And yet it was private enterprise that built and rebuilt, and again rebuilt the Eddystone, and it was private courage that established that which will soon be a thing of the past, the strange wooden-legged Malay-looking barracoon of a lighthouse in the Bristol Channel, on a rock called the “Smalls.”
The wooden structure at the Smalls was conceived originally by a Mr. Phillips, of Liverpool, a member of the Society of Friends. He set himself to establish “a great holy good to serve and save humanity,” and even in this world he had his reward; for sixty years afterwards, when his representatives had to surrender it to the Trinity House, they got one hundred and seventy thousand pounds by way of compensation for it.
Like most sagacious men, he knew how to choose his instruments. At that time there resided in Liverpool a young man of the name of Whiteside, a maker of “violins, spinettes, and upright harpsichords,” with a strongly marked mechanical genius.
In the summer of 1772, this young fiddle-maker found himself at Solva, twenty miles from the rock, with a gang of Cornish miners, who were to quarry sockets into the stone, into which it was originally intended that iron pillars should be soldered. The first essay was sufficiently appalling. The surface of the rock is called twelve feet above the level of high water, that is, in smooth weather; but in tempestuous seas, and when the waves are rolling in from the south-west, it is as many feet below it. The party had landed from their cutter, and had got a long iron rod worked a few feet into the rock, when the weather suddenly got “dirty.” The wind and the sea rose together, and the cutter had to sheer off lest she should be wrecked. The men on the rock clung, as best they might, to the half-fastened shaft, and a desperate struggle ensued between brute nature and that passive fortitude which is greater than brute nature,—all through the night into the morning, all through the day into the night again, until the third day, when the storm abated and they were saved.
Nothing daunted, it was agreed that it was just as well to know the worst. One hint was immediately taken, and rings and holding bars were let into various parts of the rock, to which the men could lash themselves and each other on similar occasions. It was soon found that iron pillars would not do, that they were not sufficiently elastic; and great pains were taken to find heart of oak that would be equal to resist the angry forces of the waters. That the present structure would stand for ever, may be doubted, except by a process analogous to the repair of the Irishman’s stocking,—first a new foot, and then a fresh leg. Anyhow, it has been recently thought better to build a granite tower, which, once well done, may be said, humanly speaking, to be done for ever. The light will be exhibited at a greater elevation, which gives it an extended range, and the size of the lantern will admit of a larger and more powerful apparatus. The mode of procedure is of course very different from that adopted by Mr. Whiteside. Where formerly there was a poor fiddle-maker, with half-a-dozen Cornish miners, and a ship’s carpenter or two, there is now a civil engineer, a clerk, thirty-eight granite masons, four carpenters, eight smiths, thirteen seamen, four bargemen, two miners and eight labourers; a commodious wharf, a steam vessel, a tender, and some barges. There may be nothing so pathetic or so heroic as that long cling of nine forlorn human creatures round the first iron bar; it would be shame to the engineer if it should be so; but there is real work to do, and it is being thoroughly well done.
The story of the present structure at the Eddystone has been told with quaint simplicity by the man who raised it. Smeaton had this advantage over Whiteside, that he had precursors in his work: but then the work was harder, and was done more enduringly. Whiteside’s work at the Smalls is coming away in the course of a season or two; Smeaton’s, at the Eddystone, is to remain the pattern lighthouse of the world for ever. The first Eddystone, built in 1696, was a strange affair—something like a Chinese pagoda, or a belvedere in some suburban tea-gardens, with open galleries and projecting cranes. The architect was Henry Winstanley, and he has depicted himself complacently fishing out of his kitchen window; but how he ever expected his queer mansion to stand the winter storms is simply a marvel. It was completed in 1699, and it was destroyed in 1703. The necessity for repairs had taken him to the rock at the time, a dreadful storm set in on the 26th November, and the next morning there was nothing left of the lighthouse or its occupants but some of the large irons whereby the work had been fixed in the rock. A narrative of the occurrence, printed in the following year, states:—“It was very remarkable that, as we are informed, at the same time the lighthouse abovesaid was blown down, the model of it, in Mr. Winstanley’s house at Littlebury, in Essex, above 200 miles from the lighthouse, fell down and was broke to pieces.” Upon which, Smeaton shrewdly remarks: “This, however, may not appear extraordinary, if we consider, that the same general wind that blew down the lighthouse near Plymouth might blow down the model at Littlebury.”
The next structure at the Eddystone, commenced in 1706, was a very different thing. Mr. John Rudyerd was doomed by fortune to be a silk mercer, and keep a shop on Ludgate Hill; but Nature had made him an engineer. Smeaton speaks with great admiration of many of his arrangements; and if the lighthouse had not been destroyed by fire, about forty-six years after its erection, there appears no reason why it should not have been standing to this day. While Winstanley’s was all external ornament, with numberless nooks and angles for the wind and sea to gripe it by, Rudyerd’s was a snug, smooth, solid cone, round which the sea might rage, but on which it could hardly fasten. But fire conquered what the water could not. Luckily for the keepers, it broke out in the very top of the lantern, and burnt downwards, and there was time to save the men, although one of them, looking upwards at the burning mass, not only got burnt on the shoulders and head with some molten lead, but while gazing upwards with his mouth open, received some of the liquid metal down his throat, and yet survived, to the incredulity of all Plymouth, for twelve days, when seven ounces of lead, “of a flat, oval form,” was taken from his stomach.
