MARINE CONSTRUCTIONS.

In one of the finest passages of "Childe Harold," Byron contrasts the gigantic power of the sea with the weakness of man. He describes the resistless billows contemptuously playing with the impotent mariner—now heaving him to the skies, now whelming him deep in the bosom of the tumultuous waters; he mocks the vain pride of our armadas, which are but the playthings of ocean, and points with a bitter sneer at the wrecks with which he strews his shores. A less misanthropic mood or a more truthful view of things might have prompted the wayward poet to celebrate the triumphs of man over the brute strength of the winds and waves; how, guided by the compass, he boldly steers through the vast waste of waters, how he excavates the artificial harbour, or piles up the breakwater to protect his bark against the destructive agencies of the billow and the storm, or how he erects the lighthouse to point out the neighbourhood of dangerous shoals or the entrance of the friendly port.

The various constructions planned and executed by man to disarm the turbulent or perfidious seas of a great part of their terrors, are indeed among the noblest monuments of his architectural genius, nor are any more deserving of universal applause and gratitude. Who has ever performed a winter voyage homewards over the wide Atlantic and not felt a thrill of delight when the first bright flash of light beamed over the dark waters and welcomed him back to his native isle? or what generous mind has ever experienced this feeling without devoting the tribute of its thanks to the wise and beneficent men whose energy and perseverance have succeeded in lighting every headland or estuary of our rugged coast? So completely has this been done, that in the dark and stormy night, almost as well as in the brightest day, the homeward-bound ship need not approach danger without receiving friendly warning, for her pathway is illuminated by gigantic fire-beacons so thickly set that when one fades to the sight a new one rises to the view.

Among the numerous lighthouses with which the genius of humanity has encircled our native shores, the Eddystone, the Bell Rock, and the Skerryvore, are pre-eminent for the vast difficulties that had to be surmounted in their construction, situated as they are upon solitary rocks, exposed to the full fury of the insurgent waves; and should by some revolution all other monuments erected by man be swept away from the surface of our land, and these alone remain, they would suffice to testify to future ages that these islands were once inhabited by a highly civilised and energetic race, one well worthy to lay claim to the dominion of the seas.

At the distance of about twelve miles and a half from Plymouth Sound, and intercepting, as it were, the entrance of the Channel, the Eddystone rocks had been for ages a perpetual menace to the mariner. The number of vessels wrecked on these perfidious shoals must have been terrible indeed, it being even now a common thing in foggy weather for homeward-bound ships to make the Eddystone Lighthouse as the first point of land of Great Britain, so that in the night and nearly at high water, when the whole range of the rocks is covered, the most careful pilot might run his ship upon them, if nothing was placed there by way of warning. As the trade of England increased, the number of fatal accidents naturally augmented, rendering it more and more desirable to crest the Eddystone with a tutelary beacon; yet years elapsed before an architect appeared bold enough to undertake the task. At length, in 1696, Mr. Winstanley, a country gentleman and amateur engineer, made the first attempt of raising a lighthouse on those sea-beaten rocks, but as he was possessed of more enterprise than solid knowledge, the structure he erected was deficient in every element of stability. Yet such was the presumption of the man that he was known to express a wish that the fiercest storm that ever blew might arise to test the solidity of the fabric. The elements took him at his word, for while on a visit of inspection to his lighthouse the dreadful storm of November 26, 1703, arose, the only storm which in our latitude has equalled the rage of a tropical hurricane. "No other tempest," says Macaulay in his Essay on Addison, "was ever in this country the occasion of a Parliamentary address or of a public fast. Whole fleets had been cast away. Large mansions had been blown down. One Prelate had been buried beneath the ruins of his palace. London and Bristol had presented the appearance of cities just sacked. Hundreds of families were still in mourning. The prostrate trunks of large trees and the ruins of houses still attested in all the southern counties the fury of the blast." No wonder that a tempest like this swept away the ill-constructed lighthouse like the "unsubstantial fabric of a vision," and that neither poor Mr. Winstanley nor any of his companions survived to recount the terrors of that dreadful night.

