 The party received word while docked at Aden of the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and its replacement by the Meiji government, and decided to continue on to Japan, reasoning that the new government was still bound by the international commitments of its predecessor.Over the next seven and a half years he designed and supervised the building of 26 Japanese lighthouses in the Western style, along with two lightvessels.An obituary published in the journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers states "in ten years he had he executed 50 lighthouses".