Records of a Family of Engineers
by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #280 · 401,587 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Records of a Family of Engineers
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: June 1, 1995 [eBook #280]
Most recently updated: November 4, 2010
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/280
Credits: Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price. Additional proofing by Peter Barnes
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS ***
Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.
RECORDS OF A
FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic for Chatto & Windus]
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1912
_All rights reserved_
INTRODUCTION: THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various
disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and
Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of Forth
to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde. Four times at least it occurs as a
place-name. There is a parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second
place of the name in the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne,
above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain Law.
Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to Edward I in 1296, and
the last of that family died after the Restoration. Stevensons of
Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode in the Bishops’ Raid of Aberlady,
served as jurors, stood bail for neighbours—Hunter of Polwood, for
instance—and became extinct about the same period, or possibly earlier.
A Stevenson of Luthrie and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give
their names, and vanish. And by the year 1700 it does not appear that
any acre of Scots land was vested in any Stevenson. {2a}
Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward progress, and a family
posting towards extinction. But the law (however administered, and I am
bound to aver that, in Scotland, ‘it couldna weel be waur’) acts as a
kind of dredge, and with dispassionate impartiality brings up into the
light of day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box or on the
gallows, the creeping things of the past. By these broken glimpses we
are able to trace the existence of many other and more inglorious
Stevensons, picking a private way through the brawl that makes Scots
history. They were members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling,
Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and Inverurie. We find them burgesses of
Edinburgh; indwellers in Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith. Thomas was the
forester of Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a
chirurgeon, and ‘Schir William’ a priest. In the feuds of Humes and
Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we
find them inconspicuously involved, and apparently getting rather better
than they gave. Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie
slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1582; James (‘in the mill-town of
Roberton’), murdered in 1590; Archibald (‘in Gallowfarren’), killed with
shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608. Three violent deaths in about
seventy years, against which we can only put the case of Thomas, servant
to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who was arraigned with his two young masters
for the death of the Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569. John (‘in
Dalkeith’) stood sentry without Holyrood while the banded lords were
despatching Rizzio within. William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran
before Gowrie House ‘with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde, saw
George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris nychtbouris; at
quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, “Awa hame! ye will all be
hangit”’—a piece of advice which William took, and immediately
‘depairtit.’ John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and seemingly
deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for infanticide, June
1614; and Martin, elder in Dalkeith, eternally disgraced the name by
signing witness in a witch trial, 1661. These are two of our black
sheep. {3a} Under the Restoration, one Stevenson was a bailie in
Edinburgh, and another the lessee of the Canonmills. There were at the
same period two physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr.
Archibald, appears to have been a famous man in his day and generation.
The Court had continual need of him; it was he who reported, for
instance, on the state of Rumbold; and he was for some time in the
enjoyment of a pension of a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds
sterling) at a time when five hundred pounds is described as ‘an opulent
future.’ I do not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to
keep favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year’s
present) his pension was expunged. {4a} There need be no doubt, at
least, of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and recorded
arms. Not quite so genteel, but still in public life, Hugh was
Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so extremely. I gather
this from his conduct in September 1681, when, with all the lords and
their servants, he took the woful and soul-destroying Test, swearing it
‘word by word upon his knees.’ And, behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was
turned out of his small post in 1684. {4b} Sir Archibald and Hugh were
both plainly inclined to be trimmers; but there was one witness of the
name of Stevenson who held high the banner of the Covenant—John,
‘Land-Labourer, {4c} in the parish of Daily, in Carrick,’ that ‘eminently
pious man.’ He seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself
disabled with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but
the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him.
‘I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with pleasure
for His name’s sake wandered in deserts and in mountains, in dens and
caves of the earth. I lay four months in the coldest season of the year
in a haystack in my father’s garden, and a whole February in the open
fields not far from Camragen, and this I did without the least prejudice
from the night air; one night, when lying in the fields near to the
Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with snow in the morning. Many nights
have I lain with pleasure in the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a
grave my pillow; frequently have I resorted to the old walls about the
glen, near to Camragen, and there sweetly rested.’ The visible band of
God protected and directed him. Dragoons were turned aside from the
bramble-bush where he lay hidden. Miracles were performed for his
behoof. ‘I got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the
same mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known
by the name of Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there came
on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the child’s
weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do could not divert
her from it, so that she was ready to burst. When we got to the top of
the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly kind to my soul in prayer,
I looked round me for a stone, and espying one, I went and brought it.
When the woman with me saw me set down the stone, she smiled, and asked
what I was going to do with it. I told her I was going to set it up as
my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that place, the Lord had formerly
helped, and I hoped would yet help. The rain still continuing, the child
weeping bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God, but
the child gave over weeping, and when we got up from prayer, the rain was
pouring down on every side, but in the way where we were to go there fell
not one drop; the place not rained on was as big as an ordinary avenue.’
And so great a saint was the natural butt of Satan’s persecutions. ‘I
retired to the fields for secret prayer about mid-night. When I went to
pray I was much straitened, and could not get one request, but “Lord
pity,” “Lord help”; this I came over frequently; at length the terror of
Satan fell on me in a high degree, and all I could say even then
was—“Lord help.” I continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding
of this terror. At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still
increased; then the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me
up by my arms. I saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he designed
to throw me there by force; and had he got leave to do so, it might have
brought a great reproach upon religion. {7a} But it was otherwise
ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that danger. {7b}
On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk,
following honest trades—millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the
character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without
distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a
potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally
free from shame and glory. John, the land-labourer, is the one living
and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a
collateral. It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on
the Craigdowhill, and ‘took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament
that was shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and
_the clerk who raised the psalms_, to witness that I did give myself away
to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be forgotten’;
and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant was registered in
Glasgow. So that I have been pursuing ancestors too far down; and John
the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must relinquish from the trophies
of my house his _rare soul-strengthening and comforting cordial_. It is
the same case with the Edinburgh bailie and the miller of the Canonmills,
worthy man! and with that public character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and,
more than all, with Sir Archibald, the physician, who recorded arms. And
I am reduced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the
clean and handsome little city on the Clyde.
The name has a certain air of being Norse. But the story of Scottish
nomenclature is confounded by a continual process of translation and
half-translation from the Gaelic which in olden days may have been
sometimes reversed. Roy becomes Reid; Gow, Smith. A great Highland clan
uses the name of Robertson; a sept in Appin that of Livingstone; Maclean
in Glencoe answers to Johnstone at Lockerby. And we find such hybrids as
Macalexander for Macallister. There is but one rule to be deduced: that
however uncompromisingly Saxon a name may appear, you can never be sure
it does not designate a Celt. My great-grandfather wrote the name
_Stevenson_ but pronounced it _Steenson_, after the fashion of the
immortal minstrel in _Redgauntlet_; and this elision of a medial
consonant appears a Gaelic process; and, curiously enough, I have come
across no less than two Gaelic forms: _John Macstophane cordinerius in
Crossraguel_, 1573, and _William M’Steen_ in Dunskeith (co. Ross), 1605.
