known as a terror to sailors, owing to the
numerous shipwrecks, fatal alike to the vessel
and their crews, which had occurred in their
neighbourhood. A list, confessedly incomplete,
enumerates thirty vessels lost in the
forty years preceding 1844. Many others had
doubtless occurred, of which no report had
been, or could have been, rendered. The
Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses
had, for many years, entertained the project
of erecting a lighthouse on the Skerryvore;
and, with this object, had visited it, more
especially, in the year 1814, in company with
Sir Walter Scott, who, in his Diary, gives a
graphic description of its inhospitable aspect
It was not until the year 1834, when a minute
survey of the reef was ordered by the Board
—(had they fallen asleep during the
intermediate years?)—that the idea of undertaking
this formidable, but necessary, work was
entertained.

The reef is composed of numerous rocks,
worn smooth as glass in some places, by the
incessant play of the water; in others,
presenting rugged humps and gullies. The cutting
of the foundation for the tower in this
irregular flinty mass occupied nearly two
summers; while the blasting of the rock, in so
narrow a space, without any shelter from the
risk of flying splinters, was attended with
much hazard. A steam-tug was built to
transport the workmen and their building
materials, and also for them to sleep in. as a
floating-barrack. She ran many perilous
risks in her precarious moorings. At length,
in 1838, a wooden barrack was erected on
the rock.

In the November following, a great gale
arose, which tore up and swept away the
barrack, leaving nothing to denote its site but
a few broken and twisted iron stanchions,
"and attached to one of them a portion of a
great beam, which had been so shaken and
rent, by dashing against the rocks, as literally
to resemble a bundle of laths." Thus, in one
night, the traces of a whole season's toil were
obliterated, and, with them, the hopes of the
men for a dwelling on the rock, instead of on
board the tug, where many of the workmen
suffered constant miseries of sea-sickness.

A second barrack was eventually erected
in a less exposed place, and of additional
strength, and this was found sufficiently stable
to brave the storm. But, what an abode!—
and, above all, for men comparatively unused
to the sea. Let the engineer describe it in
his own words:

"Perched forty feet above the wave-beaten
rock, in this singular abode, the writer of this
little volume, with a goodly company of thirty
men, has spent many a weary day and night, at
those times when the sea prevented any one going
down to the rock, anxiously looking for supplies
from the shore, and earnestly longing for a change
of weather favourable to the recommencement of
the works. For miles around, nothing could be
seen but white foaming breakers, and nothing
heard but howling winds and lashing waves. At
such seasons much of our time was spent in bed;
for there alone we had effectual shelter from the
winds and the spray, which searched every cranny
in the walls of the barrack. Our slumbers, too,
were, at times, fearfully interrupted by the sudden
pouring of the sea over the roof, the rocking of
the house on its pillars, and the spurting of water
through the seams of the doors and windows;
symptoms which, to one suddenly aroused from
sound sleep, recalled the appalling fate of the
former barrack, which had been engulphed in the
foam not twenty yards from our dwelling, and for
a moment seemed to summon us to a similar fate.
On two occasions, in particular, those sensations
were so vivid as to cause almost every one to
spring out of bed; and some of the men fled from
the barrack by a temporary gangway, to the more
stable, but less comfortable, shelter afforded by
the bare wall of the lighthouse tower, then
unfinished, where they spent the remainder of the
night in the darkness and the cold."

The Skerryvore Lighthouse was at length
successfully completed. The height of the
tower is one hundred and thirty-eight feet,
six inches. It contains a mass of stone work
of more than double the quantity of the Bell
Rock, and nearly five times that of the
Eddystone. The entire cost, including steam-tug
and the building a small harbour at Hynish
for the reception of the little vessel that now
attends the lighthouse, was eighty-six
thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven pounds.
The light is revolving, and reaches its
brightest state once every minute. It is
produced by the revolution of eight great annular
lenses around a central lamp with four wicks,
and belongs to the first order of Fresnel's
system of dioptric lights. It can be seen
from a vessel's deck at the great distance of
eighteen miles.

The number of Lights—fixed, floating, and
harbour lights— in England, is one hundred
and seventy-five. In Scotland, sixty-seven.
In Ireland, sixty. Making a total number of
three hundred and two " Lights " in the
United Kingdom. Of these, one hundred and
twenty-one are public coast " lights; " twenty-
nine floating " lights; " and one hundred and
fifty-two local and harbour lights.

In thus reviewing a system of coast-lights
so admirably organised and so efficiently
worked, it is with very great regret that we
touch upon some of its financial arrangements,
which appear to be open to severe strictures.
France, America, Russia, and Prussia, support
the " lights " upon their respective coasts out
of the funds of the state; but in England,
while the benefit of the " lights " is shared by
the whole British Navy and the community
at large, the entire burden of the taxation falls
exclusively upon the merchant and the ship-
owner. The tax, moreover, is levied in an
arbitrary sort of way, often unjustly, and
always unequally. The officer calculates the
number of " lights " a vessel has passed in her
passage, and charges accordingly, but by no
learly defined rule. Some vessels always