When worthy Mr. Phillips, the Liverpool Quaker, taking thought in what way he could best benefit his fellow-creatures, built the beacon on the Smalls Rock in 1772, he could hardly have made a happier selection of "a great good to serve and save humanity." There are few enterprises more heroic or beneficent than those connected with the construction and management of lighthouses. From first to last, from the rearing of the column on the rock to the monotonous, nightly vigil in attendance on the lamps—from the setting to the rising of the sun—the valour, intrepidity, and endurance, of all concerned are called into play, and the wild perils and stirring adventures they experience impart to the story of their labours a thrilling and romantic interest. In the case of the Smalls Lighthouse, for instance, Whiteside, the self-taught engineer, and his party of Cornish miners had no sooner landed, and got a long iron shaft worked a few feet into the rock, than a storm arose that drove away their cutter, and kept them clinging with the tenacity of despair to the half-fastened rod for three days and two nights, when the wind fell and the sea calmed, and they were rescued, rather dead than alive, numbed from their long immersion in the water, which rose almost to their necks, and exhausted from want of food. And after the lighthouse had been erected, the engineer and some of his men again found themselves, as a paper in a bottle they had cast into the sea revealed to those on shore, in a "most dangerous and distressed condition on the Smalls," cut off from the mainland by the stormy weather, without fuel, and almost at the end of their stock of food and water—in which alarming situation they had to remain some time before their friends could get out to their relief. Most sea-girt beacons have their own legends of similar perils and fortitude; and the narratives of the erection of the three great lighthouses of Eddystone, Inchcape, and Skerryvore, which may be selected as the types of the rest, are full of incidents as exciting as any "hair breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach."

About fourteen miles south from Plymouth, and ten from the Ram's Head, on the Cornish coast, lies a perilous reef of rocks, against which the long rolling swell of the Atlantic waves dashes with appalling force, and breaks up into those swirling eddies from which the reef is named—the Eddystone. Upon these treacherous crags many a gallant vessel has foundered and gone down within sight of the shore it had scarcely quitted or was just about to reach; and situated in the midst of a much frequented track, the rapid succession of calamities at the Eddystone was not long in awakening men's minds to the necessity of some warning light. The exposure of the reef to the wild fury of the Atlantic, and the small extent of the surface of the chief rock, however, rendered the construction of a lighthouse in such a situation a work of great and (as it was long considered) insuperable difficulty. The project was long talked of before any one was found daring enough to attempt the task; and when at length in 1696 Henry Winstanley stepped forward to undertake it, he might have been thought of all others the very last from whose brain so serious a conception would have emanated. The great hobby of his life had been to fill his house at Littlebury, in Essex, with mechanical devices of the most absurd and fantastic kind. If a visitor, retiring to his bedroom, kicked aside an old slipper on the floor, purposely thrown in his way, up started a ghost of hideous form. If, startled at the sight, he fell back into an arm chair placed temptingly at hand, a pair of gigantic arms would instantly spring forth and clasp him a prisoner in their rude embrace. Tired of these disagreeable surprises, the astonished guest perhaps took refuge in the garden, and sought repose in a pleasant arbour by the side of a canal; but he had scarcely seated himself, when he found himself suddenly set adrift on the water, where he floated about till his whimsical host came to his relief. Such was the man who now entered upon one of the most formidable engineering enterprises in the world.

Although Winstanley's lighthouse was but a slight affair compared with its successors, it occupied six years in the erection—the frequent rising of the sea over the rock, and the difficulty and danger of passing to and from it greatly retarding the operations, and rendering them practicable only during a short summer season. For ten or fourteen days after a storm had passed, and when all was calm elsewhere, the ground-swell from the Atlantic was often so heavy among these rocks that the waves sprang two hundred feet, and more, in the air, burying the works from sight. The first summer was spent in boring twelve holes in the rock, and fixing therein twelve large irons as a holdfast for the works that were to be reared. The next season saw the commencement of a round pillar, which was to form the steeple of the tower, as well as afford protection to the workmen while at their labours. When Winstanley bade farewell to the rock for that year, the tower had risen to the height of twelve feet; and resuming operations next spring, he built at it till it reached the height of eighty feet. Having got the apartments fit for occupation, and the lantern set up, Winstanley determined to take up his abode there with his men, in order that no time might be lost in going to and from the rock. The first night they spent on the rock a great storm arose, and for eleven days it was impossible to hold any communication with the shore. "Not being acquainted with the height of the sea's rising," writes the architect, "we were almost drowned with wet, and our provisions in as bad a condition, though we worked night and day as much as possible to make shelter for ourselves." The storm abating, they went on shore for a little repose; but soon returning, set to work again with undiminished energy.

