Henry Winstanley and the Eddystone Lighthouse by Adam Hart-Davis

Author:Adam Hart-Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752495118
Publisher: The History Press

Seven

WINSTANLEY’S DREAM

For all his looks that are so stout,

And his speeches brave and fair,

He may wait on the wind, wait on the wave,

But he’ll build no lighthouse there.

More is known about the building of the lighthouse than about any other aspect of Winstanley’s life, partly because he wrote his own brief account of it, and engraved it in the sky on his picture of his lighthouse, and partly because the illustrious engineer John Smeaton, creator of the third Eddystone lighthouse in the 1750s, took the trouble to study what had gone before. He wrote a clear and generally sympathetic account some sixty years later, when Winstanley’s work and his misfortune were still vivid in memory.

Winstanley’s undertaking was guided neither by practical experience nor by reliable historical information. When Wren started building churches he may have wanted to do better than those who had gone before, but he at least had a whole country full of churches of one sort or another to admire and criticize and improve upon. But no one had ever built a lighthouse on a rock in the open sea; there was no precedent to be followed, nothing to tell Winstanley how high or what shape his tower should be if it were to survive the wind and the waves.

One major technical problem, and perhaps in the end the most significant shortcoming, lay in the cement. No one had yet discovered a composition that would set and stay bonded under water. Sixty years later Smeaton carried out a sequence of experiments in an attempt to find a waterproof formulation, but the problem was not completely cracked until sixty years after that, in the 1820s, by another Yorkshireman, Joseph Aspdin. In the 1690s, therefore, the basic mortars used to hold bricks and stones together were ill-suited to frequent immersion in sea water and to battering by the worst of the Atlantic weather. In Smeaton’s opinion, this was the greatest weakness in the edifice of his predecessor. Nor did Winstanley make the most of the few historical examples that were available: various long-lasting lighthouses had been built using the same method of ‘cementing’ the stones together with molten lead as Sostratus had used at Alexandria two thousand years before.

Early in the summer of 1696 Henry Winstanley set sail for Eddystone. That is, metaphorically he set sail. Unfortunately the prevailing wind is from the south-west: it blew straight into his face. Beating to windward in a small sailing boat crammed with workmen and materials would have been slow, difficult and dangerous, and if they had been forced to resort to rowing – if the wind had blown up into a gale or faded to a flat calm – in a sailing boat cluttered with wet canvas, the difficulties would have been multiplied. So they had to go in a rowing boat.

When Winstanley reached the rocks and was able to reconnoitre at close quarters, he found that although the lethal reef covered a quarter of a square mile there was only a single rock big enough and high enough to form the foundation for a lighthouse.

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