Strange to say, the task of rebuilding the Eddystone lighthouse, which was now felt as a national necessity, once more devolved, not upon a professed architect, but upon a Mr. Rudyerd, a linendraper of Ludgate Hill, the son of a Cornish vagrant, who had raised himself by his talents and industry from rags and mendicancy to a station of honourable competence. The choice, however, was not ill made, for, with the assistance of two competent shipwrights, the London tradesman constructed an edifice which, though mainly of timber, was so firmly bolted to the rock with iron branches that for nearly half a century it resisted the fury of the billows, and might have withstood them for many a year to come had it not been rapidly and completely destroyed by fire. This catastrophe, which happened on December 2, 1755, was marked by a strange accident, for while one of the light-keepers was engaged in throwing up water four yards higher than himself, a quantity of lead, dissolved by the heat of the flames, suddenly rushed like a torrent from the roof, and falling upon his head, face, and shoulders, burnt him in a dreadful manner. Having been conveyed to the hospital at Plymouth, he invariably told the surgeon who attended him, that he had swallowed part of the lead while looking upward; the reality of the assertion seemed quite incredible, for who could suppose it possible that any human being could exist after receiving melted lead into the stomach, much less that he should afterwards be able to bear the hardships and inconvenience from the length of time he was in getting on shore before any remedies could be applied. On the twelfth day, however, the man died, and having been opened a solid piece of lead, which weighed above seven ounces, was found in his stomach.[H]

Another interesting anecdote is attached to the history of Rudyerd's lighthouse. Louis XIV. being at war with England while it was being built, a French privateer took the men at work upon it and carried them to France, expecting, no doubt, a good reward for the achievement. His hopes, however, were doomed to a grievous disappointment, for while the captives lay in prison, the transaction reached the ears of the monarch, who immediately ordered them to be released and the captors to be put in their place; declaring that though he was at war with England, he was not at war with mankind. He therefore directed the men to be sent back to their work with presents; observing that the Eddystone lighthouse was so situated as to be of equal service to all nations navigating the Channel. It is gratifying to meet with this trait of natural generosity in a mind long since obscured by the bigotry which prompted the revocation of the Edit de Nantes.

After these repeated disasters, the rebuilding of Eddystone lighthouse, in a more substantial manner than had hitherto been effected, was now no longer confided to amateur ingenuity, but to John Smeaton, an eminent civil engineer, one of those men who by originality of genius and strength of character are so well entitled to rank among the worthies of England. From his early infancy Smeaton (born May 28, 1724) gave tokens of the extraordinary abilities which were one day to render his name illustrious. Before he attained his sixth year his playthings were not the playthings of children but the tools which men employ: before he was fifteen he made for himself an engine for turning, forged his iron and steel, and had self-made tools of every sort for working in wood, ivory, and metals. At eighteen he by the strength of his genius acquired the art of working in most of the mechanical trades, and such was his untiring zeal that a part of every day was generally occupied in forming some ingenious piece of mechanism. In 1753, his various inventions and improvements had already attracted such notice that he was elected member of the Royal Society; and when, a few years later, the accident happened which burnt down the Eddystone lighthouse to the ground, he was at once fixed upon as the person most proper to rebuild it. A better choice could not possibly have been made, for Smeaton's lighthouse, firm as the rock on which it stands, has now already braved the storms of more than a century, and will no doubt continue to brave them for many ages to come. Of him it may well be said "exegit monumentum Ære perennius," for to him is due the honour of having fixed the best form to be given to a marine lighthouse, and even now the Eddystone beacon-tower remains a model which has hardly been surpassed by the taller and more graceful edifices of Bell Rock and Skerryvore. Nothing could exceed the patient ingenuity, the sagacity, and forethought with which that great engineer mortised his tall tower to the wave-worn rock, and then dove-tailed the whole together, so as to make rock and tower practically one stone, and that of the very best form for deadening the action of the wave. Nor must we forget that our great marine lighthouses, of which Smeaton gave the model, are as remarkable from an artistic as from a utilitarian point of view, as pleasing to the man of taste as to the friend of humanity. "It is to be regretted," says, with perfect justice, the author of an excellent article in the Quarterly Review,[I] "that these structures are placed so far at sea that they are very little seen, for they are, taken altogether, perhaps the most perfect specimens of modern architecture which exist. Tall and graceful as the minar of an Eastern mosque, they possess far more solidity and beauty of construction; and, in addition to this, their form is as appropriate to the purposes for which it was designed as anything ever done by the Greeks, and consequently meets the requirements of good architecture quite as much as a column of the Parthenon."

