One of the more spectacular victims of the Great Storm, that tempest of 297 years ago that was the topic of Weather Eye on Saturday, was the Eddystone lighthouse on the south coast of England. It was only five years old and disappeared almost without trace.
The Eddystone reef, 14 miles from Plymouth, is almost totally submerged; only three feet of it protrude above water level when the tide is high. It has been responsible for an awesome toll of shipwrecks, and has always been thought of as a rather eerie, evil place, as indeed the folk song by which the location is best known might well suggest:
Me father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light,
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night;
From this union there came three:
A porpoise and a porgy and the other was me.
Henry Winstanley was a wealthy merchant. In the early 1690s one of his ships was wrecked on the Eddystone, and when in 1696 he similarly lost the Constant, he decided enough must be enough. He, personally, would build a lighthouse on the reef.
Winstanley's design had an idiosyncrasy consistent with reputation. His lighthouse turned out to be a strange edifice that rose 80ft above the rock, constructed of a mixture of iron, brick and wood; above the octagonal base of brick was an iron balcony endowed with several Latin inscriptions, a domed cupola, and a glazed lantern designed to hold "sixty candles at a time besides a great hanging lamp". The strange structure was topped by a flamboyantly ornate weather-vane in wrought iron.
On November 14th, 1698, the lantern was lit for the first time, but by the following spring the structure had suffered severe damage from gales. Duly reinforced, however, the Eddystone light boasted a new and enlarged gallery and six ornamental candle-holders on its outside walls. Some residents of Plymouth compared the lighthouse to a Chinese mausoleum, but Winstanley retorted that his edifice could withstand "the greatest storm that ever was".
Just before the Great Storm of November 26th, 1703, Winstanley set out from Plymouth to inspect his lighthouse.
He was on the Eddystone when the storm began. According to observers at the time, the light was visible until midnight, after which the spray from the high seas obscured it from view. Next morning only 12 iron bars, part of the foundations, remained upon the reef; of Henry Winstanley and the other occupants of the Eddystone light that night, nothing more was ever heard.