Seven Wonders of the Industrial World

Below decks, madness reigned. In the grand saloon, chairs, tables and the grand piano were smashing themselves to pieces. Rich furnishings were shredded. The large cast-iron stove came loose and charged lethally into mirrors, showering fragments of glass everywhere and snapping the elegant decorative columns in half. Among this were passengers trying to dodge the furniture and cling for dear life to something stable. Water roared and torrented in through the broken skylights. At one moment, two cows from the cow pen on deck and some hens were thrown in with the deluge. A swan, which was trying to take off, battered itself to death. The cabins were smashed and soaked as water poured below deck. The ship’s doctor was busy treating 27 passengers with serious fractures, not least the ship’s baker who had managed to break his leg in three places.

For the whole of the following day the hurricane continued to blow and the Great Eastern shipped even more water. A four-ton spar loaded down with iron was put overboard in the hope it would act as a drag and give some control to the seemingly doomed ship. It was soon torn away. By now, the water that was still coming in through portholes and skylights and finding its way below deck was overwhelming the pumps. Ominous thumping and crashing were heard from the holds where nothing had been secured and ruined goods were flung from side to side with the water in the hold, battering the hull. No one had eaten for 48 hours. The situation looked hopeless.

In the evening, an attempt was made to secure the wildly gyrating rudder, still battering itself uncontrollably into the propeller and gradually being torn apart. Heavy chains were eventually wound round the broken steering shaft and made fast, so that the rudder at last became stationary. A sailor was found to brave the seas, and was lowered on a boatswain’s chair to the rudder where, in spite of terrifying conditions, he managed to loop a chain round the rudder and through the screw opening. At last, with two chains attached to the rudder, a very primitive means of steering was established. It was now possible to start the screw engines and slowly make it back to Milford Haven in Wales.

When land finally came into view, the passengers, wild with excitement, began an impromptu celebration in the ruined saloon. Limping into harbour with the band playing, the Great Eastern had survived. Everyone on board was quite sure no other ship could possibly have done so. She was, indeed, unsinkable. The grateful passengers disembarked, one woman so overwhelmed that she fainted. But the bill for the damage, which took months to repair, was £60,000. The company was in debt again.

By the summer of 1862, the Great Eastern was making regular, successful and uneventful trips to New York with a new captain, Walter Paton. In August, she embarked once again with a full cargo and 1,500 passengers and, although the ship met with yet another bad storm, Captain Paton stayed on the bridge and battled through it at full power. They reached New York on a night of calm waters and silver moonlight. The ship took on the pilot off Long Island and proceeded through the narrow channel to dock. During this final length of the journey a deep rumbling sound was heard; the ship faltered and then recovered. No damage could be found. Next day at anchor, the captain sent a diver down who discovered a great gash, 85 feet long and 5 feet wide, on the flat bottom of the outer hull. The inner hull was untouched. Brunel’s double hull had saved the ship. She had collected this awful wound from an uncharted needle of rock that came within 25 feet of the surface.

Captain Paton was a long way from Milford Haven where the ship could be put on a gridiron for repairs. He did not want to chance a journey back across the Atlantic at a time of equinoctial gales with a hull so badly ruptured, but there was no facility in America where she could be repaired and no dry dock big enough to take her. Even if he could beach her massive hull somewhere in North America, the long gash was in the flat bottom of the ship and impossible to repair.

Shipbuilders in North America were intrigued by the challenge of repairing the vast ship, but no one had an answer until a civil engineer called Edward Renwick and his brother, Henry, offered their services. Neither man inspired confidence. Both had only partial sight and were inclined to grope their way around furniture. However, they were confident, in spite of their disabilities, that they could repair the ship. Their plan was to build a watertight cofferdam over the long gash, enabling work to be completed in the dry.

Their project was accepted and templates were made from the inner hull. The space between the hulls was calculated, which then gave the exact shape of the outer hull. The riveters were to conduct their job from inside the ship by making their way down a dark shaft to the gash in the hull and many needed some persuading to trust the temporary cofferdam clamped on to the big ship’s hull. One day panic grew as knocking was heard in the double hull. Rumours spread quickly and the riveters became adamant that a ghost was hammering. They downed tools and refused to work as long as the banging continued.

