When Winstanley had brought his work to completion, he is said to have expressed himself so satisfied as to its strength that he only wished he might be there in the fiercest storm that ever blew. In this wish he was not disappointed, though the result was the reverse entirely of the builder’s anticipations. In November, 1703, Winstanley went off to the lighthouse to superintend some repairs which had become necessary, and he was still in the place with the light-keepers, when, on the night of the 26th, a storm of unparalleled fury burst along the coast. As day broke on the morning of the 27th, people on shore anxiously looked in the direction of the rock to see if Winstanley’s structure had withstood the fury of the gale, but not a vestige of it remained. The lighthouse and its builder had been swept completely away. The building had, in fact, been deficient in every element of stability, and its form was such as to render it peculiarly liable to damage from the violence both of wind and water. “Nevertheless,” as Smeaton generously observes, “it was no small degree of heroic merit in Winstanley to undertake a piece of work which had before been deemed impracticable, and, by the success which attended his endeavours, to show mankind that the erection of such a work was not in itself a thing of that kind.” He may, indeed, be said to have paved the way for the more successful enterprise of Smeaton himself; and its failure was not without its influence in inducing that great mechanic to exercise the care which he did, in devising a structure that should withstand the most violent sea on the south coast. Shortly after Winstanley’s lighthouse had been swept away, the _Winchelsea_, a richly laden homeward-bound Virginian, was wrecked on the Eddystone Rock, and almost every soul on board perished; so that the erection of a lighthouse upon the dangerous reef remained as much a necessity as ever. [Illustration: RUDYERD’S LIGHTHOUSE.]