But in process of time the true story of the wreck travelled over the Channel and reached the ears of the merchants of Aquitaine, who forthwith brought an action in the English courts against the sailors and those who had bought the shipwrecked cargo. In the end damages were awarded to the merchants, and the incautious purchasers supposed that the matter had been brought to a conclusion. But it was not so; the Church—the monks in Picardy—had been wronged, for the wine really belonged to them; the merchants had only the consignment of it; and so the pope interfered and held that the purchasers must atone for their illicit trading. He decided what form the atonement should take: Walter de Godeton, one of the largest buyers, was to establish in the hermitage of St. Catherine a priest who would offer continual prayer for those perished at sea, and he was also to build a tower adjoining the hermitage, from which a light should nightly be displayed to warn passing ships of the danger of St. Catherine’s Point. The ruin which we see to-day is evidence that this part of the papal direction was duly carried out. What was the subsequent history of this lighthouse, we do not know; but at the general sweeping away of hermitages and oratories this useful light seems no longer to have been maintained. In the seventeenth century, and again in the eighteenth, schemes were set on foot for re-erecting a lighthouse near the ruined tower of St. Catherine’s, though none was actually established at the spot till just at the end of the last century. That is the date at which the lighthouse now standing there was erected—a lighthouse famous throughout the maritime world for the extraordinary brilliancy of its light, given by electricity. Weymouth and Melcombe Regis were important ports during the Middle Ages, and it is possible, nay probable, that some system of guiding incoming vessels by night existed there in early times; but if it did, all trace of it is lost. Portland Hill seems a natural place for a lighthouse, yet the first we hear of one there is quite at the beginning of the last century, when Captain William Holman’s petition to erect one was submitted to the Trinity House. The board considered that at the spot suggested the land was so high and the water so deep, ‘to the very shore,’ that lights were needless; adding that the duty proposed would add to the already heavy burdens borne by the shipowners. The report concludes with the argument, used before in other cases, that had lights been needed at Portland, the board would have suggested them. Not perhaps convinced with this method of argument, the corporation of Weymouth and the seamen of that port again urged the actual necessity for a lighthouse. Their petition and those that succeeded it were, however, ‘shelved.’