Stevenson, Steenson, Macstophane, M’Steen: which is the original? which
the translation? Or were these separate creations of the patronymic,
some English, some Gaelic? The curiously compact territory in which we
find them seated—Ayr, Lanark, Peebles, Stirling, Perth, Fife, and the
Lothians—would seem to forbid the supposition. {9a}
‘STEVENSON—or according to tradition of one of the proscribed of the clan
MacGregor, who was born among the willows or in a hill-side
sheep-pen—“Son of my love,” a heraldic bar sinister, but history reveals
a reason for the birth among the willows far other than the sinister
aspect of the name’: these are the dark words of Mr. Cosmo Innes; but
history or tradition, being interrogated, tells a somewhat tangled tale.
The heir of Macgregor of Glenorchy, murdered about 1858 by the Argyll
Campbells, appears to have been the original ‘Son of my love’; and his
more loyal clansmen took the name to fight under. It may be supposed the
story of their resistance became popular, and the name in some sort
identified with the idea of opposition to the Campbells. Twice
afterwards, on some renewed aggression, in 1502 and 1552, we find the
Macgregors again banding themselves into a sept of ‘Sons of my love’; and
when the great disaster fell on them in 1603, the whole original legend
reappears, and we have the heir of Alaster of Glenstrae born ‘among the
willows’ of a fugitive mother, and the more loyal clansmen again rallying
under the name of Stevenson. A story would not be told so often unless
it had some base in fact; nor (if there were no bond at all between the
Red Macgregors and the Stevensons) would that extraneous and somewhat
uncouth name be so much repeated in the legends of the Children of the
Mist.
But I am enabled, by my very lively and obliging correspondent, Mr.
George A. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, to give an actual instance.
His grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, and
great-great-great-grandfather, all used the names of Macgregor and
Stevenson as occasion served; being perhaps Macgregor by night and
Stevenson by day. The great-great-great-grandfather was a mighty man of
his hands, marched with the clan in the ‘Forty-five, and returned with
_spolia opima_ in the shape of a sword, which he had wrested from an
officer in the retreat, and which is in the possession of my
correspondent to this day. His great-grandson (the grandfather of my
correspondent), being converted to Methodism by some wayside preacher,
discarded in a moment his name, his old nature, and his political
principles, and with the zeal of a proselyte sealed his adherence to the
Protestant Succession by baptising his next son George. This George
became the publisher and editor of the _Wesleyan Times_. His children
were brought up in ignorance of their Highland pedigree; and my
correspondent was puzzled to overhear his father speak of him as a true
Macgregor, and amazed to find, in rummaging about that peaceful and pious
house, the sword of the Hanoverian officer. After he was grown up and
was better informed of his descent, ‘I frequently asked my father,’ he
writes, ‘why he did not use the name of Macgregor; his replies were
significant, and give a picture of the man: “It isn’t a good _Methodist_
name. You can use it, but it will do you no _good_.” Yet the old
gentleman, by way of pleasantry, used to announce himself to friends as
“Colonel Macgregor.”’
Here, then, are certain Macgregors habitually using the name of
Stevenson, and at last, under the influence of Methodism, adopting it
entirely. Doubtless a proscribed clan could not be particular; they took
a name as a man takes an umbrella against a shower; as Rob Roy took
Campbell, and his son took Drummond. But this case is different;
Stevenson was not taken and left—it was consistently adhered to. It does
not in the least follow that all Stevensons are of the clan Alpin; but it
does follow that some may be. And I cannot conceal from myself the
possibility that James Stevenson in Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor,
may have had a Highland _alias_ upon his conscience and a claymore in his
back parlour.
To one more tradition I may allude, that we are somehow descended from a
French barber-surgeon who came to St. Andrews in the service of one of
the Cardinal Beatons. No details were added. But the very name of
France was so detested in my family for three generations, that I am
tempted to suppose there may be something in it. {12a}
CHAPTER I: DOMESTIC ANNALS
It is believed that in 1665, James Stevenson in Nether Carsewell, parish
of Neilston, county of Renfrew, and presumably a tenant farmer, married
one Jean Keir; and in 1675, without doubt, there was born to these two a
son Robert, possibly a maltster in Glasgow. In 1710, Robert married, for
a second time, Elizabeth Cumming, and there was born to them, in 1720,
another Robert, certainly a maltster in Glasgow. In 1742, Robert the
second married Margaret Fulton (Margret, she called herself), by whom he
had ten children, among whom were Hugh, born February 1749, and Alan,
born June 1752.
With these two brothers my story begins. Their deaths were simultaneous;
their lives unusually brief and full. Tradition whispered me in
childhood they were the owners of an islet near St. Kitts; and it is
certain they had risen to be at the head of considerable interests in the
West Indies, which Hugh managed abroad and Alan at home, at an age when
others are still curveting a clerk’s stool. My kinsman, Mr. Stevenson of
Stirling, has heard his father mention that there had been ‘something
romantic’ about Alan’s marriage: and, alas! he has forgotten what. It
was early at least. His wife was Jean, daughter of David Lillie, a
builder in Glasgow, and several times ‘Deacon of the Wrights’: the date
of the marriage has not reached me; but on 8th June 1772, when Robert,
the only child of the union, was born, the husband and father had scarce
passed, or had not yet attained, his twentieth year. Here was a youth
making haste to give hostages to fortune. But this early scene of
prosperity in love and business was on the point of closing.
There hung in the house of this young family, and successively in those
of my grandfather and father, an oil painting of a ship of many tons
burthen. Doubtless the brothers had an interest in the vessel; I was
told she had belonged to them outright; and the picture was preserved
through years of hardship, and remains to this day in the possession of
the family, the only memorial of my great-grandsire Alan. It was on this
ship that he sailed on his last adventure, summoned to the West Indies by
Hugh. An agent had proved unfaithful on a serious scale; and it used to
be told me in my childhood how the brothers pursued him from one island
to another in an open boat, were exposed to the pernicious dews of the
tropics, and simultaneously struck down. The dates and places of their
deaths (now before me) would seem to indicate a more scattered and
prolonged pursuit: Hugh, on the 16th April 1774, in Tobago, within sight
of Trinidad; Alan, so late as 26th May, and so far away as ‘Santt
Kittes,’ in the Leeward Islands—both, says the family Bible, ‘of a
fiver’(!). The death of Hugh was probably announced by Alan in a letter,
to which we may refer the details of the open boat and the dew. Thus, at
least, in something like the course of post, both were called away, the
one twenty-five, the other twenty-two; their brief generation became
extinct, their short-lived house fell with them; and ‘in these lawless
parts and lawless times’—the words are my grandfather’s—their property
was stolen or became involved. Many years later, I understand some small
recovery to have been made; but at the moment almost the whole means of
the family seem to have perished with the young merchants. On the 27th
April, eleven days after Hugh Stevenson, twenty-nine before Alan, died
David Lillie, the Deacon of the Wrights; so that mother and son were
orphaned in one month. Thus, from a few scraps of paper bearing little
beyond dates, we construct the outlines of the tragedy that shadowed the
cradle of Robert Stevenson.
Jean Lillie was a young woman of strong sense, well fitted to contend
with poverty, and of a pious disposition, which it is like that these
misfortunes heated. Like so many other widowed Scots-women, she vowed
her son should wag his head in a pulpit; but her means were inadequate to
her ambition. A charity school, and some time under a Mr. M’Intyre, ‘a
famous linguist,’ were all she could afford in the way of education to
the would-be minister. He learned no Greek; in one place he mentions
that the Orations of Cicero were his highest book in Latin; in another
that he had ‘delighted’ in Virgil and Horace; but his delight could never
have been scholarly. This appears to have been the whole of his training
previous to an event which changed his own destiny and moulded that of
his descendants—the second marriage of his mother.
