Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/274

538 which year he drew up the annual report for the Board of Commissioners; and during his long tenure of office, that extended over half a century, twenty-three lighthouses in the district of the Commission, which he designed and executed, attested his unwearied diligence, as well as professional skill. Many of these were constructed in situations that tasked the utmost of scientific knowledge and anxious study, while the successive steps of improvement which they exhibited, evinced the fresh ardour with which he had advanced to every undertaking, and the earnestness he had felt that each should prove the fittest and the best.

But the great work of Mr. Stevenson's life, and the durable monument of his professional attainments and success, is to be found in the Bell Rock lighthouse, of which he published such a full and interesting account in 1824, in one volume quarto. This rock, a sunken reef in the Firth of Forth, situated in west longitude from Greenwich 2° 22', and in north latitude 56° 29', and composed of red sandstone, was found so dangerous to navigation, that attention had been called to it at an early period, and, according to tradition, a remedy was adopted to warn mariners from the dangerous spot, by a humane abbot of Aberbrothock. This was a bell, erected upon the rock, and so connected with a floating apparatus, that the action of the winds and seas caused the bell to toll over the uproar of the waves amidst the darkest weather. And thus, as the well-known ballad of Southey informs us

The popular legend adds, that a pestilent pirate, the enemy of God and man, in a mere spirit of wanton mischief, silenced the ocean monitor, by taking down the bell, and throwing it into the sea. But poetical justice was not long in, overtaking him; for only a year after, while pursuing his vocation in the same dangerous sea, his ship in the dark drifted upon the now silent rock, and went down, with the captain and all hands on board ; while,

After not only bell and pirate, but abbot and abbey had passed away, the rock still retained its place, and its wonted dangers, to the great annoyance as well as heavy loss of our shipping. This was so much the case, especially in a great storm that occurred in December, 1799, that it was ascertained not less than seventy vessels had been stranded or lost upon the coast of Scotland alone, most of which, it was supposed, would have found safety by running into the Firth of Forth, had there been a lighthouse on the rock to direct them. This, however, was not all, for it was supposed that the York, a ship of 74 guns, of which no tidings could be heard, had been wrecked there, with the loss of the whole crew. While the cry now became general for the erection of a lighthouse on the Bell Rock, government, moved by the calamity that had befallen the York, of which timbers were still floating for many miles upon the coast, began to listen to the appeal. But the obstacles to be overcome were of such a nature