Covered to the height of fifteen feet at spring tide, and little more than a hundred yards in its extent, the famous Bell Rock, or Inchcape, facing the Frith of Tay at a distance of twelve miles at sea, was as dangerous to the navigation of the eastern coast of Scotland as the Eddystone had been to the entrance of the Channel. To erect a tower on a spot like this was an undertaking of no common boldness, but, fired by Smeaton's example, Mr. Robert Stevenson no less gloriously succeeded in converting what for ages had been a source of danger into a beacon of safety.

On the opposite coast of Scotland, and placed in the same parallel of latitude as Bell Rock, the Skerryvore Reef had a name equally dreaded by the mariner. Situated considerably farther from the mainland than the Bell Rock, it is less entirely submerged, some of its summits rising above the level of high water, though the surf dashes over them; but the extent of foul ground is much greater, and hidden dangers, even in fine weather, beset the intervening passage between its eastern extremity and Tyree, from which island it is distant some eleven miles. In rough weather the sea which rises there is described as one in which no ship could live. This terrible reef, so fatal to many a gallant bark, rendered the erection of a lighthouse most desirable, yet such was the difficulty of the case that although so long ago as 1814 an Act was obtained for a light on Skerryvore, it was not before 1837 that Mr. Alan Stevenson, son of the famous architect of the Bell Rock sea-tower, was authorised to commence the work. That difficulty was not confined to the position and character of the reef itself, as the neighbouring island of Tyree afforded no resource, and all the materials for the building, even the stone itself, had to be transported from distant quarters. At length, all preliminary arrangements being settled, the engineer reached the rock and commenced his work, in June 1838, by erecting a barrack-house upon stilts—a sort of dovecot perched on poles—high out of the water on the reef, close to the proposed site of the lighthouse. The erection of this barrack fully occupied the first summer; and, lest it might be supposed that this was but little work for so long a time, it may be as well to remark that, such was the turbulence of the sea that between August 7 and September 11, it had only been possible to be 165 hours on the rock. Much inconvenience was occasioned by the hard and slippery nature of the volcanic formation of the Skerryvore, to which the action of the sea had given the appearance and the smoothness of a mass of dark-coloured glass, so that the foreman of the masons compared the operation of landing on it to that of climbing up the neck of a bottle. When we consider how often, by how many persons, and under what circumstances of swell and motion, this operation was repeated, we must look upon this feature of the spot as an obstacle of no slight amount.

At length, after much danger and difficulty, the barrack was completed, but the first November storm swept it away and utterly annihilated the work of the season. Iron stancheons had been drawn, broken, and twisted like the wires of a champagne bottle; the smith's iron anvil had been transported eight yards from where it was left; and a stone three-fourths of a ton was lifted out from the bottom of a hole and sent towards the top of the rock.

Mortified, but nothing daunted by this disaster, which gave him a warning of the tremendous power he had to contend with, Mr. Stevenson prepared during the winter for the labours of 1839, which, besides the re-erection of the barrack on an improved plan, chiefly consisted in the levelling or blasting of a flat surface of forty-two feet diameter on the top of the rock from which the lighthouse was to arise. This foundation pit was in itself a work of no small magnitude, as it required for its excavation the labours of 20 men for 217 days, the firing of 296 shots, and the removal into deep water of 2,000 tons of material. The blasting, from the absence of all cover and the impossibility of retiring to a distance farther in any case than thirty feet, and often reduced to twelve, demanded all possible carefulness.

The only precautions available were a skilful appointment of the charge and the covering the mines with mats and coarse netting made of old rope. Every charge was fired by or with the assistance of the architect in person, and no mischief occurred.

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.