There was a Merchant-Burgess of Edinburgh of the name of Thomas Smith.
The Smith pedigree has been traced a little more particularly than the
Stevensons’, with a similar dearth of illustrious names. One character
seems to have appeared, indeed, for a moment at the wings of history: a
skipper of Dundee who smuggled over some Jacobite big-wig at the time of
the ‘Fifteen, and was afterwards drowned in Dundee harbour while going on
board his ship. With this exception, the generations of the Smiths
present no conceivable interest even to a descendant; and Thomas, of
Edinburgh, was the first to issue from respectable obscurity. His
father, a skipper out of Broughty Ferry, was drowned at sea while Thomas
was still young. He seems to have owned a ship or two—whalers, I
suppose, or coasters—and to have been a member of the Dundee Trinity
House, whatever that implies. On his death the widow remained in
Broughty, and the son came to push his future in Edinburgh. There is a
story told of him in the family which I repeat here because I shall have
to tell later on a similar, but more perfectly authenticated, experience
of his stepson, Robert Stevenson. Word reached Thomas that his mother
was unwell, and he prepared to leave for Broughty on the morrow. It was
between two and three in the morning, and the early northern daylight was
already clear, when he awoke and beheld the curtains at the bed-foot
drawn aside and his mother appear in the interval, smile upon him for a
moment, and then vanish. The sequel is stereo-type; he took the time by
his watch, and arrived at Broughty to learn it was the very moment of her
death. The incident is at least curious in having happened to such a
person—as the tale is being told of him. In all else, he appears as a
man ardent, passionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in
them far beyond the average. He founded a solid business in lamps and
oils, and was the sole proprietor of a concern called the Greenside
Company’s Works—‘a multifarious concern it was,’ writes my cousin,
Professor Swan, ‘of tinsmiths, coppersmiths, brass-founders, blacksmiths,
and japanners.’ He was also, it seems, a shipowner and underwriter. He
built himself ‘a land’—Nos. 1 and 2 Baxter’s Place, then no such
unfashionable neighbourhood—and died, leaving his only son in easy
circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters portions of
five thousand pounds and upwards. There is no standard of success in
life; but in one of its meanings, this is to succeed.
In what we know of his opinions, he makes a figure highly characteristic
of the time. A high Tory and patriot, a captain—so I find it in my
notes—of Edinburgh Spearmen, and on duty in the Castle during the Muir
and Palmer troubles, he bequeathed to his descendants a bloodless sword
and a somewhat violent tradition, both long preserved. The judge who sat
on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the
_obiter dictum_—‘I never liked the French all my days, but now I hate
them.’ If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must
have been tempted to applaud. The people of that land were his
abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist. Towards the end he
fell into a kind of dotage; his family must entertain him with games of
tin soldiers, which he took a childish pleasure to array and overset; but
those who played with him must be upon their guard, for if his side,
which was always that of the English against the French, should chance to
be defeated, there would be trouble in Baxter’s Place. For these
opinions he may almost be said to have suffered. Baptised and brought up
in the Church of Scotland, he had, upon some conscientious scruple,
joined the communion of the Baptists. Like other Nonconformists, these
were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the
beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of his
joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his
brethren in the faith. ‘They that take the sword shall perish with the
sword,’ they told him; they gave him ‘no rest’; ‘his position became
intolerable’; it was plain he must choose between his political and his
religious tenets; and in the last years of his life, about 1812, he
returned to the Church of his fathers.
August 1786 was the date of his chief advancement, when, having designed
a system of oil lights to take the place of the primitive coal fires
before in use, he was dubbed engineer to the newly-formed Board of
Northern Lighthouses. Not only were his fortunes bettered by the
appointment, but he was introduced to a new and wider field for the
exercise of his abilities, and a new way of life highly agreeable to his
active constitution. He seems to have rejoiced in the long journeys, and
to have combined them with the practice of field sports. ‘A tall, stout
man coming ashore with his gun over his arm’—so he was described to my
father—the only description that has come down to me by a light-keeper
old in the service. Nor did this change come alone. On the 9th July of
the same year, Thomas Smith had been left for the second time a widower.
As he was still but thirty-three years old, prospering in his affairs,
newly advanced in the world, and encumbered at the time with a family of
children, five in number, it was natural that he should entertain the
notion of another wife. Expeditious in business, he was no less so in
his choice; and it was not later than June 1787—for my grandfather is
described as still in his fifteenth year—that he married the widow of
Alan Stevenson.
The perilous experiment of bringing together two families for once
succeeded. Mr. Smith’s two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in
piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate
and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to
have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith. It is, perhaps,
easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have
done much to fashion girls who were under ten; the man, lusty and
opinionated, must have stamped a strong impression on the boy of fifteen.
But the cleavage of the family was too marked, the identity of character
and interest produced between the two men on the one hand, and the three
women on the other, was too complete to have been the result of influence
alone. Particular bonds of union must have pre-existed on each side.
And there is no doubt that the man and the boy met with common ambitions,
and a common bent, to the practice of that which had not so long before
acquired the name of civil engineering.
For the profession which is now so thronged, famous, and influential, was
then a thing of yesterday. My grandfather had an anecdote of Smeaton,
probably learned from John Clerk of Eldin, their common friend. Smeaton
was asked by the Duke of Argyll to visit the West Highland coast for a
professional purpose. He refused, appalled, it seems, by the rough
travelling. ‘You can recommend some other fit person?’ asked the Duke.
‘No,’ said Smeaton, ‘I’m sorry I can’t.’ ‘What!’ cried the Duke, ‘a
profession with only one man in it! Pray, who taught you?’ ‘Why,’ said
Smeaton, ‘I believe I may say I was self-taught, an’t please your grace.’
Smeaton, at the date of Thomas Smith’s third marriage, was yet living;
and as the one had grown to the new profession from his place at the
instrument-maker’s, the other was beginning to enter it by the way of his
trade. The engineer of to-day is confronted with a library of acquired
results; tables and formulae to the value of folios full have been
calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him
the footprints of the pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field was
largely unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of
nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake
works which were at once inventions and adventures. It was not a science
then—it was a living art; and it visibly grew under the eyes and between
the hands of its practitioners.
The charm of such an occupation was strongly felt by stepfather and
stepson. It chanced that Thomas Smith was a reformer; the superiority of
his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured his
appointment; and no sooner had he set his hand to the task than the
interest of that employment mastered him. The vacant stage on which he
was to act, and where all had yet to be created—the greatness of the
difficulties, the smallness of the means intrusted him—would rouse a man
of his disposition like a call to battle. The lad introduced by marriage
under his roof was of a character to sympathise; the public usefulness of
the service would appeal to his judgment, the perpetual need for fresh
expedients stimulate his ingenuity. And there was another attraction
which, in the younger man at least, appealed to, and perhaps first
aroused, a profound and enduring sentiment of romance: I mean the
attraction of the life. The seas into which his labours carried the new
engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on
shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in
which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in
boats; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track
through unfrequented wildernesses; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse
in the very camp of wreckers; and he was continually enforced to the
vicissitudes of outdoor life. The joy of my grandfather in this career
was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and
manhood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last
yearning was to renew these loved experiences. What he felt himself he
continued to attribute to all around him. And to this supposed sentiment
in others I find him continually, almost pathetically, appealing; often
in vain.
