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.