Parliament was applied to, and with an airy disregard of the claims of private property, vested the lighthouse rights in the Trinity House of Deptford Strand—the very body that had for so long fought against the erection of lighthouses at the Spurn at all. Armed with these rights the Trinity House promptly rendered the old lighthouses useless by erecting, in a position where they really assisted navigation, those at present standing, and they called to their aid, as architect and engineer, John Smeaton, who had just then won his laurels by the wonderful stone tower he had built on the Eddystone rocks. Of the disused lighthouses, as they appeared some twenty years before they were rendered useless by Smeaton’s buildings, we have a curious description, written by the then secretary to the Trinity House: the coals, he says, are placed in ‘a bricket or cradle of iron,’ which is suspended on a beam and hoisted or let down at pleasure. The upper light was then shown on the top of the tower, whilst the lower was placed against the tower on a platform a few feet from the ground. Perhaps it was this somewhat unusual arrangement with the beam that Dr. Johnson had in his mind when he described, in his Dictionary, a lighthouse as ‘a high building at the top of which lights are _hung_ to guide ships at sea’—certainly not a very accurate description of a lighthouse as the thing was then generally constructed and arranged. CHAPTER VI THE HUMBER TO THE THAMES Leaving the Humber, and coming southwards to the mouth of the Thames, we pass some of the earliest post-Reformation lighthouses erected—Winterton, where we have seen a light was proposed to be shown from the church steeple in 1585; Caister, Yarmouth, Corton, Lowestoft, Orfordness, and Harwich; at all which places, and many others, lighthouses were erected in the early part of the seventeenth century. There was a lighthouse at Caister some few miles south of Winterton, set up about the year 1600; soon afterwards we have a quaint account of the way in which this was maintained. It did not aspire to the dignity of being a coal fire; the building was merely a meanly constructed wooden tower with a lantern at the top, lit with candles—or _should_ have been lit with candles: but mark the italics—_should_. How was it actually illuminated? A contemporary report shall tell us. ‘Often but one candle of six to the pound ... or at the most two’ burnt in the lantern. This was insufficient: wrecks happened in consequence, and the shipowners grumbled louder than ever at having to pay dues. As stated before, the lighthouse at Caister was in the hands of the Trinity House, and it must be said to the credit of that body that on learning of the defects, it did its best to remedy them.