Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/450

364 water about it. He commenced the erection in 1696, and completed it in four years. The structure was eminently picturesque, so much so that a local artist at Launceston thought he could not do better than make a painting of it to decorate a house there then in construction (Dockacre), and set it up as a portion of the chimney-piece. The edifice certainly was not calculated to withstand such seas as roll in the Channel, but Winstanley knew only that second-hand wash which flows over miles of mud on the Essex coast, which it submerges, but above which it cannot heap itself into billows.

Winstanley had implicit confidence in his work, and frequently expressed the wish that he might be in his lighthouse when tested by a severe storm from the west. He had his desire. One morning in November, 1703, he left the Barbican to superintend repairs. An old seaman standing there warned him that dirty weather was coming on. Nevertheless, strong in his confidence, he went. That night, whilst he remained at the lighthouse, a hurricane sprang up, and when morning broke no lighthouse was visible; the erection and its occupants had been swept away. Three years elapsed before another attempt was made to rear a beacon. At length a silk mercer of London, named Rudyard, undertook the work. He determined to imitate as closely as might be the trunk of a Scotch pine, and to give to wind and wave as little surface as possible on which to take effect. Winstanley's edifice had been polygonal; Rudyard's was to be circular. Commenced in 1706 and completed in 1709, entirely of timber, the shaft weathered