The captain was called. He, too, heard the ghost ‘pounding on the hull’. Work was stopped. Fear infiltrated the ship like mist. Every inch of the bilge was inspected. The hammering was coming from below the waterline, so Captain Paton inspected the outside of the hull in a small boat. There, the ‘ghost’ was discovered: a loose chain knocking the side of the ship as it rose and dipped in the swell.

The work was finished in December 1862 and Edward and Henry Renwick presented their bill for £70,000. The insurance firm refused to pay. The company had now lost £130,000 in the last two years. When the Great Eastern arrived back in England she spent months on a gridiron while Board of Trade inspectors reviewed the work of the Renwick brothers. She made three more trips across the Atlantic, lost another £20,000 and was then beached again while the board considered the situation. Despite their efforts, the board had failed to make their fortunes from the unique vessel and even while she was on her gridiron in some lonely cove, like a great sea creature thrown up on to the beach and forgotten, she was still silently absorbing funds. The company decided to sell their one asset. The Great Eastern was auctioned in January 1864 for the disappointing sum of £25,000.

Far from being finished, however, the Great Eastern was on the threshold of a completely new career. The chairman of the new company was Daniel Gooch and he had never lost faith in Brunel’s great ship. He immediately chartered the Great Eastern to the Atlantic Telegraph Company for £50,000 of cable shares. It was their intention to lay cable across the ocean from Ireland to America. There had already been an unsuccessful attempt to lay cable by a wealthy American businessman, Cyrus Field. He was quite sure that it was possible to make the cable link between the two continents as the sea floor between Newfoundland and Ireland was plateau-like and not too deep.

The Great Eastern was stripped of all her finery and prepared for cable-laying. The grand saloon and palatial first-class cabins were thrown aside to house the miles of cable and the machinery that would deliver it to the ocean. And in July 1865, with Daniel Gooch on board, she began her next venture.

Daniel Gooch knew Brunel had designed a strong and magnificent ship that had come through adversity time and again. He felt her worth would at last be realised. The success of the venture, he declared, ‘will open out a useful future for our noble ship, lift her out of the depression under which she has laboured from her birth and satisfy me that I have done wisely in never losing confidence in her’.

Despite his enthusiasm, he, too, soon ran into problems. On 2 August 1865, after successfully laying out 1,000 miles of cable across the Atlantic, it broke and disappeared to fall 2,000 fathoms into the faceless ocean, which offered no clues or help. ‘All our labour and anxiety is lost,’ despaired Daniel Gooch. ‘We are now dragging to see if we can by chance recover it, but of this I have no hope, nor have I heart to wish. I shall be glad if I can sleep and for a few hours forget I live … This one thing upon which I had set my heart more than any other work I was ever engaged on, is dead.’ The ship returned, defeated, having lost £700,000 worth of cable.

From defeat, once again, optimism blossomed and in July 1866, after reviewing the mistakes of the previous year, the ship sailed again with stronger cable and improved machinery. This time success was the reward as the ship put in to Hearts Content Bay, Newfoundland. Daniel Gooch sent a telegram back to the Old World: ‘Our shore end has just been laid and a most perfect cable …’ And when in September returning home they reached the approximate position of the previous year’s lost cable, they put the improved grappling gear to work and, by some small miracle, found and recovered it. Success now seemed assured and Daniel Gooch estimated that the company would be nearly £400,000 a year better off. For the next three years, the Great Eastern laid cable all over the world, from France to America, Bombay to the Red Sea and a fourth cable to America, as well as completing repair work on previously laid cable. In 1874, however, her cable-laying days were over with the launch of a custom built ship, the Faraday, produced especially for the sole task of cable-laying.

Now the Great Eastern presented the company with a problem. No one had ever made money from her as a passenger ship. She had been designed originally to steam halfway round the world to Australia where, with 4,000 passengers and enough fuel for the return journey, she would have presented strong competition for sailing ships and made a fortune. But the Suez Canal was now in operation and the Great Eastern was just too large to use it. Any journey she now made to Australia would not be competitive and she was always considered too large to be economic on the Atlantic run.

