The port of Plymouth comprises what are called the "Three
Towns"--Plymouth proper, covering about a square mile, Stonehouse, and
Devonport, where the great naval dockyard is located. Plymouth Sound is
an estuary of the English Channel, and receives the Plym at its
north-eastern border and the Tamar at its north-western, the sound being
about three miles square and protected by the great breakwater a mile
long, with a lighthouse, and defended by forts. The Plym broadens into
the Catwater, used as a haven for merchant-vessels and transports and
capable of furnishing anchorage to a thousand ships at one time. The
Tamar broadens into the Hamoaze, which is the naval harbor, and is four
miles long, with sufficient anchorage-ground for the entire British
navy. Sutton Pool is a tidal harbor now used by merchant-vessels. The
coasts of Plymouth Sound are rocky and abrupt, and strong fortresses
frown at every entrance. It is the naval dockyard that gives Plymouth
its chief importance: this is at Devonport, which is strongly fortified
by breastworks, ditches, embankments, and heavy batteries. The great
dockyard encloses an area of ninety-six acres and has thirty-five
hundred feet of water-frontage. There are here five docks and also
building-slips, where the great British war-ships are constructed.
Another enclosure of seventy-two acres at Point Keyham is used for
repairing ships, and a canal seventy feet wide runs through the yards to
facilitate the movement of materials. Immense roofs cover the docks.
East of Devonport, divided from it by a creek, and adjoining Plymouth,
is Stonehouse. Here are the great victualling yard, marine barracks, and
naval hospital. The Royal William Victualling Yard occupies fourteen
acres on a tongue of land at the mouth of the Tamar, and cost $7,500,000
to build. Here the stores are kept and naval supplies furnished, its
great features being the vast government bakehouse, the cooperage, and
the storehouses. Its front is protected by a redoubt, and to the
eastward are the tasteful grounds of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe's winter
villa. The marine barracks, which have the finest mess-room in England,
will accommodate fifteen hundred men; the naval hospital, northward of
Stonehouse, will furnish beds for twelve hundred. There are three
thousand men employed about these great docks and stores, and they form
the most extensive naval establishment in the world. Near Mount Wise are
the Raglan Barracks, where there is a display of cannon taken from the
Turks.
In Plymouth Sound is a bold pyramidal rock, the Isle of St. Nicholas,
which is a formidable fortress. Mount Edgcumbe is on the western shore,
and on the eastern side is Plymouth's pretty park, known as the Hoe,
where the old Eddystone Lighthouse will be set up. Having come down the
Plym, we will now ascend the Tamar, past the huge docks and stores, and
about five miles above see the great Albert Bridge, which carries a
railway, at a height of one hundred feet, from the hills of Devon over
to those of Cornwall on the western shore. It is built on nineteen
arches, two broad ones of four hundred and fifty-five feet span each
bridging the river, the entire structure being two thousand two hundred
and forty feet long. Out in the English Channel, fourteen miles from
Plymouth, is its famous beacon--the Eddystone Lighthouse. Here
Winstanley perished in the earlier lighthouse that was swept away by the
terrible storm of 1703, and here Smeaton built his great lighthouse in
1759, one hundred feet high, which has recently been superseded by the
new lighthouse. The Eddystone Rocks consist of twenty-two gneiss reefs
extending about six hundred and fifty feet, in front of the entrance to
Plymouth Sound. Smeaton's lighthouse, modelled after the trunk of a
sturdy oak in Windsor Park, became the model for all subsequent
lighthouses. It is as firm to-day as when originally built, but the reef
on which it rests has been undermined and shattered by the joint action
of the waves and the leverage of the tall stone column, against which
the seas strike with prodigious force, causing it to vibrate like the
trunk of a tree in a storm. The foundation-stone of the new lighthouse
was laid on a reef one hundred and twenty-seven feet south of the old
one in 1878. It is built of granite and rises one hundred and
thirty-eight feet above the rock, its light being visible seventeen
miles: it was first lighted May 18, 1882.