Snared by these interests, the boy seems to have become almost at once
the eager confidant and adviser of his new connection; the Church, if he
had ever entertained the prospect very warmly, faded from his view; and
at the age of nineteen I find him already in a post of some authority,
superintending the construction of the lighthouse on the isle of Little
Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde. The change of aim seems to have caused
or been accompanied by a change of character. It sounds absurd to couple
the name of my grandfather with the word indolence; but the lad who had
been destined from the cradle to the Church, and who had attained the age
of fifteen without acquiring more than a moderate knowledge of Latin, was
at least no unusual student. And from the day of his charge at Little
Cumbrae he steps before us what he remained until the end, a man of the
most zealous industry, greedy of occupation, greedy of knowledge, a stern
husband of time, a reader, a writer, unflagging in his task of
self-improvement. Thenceforward his summers were spent directing works
and ruling workmen, now in uninhabited, now in half-savage islands; his
winters were set apart, first at the Andersonian Institution, then at the
University of Edinburgh to improve himself in mathematics, chemistry,
natural history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic; a bearded
student—although no doubt scrupulously shaved. I find one reference to
his years in class which will have a meaning for all who have studied in
Scottish Universities. He mentions a recommendation made by the
professor of logic. ‘The high-school men,’ he writes, ‘and _bearded men
like myself_, were all attention.’ If my grandfather were throughout
life a thought too studious of the art of getting on, much must be
forgiven to the bearded and belated student who looked across, with a
sense of difference, at ‘the high-school men.’ Here was a gulf to be
crossed; but already he could feel that he had made a beginning, and that
must have been a proud hour when he devoted his earliest earnings to the
repayment of the charitable foundation in which he had received the
rudiments of knowledge.
In yet another way he followed the example of his father-in-law, and from
1794 to 1807, when the affairs of the Bell Rock made it necessary for him
to resign, he served in different corps of volunteers. In the last of
these he rose to a position of distinction, no less than captain of the
Grenadier Company, and his colonel, in accepting his resignation,
entreated he would do them ‘the favour of continuing as an honorary
member of a corps which has been so much indebted for your zeal and
exertions.’
To very pious women the men of the house are apt to appear worldly. The
wife, as she puts on her new bonnet before church, is apt to sigh over
that assiduity which enabled her husband to pay the milliner’s bill. And
in the household of the Smiths and Stevensons the women were not only
extremely pious, but the men were in reality a trifle worldly. Religious
they both were; conscious, like all Scots, of the fragility and unreality
of that scene in which we play our uncomprehended parts; like all Scots,
realising daily and hourly the sense of another will than ours and a
perpetual direction in the affairs of life. But the current of their
endeavours flowed in a more obvious channel. They had got on so far; to
get on further was their next ambition—to gather wealth, to rise in
society, to leave their descendants higher than themselves, to be (in
some sense) among the founders of families. Scott was in the same town
nourishing similar dreams. But in the eyes of the women these dreams
would be foolish and idolatrous.
I have before me some volumes of old letters addressed to Mrs. Smith and
the two girls, her favourites, which depict in a strong light their
characters and the society in which they moved.
‘My very dear and much esteemed Friend,’ writes one correspondent,
‘this day being the anniversary of our acquaintance, I feel inclined
to address you; but where shall I find words to express the fealings
of a graitful _Heart_, first to the Lord who graiciously inclined you
on this day last year to notice an afflicted Strainger providentially
cast in your way far from any Earthly friend? . . . Methinks I shall
hear him say unto you, “Inasmuch as ye shewed kindness to my
afflicted handmaiden, ye did it unto me.”’
This is to Jean; but the same afflicted lady wrote indifferently to Jean,
to Janet, and to Ms. Smith, whom she calls ‘my Edinburgh mother.’ It is
plain the three were as one person, moving to acts of kindness, like the
Graces, inarmed. Too much stress must not be laid on the style of this
correspondence; Clarinda survived, not far away, and may have met the
ladies on the Calton Hill; and many of the writers appear, underneath the
conventions of the period, to be genuinely moved. But what unpleasantly
strikes a reader is, that these devout unfortunates found a revenue in
their devotion. It is everywhere the same tale; on the side of the
soft-hearted ladies, substantial acts of help; on the side of the
correspondents, affection, italics, texts, ecstasies, and imperfect
spelling. When a midwife is recommended, not at all for proficiency in
her important art, but because she has ‘a sister whom I [the
correspondent] esteem and respect, and [who] is a spiritual daughter of
my Hond Father in the Gosple,’ the mask seems to be torn off, and the
wages of godliness appear too openly. Capacity is a secondary matter in
a midwife, temper in a servant, affection in a daughter, and the
repetition of a shibboleth fulfils the law. Common decency is at times
forgot in the same page with the most sanctified advice and aspiration.
Thus I am introduced to a correspondent who appears to have been at the
time the housekeeper at Invermay, and who writes to condole with my
grandmother in a season of distress. For nearly half a sheet she keeps
to the point with an excellent discretion in language then suddenly
breaks out:
‘It was fully my intention to have left this at Martinmass, but the
Lord fixes the bounds of our habitation. I have had more need of
patience in my situation here than in any other, partly from the very
violent, unsteady, deceitful temper of the Mistress of the Family,
and also from the state of the house. It was in a train of repair
when I came here two years ago, and is still in Confusion. There is
above six Thousand Pounds’ worth of Furniture come from London to be
put up when the rooms are completely finished; and then, woe be to
the Person who is Housekeeper at Invermay!’
And by the tail of the document, which is torn, I see she goes on to ask
the bereaved family to seek her a new place. It is extraordinary that
people should have been so deceived in so careless an impostor; that a
few sprinkled ‘God willings’ should have blinded them to the essence of
this venomous letter; and that they should have been at the pains to bind
it in with others (many of them highly touching) in their memorial of
harrowing days. But the good ladies were without guile and without
suspicion; they were victims marked for the axe, and the religious
impostors snuffed up the wind as they drew near.
I have referred above to my grandmother; it was no slip of the pen: for
by an extraordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to suspect the
managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife of Robert
Stevenson. Mrs. Smith had failed in her design to make her son a
minister, and she saw him daily more immersed in business and worldly
ambition. One thing remained that she might do: she might secure for him
a godly wife, that great means of sanctification; and she had two under
her hand, trained by herself, her dear friends and daughters both in law
and love—Jean and Janet. Jean’s complexion was extremely pale, Janet’s
was florid; my grandmother’s nose was straight, my great-aunt’s aquiline;
but by the sound of the voice, not even a son was able to distinguish one
from other. The marriage of a man of twenty-seven and a girl of twenty
who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to
conceive. It took place, however, and thus in 1799 the family was still
further cemented by the union of a representative of the male or worldly
element with one of the female and devout.
