect.

Again, in 1662, a lighthouse on the Skerries was proposed independently;

but the difficulties of the undertaking and the opposition of Trinity
House crushed the proposal. Then, thirty years later—after the Eddystone
lighthouse had been set up—the proposal was renewed; but the Trinity
House still opposed the suggestion, though it offered itself to erect a
lighthouse on the Skerries if the ‘Irish trade’ would give a definite
promise of contributing. This the traders would not do, and the scheme
was not finally carried through till the year 1714, when a wealthy and
enterprising merchant named Trench, who was the leaseholder of the
islands, built a lighthouse there at a cost of fully £3,000, saying that
the thing was needful, and that he would take the risk of loss. Poor
man, it was a bad speculation for him: his son lost his life in its
construction, the traders managed in different ways to evade the payment
of the lighthouse dues which his patent authorized, and ten years later
he went to his grave a ruined man. After his death, the patent passed to
a married daughter, whose husband tried in vain to get enough toll to
support his light, and then sold the rights for a mere song.

But the purchase was a fortunate one for the purchaser, or for his
descendants or assigns; increase in traffic to Ireland, and a better
machinery for gathering the lighthouse dues, turned the Skerries light
into a very profitable possession: and one cannot read of the vast sum
of £445,000, paid by the Trinity House to the owners in 1835, without a
sigh of regret for the ill-luck of the original builder of the lighthouse.

There is, as the reader will see on looking at the map, hardly a more
useful lighthouse for the Irish navigation than the Skerries; but it
did not do all that was needed to make safe nocturnal passages in St.
George’s Channel. The Isle of Man, girt round as it is with innumerable
rocks and islets, must have formed a serious obstacle to safety in
crossing to Ireland before any lighthouse was placed there; and it is not
strange to find a warning light on the Gulf of Man, forming part of the
scheme of 1658 already mentioned; though it is remarkable that Hascard
only suggested its being illuminated during ‘the six fairest months
of the year.’ Probably the meaning of this is that during the winter
season communication between England and Ireland was then regarded as
practically impossible—no vessel would attempt it.

Hascard’s scheme was supported by the mariners of Chester, Liverpool, and

other ports in the north and west, but opposed, as we have said, by the
Trinity House on the old grounds that its maintenance would add to the
already too heavy burdens put upon the shipowners, though it must be said
that, in 1664, the ‘brethren’ were induced to admit its utility, if a
proper check was put on the amount of the contribution demanded! However,
nothing came of the suggestion for a lighthouse on ‘the Calf,’ and none
was put there till the last century; in fact, the only assistance that
sailors of the eighteenth century received in their passage to Ireland by
night was the benefit of two or three lighthouses at the entrance of the
port of Dublin.

We have now gone nearly round the coast of England in the survey of our
lighthouses, and the part that we have yet to travel—that north of the
Skerries—possesses exceedingly few about which there is much to say.
Indeed, the almost entire absence of any lighthouses on the west coast,
set up during the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, is a
noteworthy feature in the history of the subject with which we have been
dealing. It certainly points very strongly to the smallness of the west
coast trade in those days. What lights the religious houses of Wales,
and of Cheshire, Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, may have
supported, out of charity, we do not know; but, whatever they were, or
wherever they were situated, no early attempt was made to re-erect them
after the religious changes had snuffed them out.

Late in the seventeenth century, as the trade of Chester and Liverpool

rapidly increased, some attempts seem to have been made to place lights
at certain points along the shores of the Dee and the Mersey; but the
majority of lighthouses that we now see north of the Skerries have
barely a century of history of which to boast: the most northerly in
England, on the west coast, St. Bees, was established in 1714 as an open
coal fire, and this form of light was continued there till within a
hundred years ago.

* * * * *

So ends the present attempt at giving a history of coast lighting in this

country, by recalling incidents connected with the erection and existence
of some of our more famous lighthouses. The subject is an interesting
and, in a sense, a romantic one; moreover, it has hitherto received but
scant attention, save from a purely scientific point of view, and from
that we have not ventured to regard it. The picture of the coast of
England lighted by charity, and of its being for many years hardly lit at
all, is a novel one, and becomes the more curious as we realize what must
have been the effect of such a condition of affairs.

Again, the picture which reveals every obstacle being thrown in the way
of assisting navigation by means of nocturnal lights, appears strange
to modern eyes, whilst the harsh and selfish condemnation as useless of
lighthouses, which experience has taught us to regard as essential to the
safety of shipping, falls somewhat discordantly on modern ears. That
these obstacles and prejudices were, in most instances, successfully
overcome is to the credit of those who overcame them, whether the
particular project was undertaken out of charity or in the hope of
private gain. Indeed, it may be safely said that the history of many of
our English lighthouses reveals what pluck, and skill, and perseverance
will accomplish, and is, for that reason if for no other, well worthy of
careful study and full record.

THE END.

OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

FOOTNOTES
[1] See chapter viii.

[2] The acting body of the Trinity House adhering to the late king, its
labours had been transferred to a committee of the Parliament.

[3] This is the incident attributed by Smeaton and others to the building
of the second lighthouse an the Eddystone.

[4] Wright’s _History of Essex_, vol. ii. p. 179, says that Winstanley
was offered a liberal salary by the French king to remain in France, but
refused the offer. This is somewhat inconsistent with the statement that
the old king, Louis XIV, censured the officer of the privateer that had
made the capture, and ordered Winstanley’s immediate return, saying he
was at war with England, but not with humanity, and that a lighthouse on
the Eddystone would be a benefit to mankind at large.

[5] The reader will have noticed that credit for the undertaking did not
lie with the Trinity House.

[6] _The Beaux Stratagem._ By Farquhar, 1707, scene v.

[7] See page 7.

[8] Chap. i. p. 24.

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