She spent twelve quiet years, largely forgotten, on the gridiron at Milford Haven, a gentle dilapidation settling on her like a mould. Suggestions were made for her future, perhaps as a hospital or hotel, but they came to nothing. She was auctioned in 1885 for £26,000 to a coal haulier, Edward de Mattos. He leased her for a year to a well-known Liverpool draper, Louis Cohen, who proposed to turn her into a showboat for the exhibition of manufactures.

The old ship was goaded into life, but her paddle engines were eaten up with rust and unusable. Even her screw engines were stiff and reluctant as she slowly made her way to Liverpool, to be turned into some sort of funfair decked with advertisements. Trapeze artists dived from the rigging. The grand saloon became a music hall. Coconut shies vied with ‘what the butler saw’. Beer halls, conjurors, knife throwers and all the fun of the fair brought in a profit for Mr Cohen. ‘Poor old ship, you deserved a better fate,’ Daniel Gooch wrote in his diary on hearing the news, adding, ‘I would much rather the ship was broken up than turned to such base uses.’

When Mr Cohen’s lease expired, Mr de Mattos tried to repeat his success, but it seems he did not have enough of the circus in his blood to pull it off. So, in 1888, after due consideration, the ship which had cost well over a million pounds to build, maintain and repair was auctioned for scrap for the meagre sum of £16,000.

The still magnificent ship, and all the dreams she carried of everyone connected with her, was taken to the scrapyard at Birkenhead to be demolished. At first, it looked as though the breakers would make a tidy profit. They estimated that they could sell the iron plates and various metals for £58,000, but with the Great Eastern making a profit was never a foregone conclusion and, true to her history, she made a loss. Demolition proved cripplingly expensive, as human hands were not enough to pick the immensely strong hull to pieces. This was a ship designed for strength by her creator, a ship that had survived the full fury of Atlantic storms. It took some 200 men working night and day for two years, swinging demolition balls and anything else they could find to pole-axe her obstinate refusal to be metamorphosed into so many tons of scrap. Slowly the layers of metal were peeled away, the outer skin of the hull, the inner hull, the organs of the engine and all the intimately connecting shafts and pistons, until one day where she had stood was just space.

As for the riveter and his boy, entombed alive in the double hull, rumours persisted that their skeletons were indeed found. According to James Dugan, author of The Great Iron Ship in 1953, there was one witness: a Captain David Duff who at the time was a cabin boy. He claimed to have visited the wrecker’s yard and wrote: ‘They found a skeleton inside the ship’s shell and the tank tops. It was the skeleton of the basher who was missing. Also the frame of the bash boy was found with him. And so there you are Sir, that’s all I can tell you about the Great Eastern.’ But the local papers of the time bear no record of this extraordinary story and the captain’s account has never been authenticated. For the time being, the mystery of whether or not the basher and his mate were entombed remains unsolved.

It is wrong to blame the ill fortune that seemed to haunt the Great Eastern on some evil-spirited ghosts. She was way ahead of her time and was to remain the largest ship in the world until the Lusitania of 1906 and later the Titanic. But in the mid-nineteenth century there were few harbours where the Great Eastern could dock and this fact alone limited her success. She was specifically designed for taking large numbers of people to Australia, but this never happened. Those who managed her have been criticised for their insistence on using her for the luxury market to the United States at a time when there was just too much competition on this route. If she had sailed to New York from Liverpool with a full complement of emigrants and brought back cotton or wheat, she could have made £45,000 per round trip. Eight hundred thousand emigrants left Europe for the United States in the Civil War years.

Had her creator lived beyond the age of 53 then perhaps he would have been able to steer his ship towards profitability. But Isambard Kingdom Brunel was gone and, in 1890, his dream disappeared, too. Only the spirit of the man lived on. His friend Daniel Gooch wrote on Brunel’s death, ‘the greatest of England’s engineers was lost, the man with the greatest originality of thought and power of execution, bold in his plans but right. The commercial world thought him extravagant; but although he was so, great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.’

2 The Bell Rock Lighthouse (#ulink_379bf57c-4c6e-5ff3-8172-7887f1291310)

‘There is not a more dangerous situation upon the whole coasts of the Kingdom, or none that calls more loudly to be done than the Bell Rock …’

Robert Stevenson, 1800

THE SAFE ANCHORAGE of the Firth of Forth on the east coast of Scotland has always been a refuge for shipping hoping to escape the wild storms of the North Sea. The safety of this natural inlet, however, is considerably compromised by the presence of a massive underwater reef, the Bell Rock, lying treacherously right in the middle of the approach to the Firth of Forth. It is far enough away from the coast for landmarks to be unable to define its position, being eleven miles south of Arbroath and a similar distance west from the mouth of the Tay. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a storm was brewing in the Forth and Tay area, those at sea faced a forbidding choice: ride out the storm in the open sea or try to find safety in the Firth of Forth and risk an encounter with the Bell Rock.

