THE EDDYSTONE : FACTS AND FICTIONS. 
195 
During this time, however, we have the first local reference 
to the reef. It occurs in a letter from Mr. Thomas Crampporne 
to the Admiralty, dated 20th July, 1636. In this epistle the 
Mayor of Plymouth — for such was the position Mr. Crampporne 
then occupied — draws the attention of the Admiralty to the 
operations of the Sallee rovers, who then infested the Channel, 
and mentions expressly that " two fisher boats had just been 
captured near the Edyestone." 
Our next contemporary references will be to matters in which 
the Corporation of Trinity House was concerned. 
In 1623 Sir William Monson, while writing concerning the 
need of a lighthouse at the Lizard, says, "I saye the like danger 
is in haylinge in w th the Boult, in respect of the Edistone, that 
lyeth more dangerously than the Gulf." The first proposal for 
erecting a warning light upon the Eddystone itself seems to have 
been made in 1664. In this year Sir John Coryton petitioned 
the Trinity House, along with Mr. H. Brunker, for leave to erect 
lighthouses at Scilly and Eddystone. 
As was customary then, an adverse report was made when this 
petition was submitted to the Corporation by the Duke of York, 
and we hear no more of the proposal for thirty years. The 
Corporation, so far as the erection of lighthouses went, seem 
to have been always in " the cold shade of opposition," the 
principal reason for which we may judge to have been the fact 
that if they attempted to erect lighthouses under the powers 
of their Act of Elizabeth^ that statute obliged them, or seemed to 
oblige them, to do so at "their own costs." Nevertheless, the 
numerous cases in which the objectionable burden, as they reckoned 
it, of a tonnage upon passing ships was, in spite of their protests, 
laid upon shipowners and merchants, for the benefit of private 
owners of beacon lights, seem about this time to have made them 
somewhat wiser. 
Mr. E. Price-Edwards, in a capital article in Good Words of 
1882, thus speaks: 44 This Corporation feeling the influence of 
public opinion in regard to the marking of the Eddystone, resolved 
to make an effort to have it indicated, and with that object 
obtained a special Act of Parliament in 1694." 
Now before I saw this article I had received the assistance of a 
gentleman in London in looking up this subject, and he had 
searched especially for any Act of Parliament authorising the 