On the 14th November of the same year (1698), Winstanley lighted his lantern for the first time. A long spell of boisterous weather followed, and it was not till three days before Christmas that they were able to quit their desolate abode, being "almost at the last extremity for want of provisions; but by good Providence then two boats came with provisions and the family that was to take care of the light; and so ended this year's work."

It was soon found that the sea rose to a much greater height than had been anticipated, the lantern, although sixty feet above the rock, being often "buried under water." Winstanley was, therefore, under the necessity of enlarging the tower and carrying it to a greater elevation. The fourth season, accordingly, was spent in encasing the tower with fresh outworks, and adding forty feet to its height. This proved too high for its strength to bear; and in the course of three years the winds and waves had made sad havoc in the unstable fabric.

In November 1703, Winstanley went out to the rock himself, accompanied by his workmen, to institute the repairs. As he was putting off in the boat from Plymouth, a friend who had for some time before been watching the condition of the lighthouse with much anxiety, mentioned to him his suspicion that it was in a bad way, and could not last long. Winstanley, full of faith in the stability of his work, replied that "he only wished to be there in the greatest storm that ever blew under the face of the heavens, that he might see what effect it would have on his structure." And with these words he shoved off from the beach, and made for the rock.

With the last gleams of daylight, before the night fell and shrouded it from view, the tower was seen rising proudly from the midst of the waters. Before the dawn it had disappeared for ever, and the waves were lashing fiercely round the bare bleak ledge of the fatal rock. Poor Winstanley had had his presumptuous wish only too fully realized. The storm of the 26th November was one of the most fearful that ever ravaged our shores. The whole coast suffered severely from its fury, and when the morning came, not a sign remained of the lighthouse, architect, or workmen, save a fragment of chain-cable wedged firmly into a crevice of the rock. The disappearance of the warning light was quickly followed by the wreck of a large homeward-bound man-of-war, and the loss of nearly all her crew, upon the rocks.

This first Eddystone lighthouse was a strange, fantastic looking structure, deficient in every element of stability, and the wonder was not that it fell in pieces as it did, but that it was able to withstand so long the boisterous weather of the Channel. But if of little merit as an architect, Winstanley at least deserves respect, as Smeaton remarks, for the heroism he displayed in undertaking "a piece of work that before had been looked on as impossible."

For four years the Eddystone remained bare and untenanted, till, in the summer of 1706, the erection of a new lighthouse was commenced under the superintendence of John Rudyerd, by profession a silk-mercer in Ludgate Hill, but by natural genius an engineer of considerable merit. With such skill and energy did he apply himself to the work, that before two summers were over his tower was completed, and its friendly light beamed over the troubled waters and sunken crags. Rudyerd's lighthouse was entirely of wood, weighted at the base by a few courses of mason work, and 92 feet in height. In form, it was a smooth, solid cone of elegant simplicity, unbroken by any of those ornamental outworks, which offered the wind and sea so many points to lay hold of, in Winstanley's whimsical pagoda. Smeaton speaks of Rudyerd's tower as a masterly performance; and had it not been destroyed by fire, forty-six years after its erection, there seems little reason to suppose it might not have been standing to this day,—although no doubt the ravages of the worm in the wood would have demanded frequent repairs. On the 2d December 1755, some fishermen who happened to be on the beach very early in the morning preparing their nets, were startled by the sight of volumes of smoke issuing from the lighthouse. They instantly gave the alarm, and a boat was quickly manned for the relief of the sufferers. It did not reach the rock till about ten o'clock, and the fire had then been raging for eight hours. It was first discovered by the light-keeper upon watch who, going into the lantern about two o'clock in the morning to snuff the candles, found the place filled with smoke. He opened the door of the lantern into the balcony, and a mass of flame immediately burst from the inside of the cupola. He lost no time in seizing the buckets of water kept at hand, and dashing them over the fire, but without effect. His two companions were asleep, and it was some time before they heard his shouts for assistance. When at length they did bestir themselves, all the water in the house was exhausted. The light-keeper—an old man in his ninety-fourth year—urged them to replenish the buckets from the sea; but the difficulty of lowering the buckets to such a depth, and their confusion and terror at the sudden catastrophe and their impending fate, destroyed their presence of mind, and rendered them quite powerless. The old man did his best to prevent the advance of the flames; but, exhausted by the unavailing labour, and severely injured by the melting lead from the roof, he had to desist. As the fire spread from point to point, with rapid strides descending from the summit to the base, the poor wretches fled before it, retreating from room to room, till at last they were driven to seek shelter from the blazing timbers and red hot bars, in a cleft of the rock. There they were found by their preservers, crouching together half dead with suffering and fright. It was with the greatest difficulty that they were got into the boat; and they had no sooner reached the shore than one of them, crazed by the terrors he had undergone, ran away, and was never heard of more. The old man lingered on for a few days in great agony, and died from the injuries he had received.