Hidden by a few feet of water under the sea, the craggy shape of the Bell Rock lay in wait for sailing ships, as it had for centuries, claiming many lives and ships and scattering them wantonly, like trophies, over its silent and mysterious escarpments. It bares itself briefly twice a day at low tide for an hour or two, and then disappears under the sea at high tide, sometimes its position given away by waves breaking on the submerged rocks and foaming surf over its rugged features. An outcrop of sandstone about a quarter of a mile long, it slopes away gently on the southern side, but to the north it rises steeply from the seabed, an unyielding barrier.

For early navigators the greatest danger was to come suddenly upon the northern cliff face. Any ship taking soundings north of the rock would find deep water and assume all was safe, only to learn the fatal error should the ship stray a few yards further south. All on board would listen for the last sounds they might hear of timber being torn and split as wood was crushed against rock. So many lives were lost, along the whole Scottish coast the notorious Bell Rock ‘breathed abroad an atmosphere of terror’.

For centuries the sea lanes were deserted, their wild highways left unchallenged, but from about the mid-eighteenth century the growth of trade in flax, hemp and goods for the weaving industry saw an increase in shipping and, as a consequence, a growing number of fatal collisions with the massive submerged cliff of the Bell Rock. The heavy toll brought pleas for some kind of warning light, although no one was sure how this could be done so far out to sea on a rock which for most of the time was under water.

The local people of the east coast had once succeeded in putting a warning on the rock. In the fourteenth century, it was said, a man called John Gedy, the abbot of Aberbrothock, was so concerned at the numbers who perished there that he set out to the rock with his monks and an enormous bell. With incredible ingenuity, they attached the bell to the rock and it rang out loud and clear above the waves warning all seafarers, an invisible church in the sea.

The good abbot, however, had not reckoned on human avarice. Soon after, a Dutch pirate called ‘Ralph the Rover’ stole the bell, in spite of its miraculous power to save life by its insistent warning ring. Ironically, he died within a year and must have regretted his act when his ship met bad weather and the great reef, and some said a deserving fate, as he and his ship disappeared beneath the waves. From that time, the rock acquired its name and became known as the ‘Bell Rock’.

The coast of Scotland is long and rugged and has many jagged peninsulas and rocky islets. Even by the late eighteenth century for hundreds of miles, according to local accounts, these desolate shores ‘were nightly plunged into darkness’. To help further the safety of these coastal waters, the Northern Lighthouse Board was established in 1786 to erect and maintain lighthouses. At that time, the warning lights to shipping were often no more than bonfires set on dangerous headlands, maintained by private landowners. When the warning fires were most needed in bad weather, they were usually put out by drenching rain.

By 1795, the board had improved on these primitive lights with seven major lighthouses, but progress was slow. They were chronically underfunded, though never short of requests to do more by worried shipowners, and especially to put a light on the Bell Rock. The Northern Lighthouse Board was well aware of the desirability of a light on the rock. Its reputation as a killer lying in wait at the entrance to the enticing safety of the Firth of Forth had travelled well beyond England. However, with little in the way of funds and the difficulties of building so far out to sea on a rock that was submerged by up to sixteen feet of water for much of the day, such a request was improbable madness not even to be considered.

There was one man, however, who had been dreaming of the impossible, of building a lighthouse on the hidden reef and allowing the whole bay of the Firth of Forth to be useful as safe anchorage. Robert Stevenson was a man of strong character who by some strange fate had been given the very opportunities he needed to fulfil his ambition. In early life his chances of success had looked poor. His mother, Jean Stevenson, had been widowed and left penniless when he was only two. Years of hardship followed, but Jean Stevenson, a deeply religious woman, struggled on to ensure an education for her son. In later life, Stevenson always remembered ‘that dark period when my mother’s ingenious and gentle spirit amidst all her difficulties never failed her’.