This essential difference remained unbridged, yet never diminished the
strength of their relation. My grandfather pursued his design of
advancing in the world with some measure of success; rose to distinction
in his calling, grew to be the familiar of members of Parliament, judges
of the Court of Session, and ‘landed gentlemen’; learned a ready address,
had a flow of interesting conversation, and when he was referred to as ‘a
highly respectable _bourgeois_,’ resented the description. My
grandmother remained to the end devout and unambitious, occupied with her
Bible, her children, and her house; easily shocked, and associating
largely with a clique of godly parasites. I do not know if she called in
the midwife already referred to; but the principle on which that lady was
recommended, she accepted fully. The cook was a godly woman, the butcher
a Christian man, and the table suffered. The scene has been often
described to me of my grandfather sawing with darkened countenance at
some indissoluble joint—‘Preserve me, my dear, what kind of a reedy,
stringy beast is this?’—of the joint removed, the pudding substituted and
uncovered; and of my grandmother’s anxious glance and hasty, deprecatory
comment, ‘Just mismanaged!’ Yet with the invincible obstinacy of soft
natures, she would adhere to the godly woman and the Christian man, or
find others of the same kidney to replace them. One of her confidants
had once a narrow escape; an unwieldy old woman, she had fallen from an
outside stair in a close of the Old Town; and my grandmother rejoiced to
communicate the providential circumstance that a baker had been passing
underneath with his bread upon his head. ‘I would like to know what kind
of providence the baker thought it!’ cried my grandfather.
But the sally must have been unique. In all else that I have heard or
read of him, so far from criticising, he was doing his utmost to honour
and even to emulate his wife’s pronounced opinions. In the only letter
which has come to my hand of Thomas Smith’s, I find him informing his
wife that he was ‘in time for afternoon church’; similar assurances or
cognate excuses abound in the correspondence of Robert Stevenson; and it
is comical and pretty to see the two generations paying the same court to
a female piety more highly strung: Thomas Smith to the mother of Robert
Stevenson—Robert Stevenson to the daughter of Thomas Smith. And if for
once my grandfather suffered himself to be hurried, by his sense of
humour and justice, into that remark about the case of Providence and the
Baker, I should be sorry for any of his children who should have stumbled
into the same attitude of criticism. In the apocalyptic style of the
housekeeper of Invermay, woe be to that person! But there was no fear;
husband and sons all entertained for the pious, tender soul the same
chivalrous and moved affection. I have spoken with one who remembered
her, and who had been the intimate and equal of her sons, and I found
this witness had been struck, as I had been, with a sense of
disproportion between the warmth of the adoration felt and the nature of
the woman, whether as described or observed. She diligently read and
marked her Bible; she was a tender nurse; she had a sense of humour under
strong control; she talked and found some amusement at her (or rather at
her husband’s) dinner-parties. It is conceivable that even my
grandmother was amenable to the seductions of dress; at least, I find her
husband inquiring anxiously about ‘the gowns from Glasgow,’ and very
careful to describe the toilet of the Princess Charlotte, whom he had
seen in church ‘in a Pelisse and Bonnet of the same colour of cloth as
the Boys’ Dress jackets, trimmed with blue satin ribbons; the hat or
Bonnet, Mr. Spittal said, was a Parisian slouch, and had a plume of three
white feathers.’ But all this leaves a blank impression, and it is
rather by reading backward in these old musty letters, which have moved
me now to laughter and now to impatience, that I glean occasional
glimpses of how she seemed to her contemporaries, and trace (at work in
her queer world of godly and grateful parasites) a mobile and responsive
nature. Fashion moulds us, and particularly women, deeper than we
sometimes think; but a little while ago, and, in some circles, women
stood or fell by the degree of their appreciation of old pictures; in the
early years of the century (and surely with more reason) a character like
that of my grandmother warmed, charmed, and subdued, like a strain of
music, the hearts of the men of her own household. And there is little
doubt that Mrs. Smith, as she looked on at the domestic life of her son
and her stepdaughter, and numbered the heads in their increasing nursery,
must have breathed fervent thanks to her Creator.
Yet this was to be a family unusually tried; it was not for nothing that
one of the godly women saluted Miss Janet Smith as ‘a veteran in
affliction’; and they were all before middle life experienced in that
form of service. By the 1st of January 1808, besides a pair of
still-born twins, children had been born and still survived to the young
couple. By the 11th two were gone; by the 28th a third had followed, and
the two others were still in danger. In the letters of a former
nurserymaid—I give her name, Jean Mitchell, _honoris causa_—we are
enabled to feel, even at this distance of time, some of the bitterness of
that month of bereavement.
‘I have this day received,’ she writes to Miss Janet, ‘the melancholy
news of my dear babys’ deaths. My heart is like to break for my dear
Mrs. Stevenson. O may she be supported on this trying occasion! I
hope her other three babys will be spared to her. O, Miss Smith, did
I think when I parted from my sweet babys that I never was to see
them more?’ ‘I received,’ she begins her next, ‘the mournful news of
my dear Jessie’s death. I also received the hair of my three sweet
babys, which I will preserve as dear to their memorys and as a token
of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson’s friendship and esteem. At my leisure
hours, when the children are in bed, they occupy all my thoughts, I
dream of them. About two weeks ago I dreamed that my sweet little
Jessie came running to me in her usual way, and I took her in my
arms. O my dear babys, were mortal eyes permitted to see them in
heaven, we would not repine nor grieve for their loss.’
By the 29th of February, the Reverend John Campbell, a man of obvious
sense and human value, but hateful to the present biographer, because he
wrote so many letters and conveyed so little information, summed up this
first period of affliction in a letter to Miss Smith: ‘Your dear sister
but a little while ago had a full nursery, and the dear blooming
creatures sitting around her table filled her breast with hope that one
day they should fill active stations in society and become an ornament in
the Church below. But ah!’
Near a hundred years ago these little creatures ceased to be, and for not
much less a period the tears have been dried. And to this day, looking
in these stitched sheaves of letters, we hear the sound of many
soft-hearted women sobbing for the lost. Never was such a massacre of
the innocents; teething and chincough and scarlet fever and smallpox ran
the round; and little Lillies, and Smiths, and Stevensons fell like moths
about a candle; and nearly all the sympathetic correspondents deplore and
recall the little losses of their own. ‘It is impossible to describe the
Heavnly looks of the Dear Babe the three last days of his life,’ writes
Mrs. Laurie to Mrs. Smith. ‘Never—never, my dear aunt, could I wish to
eface the rememberance of this Dear Child. Never, never, my dear aunt!’
And so soon the memory of the dead and the dust of the survivors are
buried in one grave.
There was another death in 1812; it passes almost unremarked; a single
funeral seemed but a small event to these ‘veterans in affliction’; and
by 1816 the nursery was full again. Seven little hopefuls enlivened the
house; some were growing up; to the elder girl my grandfather already
wrote notes in current hand at the tail of his letters to his wife: and
to the elder boys he had begun to print, with laborious care, sheets of
childish gossip and pedantic applications. Here, for instance, under
date of 26th May 1816, is part of a mythological account of London, with
a moral for the three gentlemen, ‘Messieurs Alan, Robert, and James
Stevenson,’ to whom the document is addressed:
‘There are many prisons here like Bridewell, for, like other large
towns, there are many bad men here as well as many good men. The
natives of London are in general not so tall and strong as the people
of Edinburgh, because they have not so much pure air, and instead of
taking porridge they eat cakes made with sugar and plums. Here you
have thousands of carts to draw timber, thousands of coaches to take
you to all parts of the town, and thousands of boats to sail on the
river Thames. But you must have money to pay, otherwise you can get
nothing. Now the way to get money is, become clever men and men of
education, by being good scholars.’