Such was the fate of the second lighthouse on the Eddystone,—one element revenging, as it were, the conquest over another.

In spite of the fatality which seemed to attend these lighthouses, the lessees of the Eddystone—for it was then in private hands, and did not come into the hands of the Trinity House till many years after—resolved to make another attempt; and this time they selected as the architect one of the ablest professional men of the day, and with sagacious liberality, adopted his advice to build it of stone and granite.

Smeaton truly belonged to the class of heaven-born engineers. From his earliest years the bent of his genius unmistakably revealed itself. Before he was six years old, he one day terrified his parents by climbing to the top of a barn to fix up some contrivance he had put together, after the fashion of a windmill; and another time he constructed a pump that raised water, after watching some workmen sinking one. And as he grew older, his efforts took a more ambitious range, and were all equally remarkable for their originality and success. His father destined him for the bar; but his inclination for engineering was so irresistible, that he allowed him to resign all chance of the woolsack, and set up in business as a mathematical instrument maker. He gradually advanced to the profession of civil engineering,—which he was the first man in England to pursue, and which he may be said to have created.

It was in 1756 he commenced the construction of the great work which may be regarded as the monument of his fame. Having decided that his lighthouse should be of stone, the next point to be settled was its form. His thoughts, he tells us in his book, instinctively reverted to the analogy between a lighthouse shaft and the trunk of a stately oak. He remarked the spreading roots taking a broad, firm grip of the soil, the rise of the swelling base, gradually lessening in girth in a graceful curve, till a preparation being required for the support of the spreading boughs, a renewed swelling of diameter takes place; and he held that cutting off the branches we have, in the trunk of an oak, a type of such a lighthouse column as is best adapted to resist the influence of the winds and waves. Whether or not Smeaton arrived at the form of his lighthouse, which has since become the model for all others, from this fanciful analogy, its appearance rising from the rock presents a strong resemblance to a noble tree stripped of its boughs and foliage.

Smeaton commenced the undertaking by visiting the rock in the spring of 1756, accurately measuring its very irregular surface, and in order to ensure exactness in his plans, making a model of it. In the summer of the same year he prepared the foundation by cutting the surface of the rock in regular steps or trenches, into which the blocks of stone were to be dovetailed. The first stone was laid in June 1757, and the last in August 1759. Of that period there were only 431 days when it was possible to stand on the rock, and so small a portion even of these was available for carrying on the work, that it is calculated the building in reality occupied but six weeks. The whole was completed without the slightest accident to any one; and so well were all the arrangements made, that not a minute was lost by confusion or delay amongst the workmen.

The tower measures 86 feet in height, and 26 feet in diameter at the level of the first entire course, the diameter under the cornice being only 15 feet. The first twelve feet of the structure form a solid mass of masonry,—the blocks of stone being held together by means of stone joggles, dovetailed joints, and oaken tree-nails. All the floors of the edifice are arched; to counteract the possible outburst of which, Smeaton bound the courses of his stone work together by belts of iron chain, which, being set in grooves while in a heated state, by the application of hot lead, on cooling, of course, tightened their clasp on the tower. Throughout the whole work the greatest ingenuity is displayed in obtaining the greatest amount of resistance, and combining the two great principles of strength and weight,—technically speaking, cohesion and inertia.

On the 16th October 1759, the warning light once more, after an interval of four years, shone forth over the troubled waters from the dangerous rock; but it was but a feeble illumination at the best, for it came from only a group of tallow candles. It was better than nothing, certainly; but the exhibition of a few glimmering candles was but a paltry conclusion to so stupendous an undertaking. For many years, however, no stronger light gleamed from the tower, till, in 1807, when it passed from the hands of private proprietors into the charge of the Trinity House, the mutton dips were supplanted by Argand burners, with silvered copper reflectors.

Imperfect, however, as used to be the lighting apparatus, the Eddystone Beacon has always been a great boon to all those "that go down to the sea in great ships," and has robbed these perilous waters of much of their terror. We can readily sympathize with the exultation of the great engineer who reared it, when standing on the Hoe at Plymouth, he spent many an hour, with his telescope, watching the great swollen waves, in powerless fury, dash against his tower, and "fly up in a white column, enwrapping it like a sheet, rising at the least to double the height of the tower, and totally intercepting it from sight." It is now more than a hundred years since Smeaton's Lighthouse first rose upon the Eddystone; but, in spite of the many furious storms which have put its stability to rude and searching proof, it still lifts its head proudly over the waves, and shows no signs of failing strength.