The ledge is about 3,000 feet long and 1,500 feet broad, and is bare at low water. It is surrounded by detached rocks, upon which the sea breaks with terrific violence. There is but one place of access, which is a passage 300 feet wide, where there are no rocks, and which leads to within 600 feet of the tower. The tower was a circular cone, rising from its rocky base to a height of 162 feet. It is now shorter. The apartments of the tower are highly ornamented, consisting of four storeys, all of different orders of architecture, and adorned with busts and statues of Kings of France and heathen gods. The basement, or lower storey, appears to have been intended as a store-room; the second storey is called the “King’s apartments;” the third is a chapel; and the fourth consists of a dome supported by columns, a kind of lower lantern; above this was originally a lantern formed of a stone dome and eight columns. In the upper lantern a fire of oak wood was kept burning for about a hundred years, when, in 1717, the fire having weakened the stone supports by calcining them, the upper lantern was taken down, and the light was kept up in the lower lantern. As it did not show well there, an iron lantern was erected in 1727 above this, in the place of the old stone lantern, and coal was then used for fuel instead of wood.
The following history of the Eddystone is largely derived from one of Mr. Samuel Smiles’ graphic and learned works.[52]
In 1696, Mr. Henry Winstanley (a mercer and country gentleman), of Littlebury, in the county of Essex, obtained the necessary powers to erect a lighthouse on the Eddystone. That gentleman seems to have possessed a curious mechanical genius, which first displayed itself in devising sundry practical jokes for the entertainment of his guests. Smeaton tells us that in one room there lay an old slipper, which, if a kick was given it, immediately raised a ghost from the floor; in another the visitor sat down upon a chair, which suddenly threw out two arms and held him a fast prisoner; whilst, in the garden, if he sought the shelter of an arbour, and sat down upon a particular seat, he was straightway set afloat in the middle of the adjoining canal. These tricks must have rendered the house at Littlebury a somewhat exciting residence for the uninitiated guest. The amateur inventor exercised the same genius, to a certain extent, for the entertainment of the inhabitants of the metropolis, and at Hyde Park Corner he erected a variety of jets d’eau, known by the name of Winstanley’s Waterworks, which he exhibited at stated times at a shilling a head.
This whimsicality of the man in some measure accounts for the oddity of the wooden building erected by him on the Eddystone Rock; and it is matter of surprise that it should have stood the severe weather of the English Channel for several seasons. The building was begun in the year 1696, and finished in four years. It must necessarily have been a work attended with great difficulty as well as danger, as operations could [pg 160]only be carried on during fine weather, when the sea was comparatively smooth. The first summer was wholly spent in making twelve holes in the rock, and fastening twelve irons in them, by which to hold fast the superstructure. “Even in summer,” Winstanley says, “the weather would at times prove so bad that for ten or fourteen days together the sea would be so raging about these rocks, caused by out-winds and the running of the ground seas coming from the main ocean, that although the weather should seem and be most calm in other places, yet here it would mount and fly more than two hundred feet, as has been so found since there was lodgment on the place, and therefore all our works were constantly buried at those times, and exposed to the mercy of the seas.”
The second summer was spent in making a solid pillar, twelve feet high and fourteen feet in diameter, on which to build the lighthouse. In the third year all the upper work was erected to the vane, which was eighty feet above the foundation. In the midsummer of that year Winstanley ventured to take up his lodging with the workmen in the lighthouse; but a storm arose, and eleven days passed before any boats could come near them. During that period the sea washed in upon Winstanley and his companions, wetting all their clothing and provisions, and carrying off many of their materials. By the time the boats could land, the party were reduced almost to their last crust; but, happily, the building stood, apparently firm. Finally, the light was exhibited on the summit of the building, on the 14th of November, 1698.
The fourth year was occupied in strengthening the building round the foundations, making all solid nearly to a height of twenty feet, and also in raising the upper part of the lighthouse forty feet, to keep it well out of the wash of the sea. This timber erection, when finished, somewhat resembled a Chinese pagoda, with open galleries and numerous fantastic projections. The main gallery, under the light, was so wide and open that an old gentleman who remembered both Winstanley and his lighthouse, afterwards told Smeaton that it was possible for a six-oared boat to be lifted up on a wave and driven clear through the open gallery into the sea on the other side. In the perspective print of the lighthouse, published by the architect after its erection, he complacently represented himself as fishing out of the kitchen window!
WINSTANLEY’S LIGHTHOUSE.
When Winstanley had brought his work to completion, he is said to have expressed himself so satisfied as to its strength that he only wished he might be there in the fiercest storm that ever blew. In this wish he was not disappointed, though the result was the reverse entirely of the builder’s anticipations. In November, 1703, Winstanley went off to the lighthouse to superintend some repairs which had become necessary, and he was still in the place with the light-keepers, when, on the night of the 26th, a storm of unparalleled fury burst along the coast. As day broke on the morning of the 27th, people on shore anxiously looked in the direction of the rock to see if Winstanley’s structure had withstood the fury of the gale, but not a vestige of it remained. The lighthouse and its builder had been swept completely away.
The building had, in fact, been deficient in every element of stability, and its form was such as to render it peculiarly liable to damage from the violence both of wind and water. “Nevertheless,” as Smeaton generously observes, “it was no small degree of heroic merit in Winstanley to undertake a piece of work which had before [pg 161]been deemed impracticable, and, by the success which attended his endeavours, to show mankind that the erection of such a work was not in itself a thing of that kind.” He may, indeed, be said to have paved the way for the more successful enterprise of Smeaton himself; and its failure was not without its influence in inducing that great mechanic to exercise the care which he did, in devising a structure that should withstand the most violent sea on the south coast. Shortly after Winstanley’s lighthouse had been swept away, the Winchelsea, a richly laden homeward-bound Virginian, was wrecked on the Eddystone Rock, and almost every soul on board perished; so that the erection of a lighthouse upon the dangerous reef remained as much a necessity as ever.