Jean was eventually remarried in November 1792 to an Edinburgh widower called Thomas Smith who designed and manufactured lamps. At the time, Smith was interested in increasing the brightness of his lamps. A scientific philosopher from Geneva called Ami Argand had recently developed a way of improving brightness by fitting a glass tube or chimney around the wick. Smith was experimenting with taking this work further by placing a polished tin reflector behind and partly surrounding the wick, shaped in a parabolic curve to focus the light. This gave a much brighter beam than conventional oil lamps and the lamps from his workshops were now much in demand. He was soon approached by the Northern Lighthouse Board, who employed him as their lighting engineer. At a time when lighthouses were as basic as a fire or torch on top of an open tower or simple oil lamps encased in glass lanterns, Smith began to design oil lamps with parabolic reflectors consisting of small facets of mirror glass to create a powerful beam.

When the young Robert Stevenson visited his stepfather’s workshop, he found it a magical place where uninteresting bits of metal and glass were transformed into beautiful precision-made objects. Jean could see where her son’s interests lay and, much to his delight, Stevenson was soon apprenticed to Thomas Smith. One of Thomas Smith’s duties at the Northern Lighthouse Board was to visit the board’s growing number of lighthouses. During the summer months he and Stevenson would set out by boat and appraise the situation, repairing damage and deciding on the position of new lighthouses. By about the turn of the century this responsibility fell entirely to Stevenson.

‘The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted,’ his grandson, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote years later.

The coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats; he must often adventure on horseback through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the vicissitudes of out door life. The joy of my grandfather in this career was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and manhood, it burned strong in age and at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences.

From May to October, Stevenson went on his round visiting the board’s scattered lighthouses, taking much needed supplies and solving problems. These could vary from the repair of storm-damaged buildings to the question of finding new pasture for the keepers’ cow. Stevenson was also employed to map out the position of new lighthouses and soon found that some of the inhabitants of the remote islands – who supplemented their income from wrecking – were openly hostile to him.

On one journey in dense fog his ship came dangerously near sharp rocks of the Isle of Swona. The captain hoped to get help towing the ship away from the danger from a village he could see on shore. The village looked dead; everyone was asleep. To attract attention, he fired a distress signal. Stevenson watched in disbelief, as ‘door after door was opened, and in the grey light of morning, fisher after fisher was seen to come forth nightcap on head. There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised, but all callously waited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and waited also.’ Luckily a breeze sprang up and the ship was able to make for the open sea.

During these summer trips Stevenson learned a great deal. He could be impatient, not inclined to suffer fools gladly, but he never lacked confidence in his ability to tackle the most difficult problems. Over these years, as the Scottish coastline and its lighthouses became ingrained on his mind, he was nurturing his secret ambition to tame for ever the awful power of the Bell Rock. The fulfilment of his dream seemed remote. Stevenson was not a qualified civil engineer. As Smith’s young assistant he had little influence with the board. And he was only too aware that the commissioners believed that a light on the Bell Rock was out of the question.

Those living on the northeast coast of England and Scotland in December 1799 saw the old century dragged out with a thunderous storm of screaming winds and mountainous seas, which raged from Yorkshire to the Shetlands. All along the east coast, ships at anchorage were torn from their moorings and swept away. Those seafarers who could hear anything above the wind and crash of waves listened for the dreaded sound of wood cracking and splitting as it was thrown against rock – the sound of death. In Scotland, the haven of the Firth of Forth, guarded by the Bell Rock, was ignored. Ships preferred to make for the open sea and take their chances in the storm rather than try to steer their way past the dreaded reef. The storm lasted three days and was to sink 70 ships.

The call for a light on the Bell Rock grew louder. If there had been a lighthouse, shipowners argued, many more ships would have made for the safety of the Firth of Forth. The Northern Lighthouse Board began, at last, to give serious consideration to what they still saw as an insoluble problem and Stevenson was quick to present his own plan for a beacon-style lighthouse on cast-iron pillars. Although there was not a more dangerous situation ‘upon the whole coasts of the Kingdom,’ he argued, his design would be safe, relatively inexpensive and even pay for itself as the board collected fees from ships taking advantage of its warning light. The cautiously minded board was impressed with the idea of economy, but less sure of Stevenson’s design.