The lessees of the Eddystone, in those days, seem to have been liberal-minded people. The tolls ceased with the extinction of the light, and could not be renewed until it was again exhibited. It was their apparent interest, therefore, to get a structure run up on the old model as quickly as possible. It was true it had been destroyed by fire, but a little modification of the old arrangements would probably have prevented such a calamity recurring, and it had proved itself stable and seaworthy. Nevertheless, they not only consulted the ablest engineer of the day, but submitted to the delay and extra cost involved in the adoption of his advice to build of stone and granite.
The point of most enduring interest connected with the present Eddystone is the peculiarity of its form, which is familiar, probably, to everybody in the kingdom, from the child, who has seen it in a magic-lantern, to the civil engineer who knows Smeaton’s stately folio by heart. Until he built so, the form was almost unknown to us; and since he built so, all the ocean lighthouses have been modifications of it. It is interesting to contrast the reasoning of Mr. Alan Stevenson, the builder of the “Skerryvore,” another of these deep-sea lamp-posts, as they have been called, off the western coast of Scotland,—with the instincts of Smeaton, so to speak, on the same subject. It may not be very edifying to the general reader to learn “that, as the stability of a sea-tower depends, cæteris paribus, on the lowness of its centre of gravity, the general notion of its form is that of a cone; but that, as the forces to which its several horizontal sections are opposed decrease towards its top in a rapid ratio, the solid should be generated by the revolution of some curve line convex to the axis of the tower, and gradually approaching to parallelism with it; and that this, in fact, is a general description of the Eddystone Tower, devised by Smeaton.” Neither is it a thing likely to be remembered, without saying it over a good many times to oneself, that “the shaft of the Skerryvore pillar is a solid, generated by the revolution of a rectangular hyperbola about its asymptote as a vertical axis.” But if we understand the respective narratives of the constructors rightly, Smeaton worked from analogy, and Stevenson from mathematical calculation. Smeaton tells us of his desire to make his lighthouse resemble the trunk of a stately tree, and he gives drawings both of a trunk and of a branch, to show how they start, the one from the ground, and the other from the main stem. He is also constantly recurring to the idea of the elasticity of stone, and he quotes a report from one of the keepers, that on one occasion “the house did shake as if a man had been up in a great tree.” Certainly, the effect to the eye in looking at the Eddystone, corroborates the conception with which his mind was evidently possessed; it emerges from the sea; the curve of the natural rock is continued in a singularly felicitous manner; the Skerryvore is a fine shaft, but one sees that it has been stuck in a hole, thoroughly well fastened in, and (relying on its weight and coherence) likely to remain there till doomsday; but the Eddystone is homogeneous to the rock, as well as to itself; and gazing on it, one gets into the same train of contemplation as Topsy did upon her wickedness, and supposes it grew there. Nevertheless the Skerryvore is a noble structure, and the memoir of its construction by Mr. Stevenson is almost exhaustive of all that is at present known about lighthouses and lighthouse illumination.
And if these be the lighthouses, and the mode of life among those by whom they are builded, let us try to realize the daily work of those by whom the structures are inhabited. “You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.” That is the first article of instructions to light-keepers, as may be seen by any visitors to a station. Whatever else happens, you are to do that. It may be you are isolated, through the long night-watches, twenty miles from land, fifty or a hundred feet above the level of the sea, with the winds and waves howling round you, and the sea-birds dashing themselves to death against the gleaming lantern, like giant-moths against a candle; or it may be a calm, voluptuous, moonlight night, the soft landairs laden with the perfumes of the highland heather or the Cornish gorse, tempting you to keep your watch outside the lantern, in the open gallery, instead of in your watch-room chair within; the Channel may be full of stately ships, each guided by your light, or the horizon may be bare of all sign of life, except, remote and far beneath you, the lantern of some fishing-boat at sea,—but, whatever may be going on outside, there is within for you the duty, simple and easy, by virtue of your moral method and orderly training, “to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.” You shall be helped to do this easily and well by abundant discipline, first, on probation, at head-quarters, where you shall gain familiarity with all your materials—lamps, oil, wicks, lighting apparatus, revolving machinery, and cleaning stores; you shall be looked at, and over, and through, by keen medical eyes, before you can be admitted to this service, lest, under the exceptional nature of your future life, you, not being a sound man, should break down, to the public detriment and your own; you shall be enjoined “to the constant habit of cleanliness and good order in your own person, and to the invariable exercise of temperance and morality in your habits and proceedings, so that, by your example, you may enforce, as far as lies in your power, the observance of the same laudable conduct by your wife and family.” You shall be well paid while you are hale and active, and well pensioned when you are past work; you shall be ennobled, by compulsion, into provident consideration for your helpmate and your children by an insurance on your life; but when all this is done for you, and the highest and completest satisfaction that can fall to the best of us on this side the grave—the sense of being useful to our fellows—is ordered for you in abundant measure, it all recurs to what, as regards the specialty of your life, is the be-all and the end-all of your existence, and this is the burden to the ballad of your story:—“You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.”