t many vessels were lost in trying to avoid
them, and much hardship was sustained by mariners who preferred to seek
shelter in higher latitudes. It was estimated that no fewer than
seventy vessels were either stranded or lost during that single gale,
and many of the crews perished.

At one wild part of the coast, near Peterhead, called the Bullers of
Buchan, after the first night of the storm, the wrecks of seven vessels
were found in one cove, without a single survivor of the crews to give
an account of the disaster.

The "dangers of the deep" are nothing compared with the _dangers of the
shore_. If the hard rocks of our island could tell the tale of their
experience, and if we landsmen could properly appreciate it, we should
understand more clearly why it is that sailors love blue (in other
words, deep) water during stormy weather.

In order to render the Forth more accessible by removing the danger of
the Bell Rock, it was resolved by the Commissioners of Northern Lights
to build a lighthouse upon it. This resolve was a much bolder one than
most people suppose, for the rock on which the lighthouse was to be
erected was a sunken reef, visible only at low tide during two or three
hours, and quite inaccessible in bad weather. It was the nearest
approach to building a house _in_ the sea that had yet been attempted!
The famous Eddystone stands on a rock which is _never quite_ under
water, although nearly so, for its crest rises a very little above the
highest tides, while the Bell Rock is eight or ten feet under water at
high tides.

It must be clear, therefore, to everyone, that difficulties, unusual in
magnitude and peculiar in kind, must have stood in the way of the daring
engineer who should undertake the erection of a tower on a rock twelve
miles out on the stormy sea, and the foundation of which was covered
with ten or twelve feet of water every tide; a tower which would have to
be built _perfectly_, yet _hastily_; a tower which should form a
comfortable home, fit for human beings to dwell in, and yet strong
enough to withstand the utmost fury of the waves, not merely whirling
round it, as might be the case on some exposed promontory, but rushing
at it, straight and fierce from the wild ocean, in great blue solid
billows that should burst in thunder on its sides, and rush up in
scarcely less solid spray to its lantern, a hundred feet or more above
its foundation.

An engineer able and willing to undertake