Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/239

 evidently something far too good to be talked about. It must have been very hard to have been insulted with an offer of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a barren rock in the ocean, nothing like that number of feet square, subjecting the proprietor to the necessity of making a pathetic rejoinder to the effect "that if he must sell, it must be for five hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and that would not pay him;" but a jury was appealed to, and four hundred and forty-five thousand pounds was carried off as the vested right in one lighthouse, with a heavy sigh that it was so little. Another leviathan of the deep realized three hundred thousand pounds; and if these were whales among the tritons, the tritons and the minnows too, all plethoric of their kind, fared well. The scale was freighted heavily with compulsory purchase-money before they were all bought out, and the shipping interest had to pay surplus light dues for many years before the official custodians of the lighthouse fund had got quit of their huge debt.

Even on these terms it was the right thing to do. When the lighthouse on the Smalls rock in the Bristol Channel was in private hands, the annual consumption of oil, which is another way of stating the annual amount of light produced, was as little as two hundred gallons; at this present time fifteen hundred gallons are burnt within the year. The dues payable in those days were twopence per ton, whilst now vessels pay at the rate of one halfpenny per ton over-sea, and one-sixteenth part of a penny per ton for coasting voyages, less an abatement in the latter cases of thirty-five per cent. But bad lighting, private proprietorship, public debt, and, to a great extent, even surplus light dues, have gone for ever, and lighthouses have got back to what Queen Elizabeth meant them to be—public trusts in public hands for public uses.

And yet it was private enterprise that built and rebuilt, and again rebuilt the Eddystone, and it was private courage that established that which will soon be a thing of the past, the strange wooden-legged Malay-looking barracoon of a lighthouse in the Bristol Channel, on a rock called the "Smalls."

The wooden structure at the Smalls was conceived originally by a Mr. Phillips, of Liverpool, a member of the Society of Friends. He set himself to establish "a great holy good to serve and save humanity," and even in this world he had his reward; for sixty years afterwards, when his representatives had to surrender it to the Trinity House, they got one hundred and seventy thousand pounds by way of compensation for it.

Like most sagacious men, he knew how to choose his instruments. At that time there resided in Liverpool a young man of the name of Whiteside, a maker of "violins, spinettes, and upright harpsichords," with a strongly marked mechanical genius.

In the summer of 1772, this young fiddle-maker found himself at Solva, twenty miles from the rock, with a gang of Cornish miners, who were to quarry sockets into the stone, into which it was originally intended that iron pillars should be soldered. The first essay was sufficiently appalling.