From the same absence, he writes to his wife on a Sunday:
‘It is now about eight o’clock with me, and I imagine you to be busy
with the young folks, hearing the questions [_Anglicé_, catechism],
and indulging the boys with a chapter from the large Bible, with
their interrogations and your answers in the soundest doctrine. I
hope James is getting his verse as usual, and that Mary is not
forgetting her little _hymn_. While Jeannie will be reading
Wotherspoon, or some other suitable and instructive book, I presume
our friend, Aunt Mary, will have just arrived with the news of _a
throng kirk_ [a crowded church] and a great sermon. You may mention,
with my compliments to my mother, that I was at St. Paul’s to-day,
and attended a very excellent service with Mr. James Lawrie. The
text was “Examine and see that ye be in the faith.”’
A twinkle of humour lights up this evocation of the distant scene—the
humour of happy men and happy homes. Yet it is penned upon the threshold
of fresh sorrow. James and Mary—he of the verse and she of the hymn—did
not much more than survive to welcome their returning father. On the
25th, one of the godly women writes to Janet:
‘My dearest beloved madam, when I last parted from you, you was so
affected with your affliction [you? or I?] could think of nothing
else. But on Saturday, when I went to inquire after your health, how
was I startled to hear that dear James was gone! Ah, what is this?
My dear benefactors, doing so much good to many, to the Lord,
suddenly to be deprived of their most valued comforts! I was thrown
into great perplexity, could do nothing but murmur, why these things
were done to such a family. I could not rest, but at midnight,
whether spoken [or not] it was presented to my mind—“Those whom ye
deplore are walking with me in white.” I conclude from this the Lord
saying to sweet Mrs. Stevenson: “I gave them to be brought up for me:
well done, good and faithful! they are fully prepared, and now I must
present them to my father and your father, to my God and your God.”’
It would be hard to lay on flattery with a more sure and daring hand. I
quote it as a model of a letter of condolence; be sure it would console.
Very different, perhaps quite as welcome, is this from a lighthouse
inspector to my grandfather:
‘In reading your letter the trickling tear ran down ray cheeks in
silent sorrow for your departed dear ones, my sweet little friends.
Well do I remember, and you will call to mind, their little innocent
and interesting stories. Often have they come round me and taken me
by the hand, but alas! I am no more destined to behold them.’
The child who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest
babe seem in the retrospect ‘heavenly the three last days of his life.’
But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than
usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of
their remarks and ‘little innocent and interesting stories,’ and the blow
and the blank were the more sensible.
Early the next month Robert Stevenson must proceed upon his voyage of
inspection, part by land, part by sea. He left his wife plunged in low
spirits; the thought of his loss, and still more of her concern, was
continually present in his mind, and he draws in his letters home an
interesting picture of his family relations:
‘_Windygates Inn_, _Monday_ (_Postmark July_ 16_th_)
‘MY DEAREST JEANNIE,—While the people of the inn are getting me a
little bit of something to eat, I sit down to tell you that I had a
most excellent passage across the water, and got to Wemyss at
mid-day. I hope the children will be very good, and that Robert will
take a course with you to learn his Latin lessons daily; he may,
however, read English in company. Let them have strawberries on
Saturdays.’
‘_Westhaven_, 17_th_ _July_.
‘I have been occupied to-day at the harbour of Newport, opposite
Dundee, and am this far on my way to Arbroath. You may tell the boys
that I slept last night in Mr. Steadman’s tent. I found my bed
rather hard, but the lodgings were otherwise extremely comfortable.
The encampment is on the Fife side of the Tay, immediately opposite
to Dundee. From the door of the tent you command the most beautiful
view of the Firth, both up and down, to a great extent. At night all
was serene and still, the sky presented the most beautiful appearance
of bright stars, and the morning was ushered in with the song of many
little birds.’
‘_Aberdeen_, _July_ 19_th_.
‘I hope, my dear, that you are going out of doors regularly and
taking much exercise. I would have you to _make the markets
daily_—and by all means to take a seat in the coach once or twice in
the week and see what is going on in town. [The family were at the
sea-side.] It will be good not to be too great a stranger to the
house. It will be rather painful at first, but as it is to be done,
I would have you not to be too strange to the house in town.
‘Tell the boys that I fell in with a soldier—his name is
Henderson—who was twelve years with Lord Wellington and other
commanders. He returned very lately with only eightpence-halfpenny
in his pocket, and found his father and mother both in life, though
they had never heard from him, nor he from them. He carried my
great-coat and umbrella a few miles.’
‘_Fraserburgh_, _July_ 20_th_.
‘Fraserburgh is the same dull place which [Auntie] Mary and Jeannie
found it. As I am travelling along the coast which they are
acquainted with, you had better cause Robert bring down the map from
Edinburgh; and it will be a good exercise in geography for the young
folks to trace my course. I hope they have entered upon the writing.
The library will afford abundance of excellent books, which I wish
you would employ a little. I hope you are doing me the favour to go
much out with the boys, which will do you much good and prevent them
from getting so very much overheated.’
[_To the Boys—Printed_.]
‘When I had last the pleasure of writing to you, your dear little
brother James and your sweet little sister Mary were still with us.
But it has pleased God to remove them to another and a better world,
and we must submit to the will of Providence. I must, however,
request of you to think sometimes upon them, and to be very careful
not to do anything that will displease or vex your mother. It is
therefore proper that you do not roamp [Scottish indeed] too much
about, and that you learn your lessons.’
‘I went to Fraserburgh and visited Kinnaird Head Lighthouse, which I
found in good order. All this time I travelled upon good roads, and
paid many a toll-man by the way; but from Fraserburgh to Banff there
is no toll-bars, and the road is so bad that I had to walk up and
down many a hill, and for want of bridges the horses had to drag the
chaise up to the middle of the wheels in water. At Banff I saw a
large ship of 300 tons lying on the sands upon her beam-ends, and a
wreck for want of a good harbour. Captain Wilson—to whom I beg my
compliments—will show you a ship of 300 tons. At the towns of
Macduff, Banff, and Portsoy, many of the houses are built of marble,
and the rocks on this part of the coast or sea-side are marble. But,
my dear Boys, unless marble be polished and dressed, it is a very
coarse-looking stone, and has no more beauty than common rock. As a
proof of this, ask the favour of your mother to take you to Thomson’s
Marble Works in South Leith, and you will see marble in all its
stages, and perhaps you may there find Portsoy marble! The use I
wish to make of this is to tell you that, without education, a man is
just like a block of rough, unpolished marble. Notice, in proof of
this, how much Mr. Neill and Mr. M’Gregor [the tutor] know, and
observe how little a man knows who is not a good scholar. On my way
to Fochabers I passed through many thousand acres of Fir timber, and
saw many deer running in these woods.’
[_To Mrs. Stevenson_.]
‘_Inverness_, _July_ 21_st_.
‘I propose going to church in the afternoon, and as I have
breakfasted late, I shall afterwards take a walk, and dine about six
o’clock. I do not know who is the clergyman here, but I shall think
of you all. I travelled in the mail-coach [from Banff] almost alone.
