The year 1840 had now arrived, and the construction of the lighthouse was about to begin. Quarriers and labourers had been busily employed in cutting blocks of stone in the quarries. Carpenters were diligently engaged in making wooden moulds for each lighthouse block wherewith to gauge its exact mathematical figure. In April, a reinforcement of thirty-seven masons from Aberdeen arrived at Tyree—men expert in the difficult work of dressing granite—and, on April 30, the first visit was made to the rock. To the great joy of all, the barrack constructed in the previous season was found uninjured, though a mass of rock weighing about five tons had been detached from its bed and carried right across the foundation pit by the violence of the waves. In this barrack the architect and his party now took up their quarters, which from the frequent flooding of the apartments with water and from the heavy spray that washed the walls were anything but agreeable. "Once," says the gallant engineer,[J] "we were fourteen days without communication with the shore or the steamer, and during the greater part of that time we saw nothing but white fields of foam as far as the eye could reach; and heard nothing but the whistling of the wind and the thunder of the waves, which was at times so loud as to make it almost impossible to hear anyone speak. Such a scene, with the ruins of the former barrack not twenty yards from us, was calculated to inspire the most desponding anticipations; and I well remember the undefined sense of dread that flashed on my mind, on being awakened one night by a heavy sea which struck the barrack and made my cot swing inwards from the wall, and was immediately followed by a cry of terror from the men in the apartment above me, most of whom, startled by the sound and the tremor, sprang from their berths to the floor, impressed with the idea that the whole fabric had been washed into the sea."
[J] Account of Skerryvore Lighthouse, by Alan Stevenson, Engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board. Edinburgh, 1848.
This spell of bad weather, though in summer, well-nigh outlasted their provisions; and when at length they were able to make the signal that a landing would be practicable, scarcely twenty-four hours' stock remained on the rock. The landing of the heavy stones from the lighters was a work of no small difficulty, considering the slippery nature of the rock, and as the loss of one dressed stone would frequently have delayed the whole progress of the building, the anxiety was incessant. On July 4, the building of the tower really commenced. Six courses of masonry carried the building to the height of 8 feet 2 inches before the autumnal gales terminated the work of 1840, and an excellent year's work it was. The saying that "what is well begun is half done" was illustrated here. Next year's work was comparatively easy—so that in 1842 the tower rose to its full height of 138 feet; and the year after the light was shedding its beneficent rays over the thirty miles of watery waste that surround the hidden rocks of Skerryvore.
The Skerryvore Lighthouse.
Well may we be proud of men like Smeaton and the Stevensons; but, while justly admiring their architectural skill, their perseverance, and their courage, we must not forget to offer the just tribute of our gratitude to the eminent natural philosophers without whose ingenious optical inventions the most splendid sea-towers would be comparatively useless. The Pharus or lighthouse of Alexandria was, probably with justice, reckoned among the seven wonders of the world, and its several stories, rising on marble columns to the height of 400 feet, must have presented an imposing spectacle, but I strongly suspect that the rude brazier on the summit of the majestic pile bore the same proportion to the lighthouse lanterns of our time as the wretched coasting-craft of the ancient Greeks to the ocean steamers of the present day. Among the names of those who have contributed most effectually to the progress of marine illumination Argand, Borda, and Fresnel are conspicuous. The hollow cylindrical wick of the first was a sudden and immense advance in the art of economical and effective illumination. The second, by his invention of the parabolic mirror, multiplied the effect of the unassisted flame by 450, and the refracting lens of Fresnel so admirably concentrates the light as to project its warning beams to the wonderful distance of thirty or thirty-five miles.
In former ages the efforts of man to provide a refuge to the mariner from the fury of the raging gale were feeble and insignificant. Content with the harbours that nature had provided, it was then thought quite sufficient to line a river-bank with quays or to enclose a natural pond by walls. The idea of raising colossal breakwaters by casting whole quarries into the deep, or of extending artificial promontories far into the bosom of the ocean, is of modern date, and would have appeared chimerical not only to the ancients but to our fathers not a century ago. The first great work of this description is the famous breakwater planned by De Cessart in 1783, and terminated in 1853, which has converted the open roadstead of Cherbourg into a land-locked harbour. Rising from a depth of 40 feet at low spring tides, on a coast where the floods attain a height of 19 feet, it opposes a front of 12,700 feet to the fury of the storm, and carries 250 pieces of the heaviest cannon on its formidable brow.
It far surpasses in extent and boldness of construction the breakwater at Plymouth, nor will it be eclipsed by the moles now forming at Portland, Holyhead, and Alderney; but although it is a more impressive spectacle to see man struggling with the ocean and producing calmness and shelter in the midst of the raging storm, than to contemplate his operations where he has no such adversaries to subdue, still such buildings as those just described are neither the largest nor the most expensive works required for the accommodation of shipping. Witness the Cyclopean grandeur of the Liverpool docks or of the Great Float at Birkenhead, which alone covers an area of water of 121 acres, and whose portals, with a clear opening of 100 feet, will admit the largest screw-steamer or sailing ship the wildest imagination has yet conceived. Six millions of money is the cost of this one work alone—more than would be required to raise a pyramid like that of Cheops—and even this sum is a trifle when compared with what has been spent on the harbours of Liverpool, London, and other great commercial cities.
Not satisfied with erecting his lighthouses on wave-worn rocks or defying the waves with his colossal breakwaters, man spans bridges over arms of the sea and excavates mines under the abysses of the deep. The locomotive now rolls full speed 100 feet above high water over the strait which separates Anglesea from the mainland; and in Botallack and several other Cornish mines the workman, while resting from his subterranean labours, hears the awful voice of the ocean rolling over his head.
"In all these submarine mines," says Mr. Henwood, "I have heard the dashing of the billows and the grating of the shingle when in calm weather. I was once, however, underground in Wheal Cock during a storm. At the extremity of the level seaward some eighty or one hundred fathoms from the shore, little could be heard of its effects, except at intervals, when the reflux of some unusually large wave projected a pebble outward, bounding and rolling over the rocky bottom. But when standing beneath the base of the cliff, and in that part of the mine where but nine feet of rock stood between us and the ocean, the heavy roll of the large boulders, the ceaseless grinding of the pebbles, the fierce thundering of the billows, with the crackling and boiling as they rebounded, placed a tempest in its most appalling form too vividly before me ever to be forgotten. More than once doubting the protection of our rocky shield, we retreated in affright, and it was only after repeated trials that we had confidence to pursue our investigations." Yet the miners, accustomed from their early youth to the fierce and threatening roaring of the stormy sea, pursue their work from year to year, never doubting that the thin roof which separates them from a watery grave will continue to protect them, as it has shielded their fathers before them.