Despite his experience around the coast of Scotland, Stevenson had not yet managed to set foot on Bell Rock itself and was impatient to do so. In April 1800, he hired a boat, intending to survey the site, but the weather was too stormy to land. In May, as he sailed nearby on a journey north, it lay invisible, even at low tide. He had to wait until the neap tides of October before he could make the attempt again. At the last minute, however, the boat he had been promised was unavailable and no one was prepared to take him out to the rock, not even in calm seas. Time was running out for a landing on the rock before winter and, if he could not find a boat, he would miss the favourable tides. Finally, a fisherman was found who was prepared to take the risk; it transpired the man often braved the Bell Rock to hunt for valuable wreckage to supplement his income.

Once on the rock, Stevenson and his friend, the architect James Haldane, had just two hours in which to assess the possibilities that the rock might offer before the tide returned and the rock disappeared. It was covered in seaweed and very slippery. The surface was pitted and sea water gurgled and sucked in the fissures and gullies that criss-crossed the rock, but Stevenson was encouraged by what he saw. The exposed area at low tide was about 250 by 130 feet, revealing enough room for a lighthouse. Better still the surface of the rock was of very hard sandstone, perfect for building.

There was one problem though. He had thought that a lighthouse on pillars would offer less resistance to the sea, but when he saw the heavy swell around the rock, overwhelming the channels and inlets, pushing its bullying foamy waters into deep fissures even on a calm day, he knew his plan could not work. Visiting boats bringing supplies or a change of keeper would be shattered against the pillars in heavy seas, and the capability of the pillars to withstand the timeless beating of the waves was questionable, too. ‘I am sure no one was fonder of his own work than I was, until I saw the Bell Rock,’ he wrote. ‘I had no sooner landed than I saw my pillars tumble like the baseless fabric of a dream.’

The two hours passed all too quickly. The fisherman, who had gathered spoils from wreckage on the reef, was anxious to leave as the returning tide swirled around their feet. For Stevenson, finding the Bell Rock and standing at the centre of its watery kingdom, with nothing but the ever-encroaching sea in sight, had been a revelation. It was clear that only an immensely strong tower would have a chance of surviving in such an exposed position – a building higher than the highest waves, made of solid sandstone and granite. With these thoughts in mind, he undertook an extensive tour of English lighthouses and harbour lights in search of a model on which to base his own plans. It was a journey of some two and a half thousand miles by coach or on horseback, which took many months of 1801. He soon found there was only one such stone sea-tower already in existence. It was built on a buttress of rock about nine miles from the port of Plymouth, off the south coast in Cornwall.

The Eddystone Lighthouse, so called because of the dangerous eddies and currents that swirled around it, had withstood the fearsome gales blown in from the Atlantic since 1759. It had been built by John Smeaton, a man revered by Stevenson and considered to be the father of the civil engineering profession. Standing 70 feet high, it was made from interlocking solid Portland stone and granite blocks, which presented a tall, smooth curved shape to the elements. It had been inspired, Smeaton said, by the trunk of an oak tree. ‘An oak tree is broad at its base,’ he explained, ‘curves inward at its waist and becomes narrower towards the top. We seldom hear of a nature oak tree being uprooted.’

There had been several attempts at lighthouses on the Eddystone rocks before Smeaton’s triumphant endeavour, the most notable being the Winstanley Lighthouse, built in 1698. Henry Winstanley, the clerk of works at Audley End in Essex, was also an enthusiastic inventor and he took it upon himself to build a remarkable six-sided structure on the Eddystone rocks standing over 100 feet high. With charming balconies, gilded staterooms, decorative wrought-iron work and casement windows for fishing, the whole curious structure was topped with an octagonal cupola complete with flags, more wrought iron and a weather vane. It might have been more appropriately placed as a folly on a grand estate, but Winstanley was confident it could withstand the most furious of storms. He was so confident that he longed to be there in bad weather to observe the might of the sea and by chance he was there on 26 November 1703. That night a bad storm blew in with horizontal rain, screaming winds and waves 100 feet high. Winstanley certainly had his wish. At some time in the night, the fury of the sea took Winstanley and his pretty gilded lighthouse and tossed them to a watery oblivion. In the morning, nothing remained but a few pieces of twisted wire.