While it was daylight I kept the top, and the passing along a country
I had never before seen was a considerable amusement. But, my dear,
you are all much in my thoughts, and many are the objects which
recall the recollection of our tender and engaging children we have
so recently lost. We must not, however, repine. I could not for a
moment wish any change of circumstances in their case; and in every
comparative view of their state, I see the Lord’s goodness in
removing them from an evil world to an abode of bliss; and I must
earnestly hope that you may be enabled to take such a view of this
affliction as to live in the happy prospect of our all meeting again
to part no more—and that under such considerations you are getting up
your spirits. I wish you would walk about, and by all means go to
town, and do not sit much at home.’
‘_Inverness_, _July_ 23_rd_.
‘I am duly favoured with your much-valued letter, and I am happy to
find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of
variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from
brooding too much upon one subject. Sensibility and tenderness are
certainly two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the
mind. These qualities are also none of the least of the many
endearingments of the female character. But if that kind of sympathy
and pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under distress, be
much indulged, it becomes habitual, and takes such a hold of the mind
as to absorb all the other affections, and unfit us for the duties
and proper enjoyments of life. Resignation sinks into a kind of
peevish discontent. I am far, however, from thinking there is the
least danger of this in your case, my dear; for you have been on all
occasions enabled to look upon the fortunes of this life as under the
direction of a higher power, and have always preserved that propriety
and consistency of conduct in all circumstances which endears your
example to your family in particular, and to your friends. I am
therefore, my dear, for you to go out much, and to go to the house
up-stairs [he means to go up-stairs in the house, to visit the place
of the dead children], and to put yourself in the way of the visits
of your friends. I wish you would call on the Miss Grays, and it
would be a good thing upon a Saturday to dine with my mother, and
take Meggy and all the family with you, and let them have their
strawberries in town. The tickets of one of the _old-fashioned
coaches_ would take you all up, and if the evening were good, they
could all walk down, excepting Meggy and little David.’
‘_Inverness_, _July_ 25_th_, 11 _p.m._
‘Captain Wemyss, of Wemyss, has come to Inverness to go the voyage
with me, and as we are sleeping in a double-bedded room, I must no
longer transgress. You must remember me the best way you can to the
children.’
‘_On board of the Lighthouse Yacht_, _July_ 29_th_.
‘I got to Cromarty yesterday about mid-day, and went to church. It
happened to be the sacrament there, and I heard a Mr. Smith at that
place conclude the service with a very suitable exhortation. There
seemed a great concourse of people, but they had rather an
unfortunate day for them at the tent, as it rained a good deal.
After drinking tea at the inn, Captain Wemyss accompanied me on
board, and we sailed about eight last night. The wind at present
being rather a beating one, I think I shall have an opportunity of
standing into the bay of Wick, and leaving this letter to let you
know my progress and that I am well.’
‘_Lighthouse Yacht_, _Stornoway_, _August_ 4_th_.
‘To-day we had prayers on deck as usual when at sea. I read the 14th
chapter, I think, of Job. Captain Wemyss has been in the habit of
doing this on board his own ship, agreeably to the Articles of War.
Our passage round the Cape [Cape Wrath] was rather a cross one, and
as the wind was northerly, we had a pretty heavy sea, but upon the
whole have made a good passage, leaving many vessels behind us in
Orkney. I am quite well, my dear; and Captain Wemyss, who has much
spirit, and who is much given to observation, and a perfect
enthusiast in his profession, enlivens the voyage greatly. Let me
entreat you to move about much, and take a walk with the boys to
Leith. I think they have still many places to see there, and I wish
you would indulge them in this respect. Mr. Scales is the best
person I know for showing them the sailcloth-weaving, etc., and he
would have great pleasure in undertaking this. My dear, I trust soon
to be with you, and that through the goodness of God we shall meet
all well.’
‘There are two vessels lying here with emigrants for America, each
with eighty people on board, at all ages, from a few days to upwards
of sixty! Their prospects must be very forlorn to go with a slender
purse for distant and unknown countries.’
‘_Lighthouse Yacht_, _off Greenock_, _Aug._ 18_th_.
‘It was after _church-time_ before we got here, but we had prayers
upon deck on the way up the Clyde. This has, upon the whole, been a
very good voyage, and Captain Wemyss, who enjoys it much, has been an
excellent companion; we met with pleasure, and shall part with
regret.’
Strange that, after his long experience, my grandfather should have
learned so little of the attitude and even the dialect of the
spiritually-minded; that after forty-four years in a most religious
circle, he could drop without sense of incongruity from a period of
accepted phrases to ‘trust his wife was _getting up her spirits_,’ or
think to reassure her as to the character of Captain Wemyss by mentioning
that he had read prayers on the deck of his frigate ‘_agreeably to the
Articles of War_’! Yet there is no doubt—and it is one of the most
agreeable features of the kindly series—that he was doing his best to
please, and there is little doubt that he succeeded. Almost all my
grandfather’s private letters have been destroyed. This correspondence
has not only been preserved entire, but stitched up in the same covers
with the works of the godly women, the Reverend John Campbell, and the
painful Mrs. Ogle. I did not think to mention the good dame, but she
comes in usefully as an example. Amongst the treasures of the ladies of
my family, her letters have been honoured with a volume to themselves. I
read about a half of them myself; then handed over the task to one of
stauncher resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be
found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it was her only art
to communicate by post second-rate sermons at second-hand; and such, I
take it, was the correspondence in which my grandmother delighted. If I
am right, that of Robert Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the
contemporary ‘Sandford and Merton,’ his interest in the whole page of
experience, his perpetual quest, and fine scent of all that seems
romantic to a boy, his needless pomp of language, his excellent good
sense, his unfeigned, unstained, unwearied human kindliness, would seem
to her, in a comparison, dry and trivial and worldly. And if these
letters were by an exception cherished and preserved, it would be for one
or both of two reasons—because they dealt with and were bitter-sweet
reminders of a time of sorrow; or because she was pleased, perhaps
touched, by the writer’s guileless efforts to seem spiritually-minded.
After this date there were two more births and two more deaths, so that
the number of the family remained unchanged; in all five children
survived to reach maturity and to outlive their parents.
CHAPTER II: THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
I
It were hard to imagine a contrast more sharply defined than that between
the lives of the men and women of this family: the one so chambered, so
centred in the affections and the sensibilities; the other so active,
healthy, and expeditious. From May to November, Thomas Smith and Robert
Stevenson were on the mail, in the saddle, or at sea; and my grandfather,
in particular, seems to have been possessed with a demon of activity in
travel. In 1802, by direction of the Northern Lighthouse Board, he had
visited the coast of England from St. Bees, in Cumberland, and round by
the Scilly Islands to some place undecipherable by me; in all a distance
of 2500 miles. In 1806 I find him starting ‘on a tour round the south
coast of England, from the Humber to the Severn.’ Peace was not long
declared ere he found means to visit Holland, where he was in time to
see, in the navy-yard at Helvoetsluys, ‘about twenty of Bonaparte’s
_English flotilla_ lying in a state of decay, the object of curiosity to
Englishmen.’ By 1834 he seems to have been acquainted with the coast of
France from Dieppe to Bordeaux; and a main part of his duty as Engineer
to the Board of Northern Lights was one round of dangerous and laborious
travel.
In 1786, when Thomas Smith first received the appointment, the extended
and formidable coast of Scotland was lighted at a single point—the Isle
of May, in the jaws of the Firth of Forth, where, on a tower already a
hundred and fifty years old, an open coal-fire blazed in an iron
chauffer. The whole archipelago, thus nightly plunged in darkness, was
shunned by sea-going vessels, and the favourite courses were north about
Shetland and west about St. Kilda. When the Board met, four new lights
formed the extent of their intentions—Kinnaird Head, in Aberdeenshire, at
the eastern elbow of the coast; North Ronaldsay, in Orkney, to keep the
north and guide ships passing to the south’ard of Shetland; Island Glass,
on Harris, to mark the inner shore of the Hebrides and illuminate the
navigation of the Minch; and the Mull of Kintyre. These works were to be
attempted against obstacles, material and financial, that might have
staggered the most bold. Smith had no ship at his command till 1791; the
roads in those outlandish quarters where his business lay were scarce
passable when they existed, and the tower on the Mull of Kintyre stood
eleven months unlighted while the apparatus toiled and foundered by the
way among rocks and mosses. Not only had towers to be built and
apparatus transplanted; the supply of oil must be maintained, and the men
fed, in the same inaccessible and distant scenes; a whole service, with
its routine and hierarchy, had to be called out of nothing; and a new
trade (that of lightkeeper) to be taught, recruited, and organised. The
funds of the Board were at the first laughably inadequate. They embarked
on their career on a loan of twelve hundred pounds, and their income in
1789, after relief by a fresh Act of Parliament, amounted to less than
three hundred. It must be supposed that the thoughts of Thomas Smith, in
these early years, were sometimes coloured with despair; and since he
built and lighted one tower after another, and created and bequeathed to
his successors the elements of an excellent administration, it may be
conceded that he was not after all an unfortunate choice for a first
engineer.
War added fresh complications. In 1794 Smith came ‘very near to be
taken’ by a French squadron. In 1813 Robert Stevenson was cruising about
the neighbourhood of Cape Wrath in the immediate fear of Commodore
Rogers. The men, and especially the sailors, of the lighthouse service
must be protected by a medal and ticket from the brutal activity of the
press-gang. And the zeal of volunteer patriots was at times
embarrassing.
‘I set off on foot,’ writes my grandfather, ‘for Marazion, a town at
the head of Mount’s Bay, where I was in hopes of getting a boat to
freight. I had just got that length, and was making the necessary
inquiry, when a young man, accompanied by several idle-looking
fellows, came up to me, and in a hasty tone said, “Sir, in the king’s
name I seize your person and papers.” To which I replied that I
should be glad to see his authority, and know the reason of an
address so abrupt. He told me the want of time prevented his taking
regular steps, but that it would be necessary for me to return to
Penzance, as I was suspected of being a French spy. I proposed to
submit my papers to the nearest Justice of Peace, who was immediately
applied to, and came to the inn where I was. He seemed to be greatly
agitated, and quite at a loss how to proceed. The complaint
preferred against me was “that I had examined the Longships
Lighthouse with the most minute attention, and was no less particular
in my inquiries at the keepers of the lighthouse regarding the sunk
rocks lying off the Land’s End, with the sets of the currents and
tides along the coast: that I seemed particularly to regret the
situation of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and the loss of a
beacon which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed on the Wolf
Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunk rocks,
and a drawing of the lighthouse, and of Cape Cornwall. Further, that
I had refused the honour of Lord Edgecombe’s invitation to dinner,
offering as an apology that I had some particular business on hand.”’
My grandfather produced in answer his credentials and letter of credit;
but the justice, after perusing them, ‘very gravely observed that they
were “musty bits of paper,”’ and proposed to maintain the arrest. Some
more enlightened magistrates at Penzance relieved him of suspicion and
left him at liberty to pursue his journey,—‘which I did with so much
eagerness,’ he adds, ‘that I gave the two coal lights on the Lizard only
a very transient look.’
Lighthouse operations in Scotland differed essentially in character from
those in England. The English coast is in comparison a habitable, homely
place, well supplied with towns; the Scottish presents hundreds of miles
of savage islands and desolate moors. The Parliamentary committee of
1834, profoundly ignorant of this distinction, insisted with my
grandfather that the work at the various stations should be let out on
contract ‘in the neighbourhood,’ where sheep and deer, and gulls and
cormorants, and a few ragged gillies, perhaps crouching in a bee-hive
house, made up the only neighbours. In such situations repairs and
improvements could only be overtaken by collecting (as my grandfather
expressed it) a few ‘lads,’ placing them under charge of a foreman, and
despatching them about the coast as occasion served. The particular
danger of these seas increased the difficulty. The course of the
lighthouse tender lies amid iron-bound coasts, among tide-races, the
whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, flocks of islands, flocks of reefs,
many of them uncharted. The aid of steam was not yet. At first in
random coasting sloop, and afterwards in the cutter belonging to the
service, the engineer must ply and run amongst these multiplied dangers,
and sometimes late into the stormy autumn. For pages together my
grandfather’s diary preserves a record of these rude experiences; of hard
winds and rough seas; and of ‘the try-sail and storm-jib, those old
friends which I never like to see.’ They do not tempt to quotation, but
it was the man’s element, in which he lived, and delighted to live, and
some specimen must be presented. On Friday, September 10th, 1830, the
_Regent_ lying in Lerwick Bay, we have this entry: ‘The gale increases,
with continued rain.’ On the morrow, Saturday, 11th, the weather
appeared to moderate, and they put to sea, only to be driven by evening
into Levenswick. There they lay, ‘rolling much,’ with both anchors ahead
and the square yard on deck, till the morning of Saturday, 18th.
Saturday and Sunday they were plying to the southward with a ‘strong
breeze and a heavy sea,’ and on Sunday evening anchored in Otterswick.
‘Monday, 20th, it blows so fresh that we have no communication with the
shore. We see Mr. Rome on the beach, but we cannot communicate with him.
It blows “mere fire,” as the sailors express it.’ And for three days
more the diary goes on with tales of davits unshipped, high seas, strong
gales from the southward, and the ship driven to refuge in Kirkwall or
Deer Sound. I have many a passage before me to transcribe, in which my
grandfather draws himself as a man of minute and anxious exactitude about
details. It must not be forgotten that these voyages in the tender were
the particular pleasure and reward of his existence; that he had in him a
reserve of romance which carried him delightedly over these hardships and
perils; that to him it was ‘great gain’ to be eight nights and seven days
in the savage bay of Levenswick—to read a book in the much agitated
cabin—to go on deck and hear the gale scream in his ears, and see the
landscape dark with rain and the ship plunge at her two anchors—and to
turn in at night and wake again at morning, in his narrow berth, to the
glamorous and continued voices of the gale.
His perils and escapes were beyond counting. I shall only refer to two:
the first, because of the impression made upon himself; the second, from
the incidental picture it presents of the north islanders. On the 9th
October 1794 he took passage from Orkney in the sloop _Elizabeth_ of
Stromness. She made a fair passage till within view of Kinnaird Head,
where, as she was becalmed some three miles in the offing, and wind
seemed to threaten from the south-east, the captain landed him, to
continue his journey more expeditiously ashore. A gale immediately
followed, and the _Elizabeth_ was driven back to Orkney and lost with all
hands. The second escape I have been in the habit of hearing related by
an eye-witness, my own father, from the earliest days of childhood. On a
September night, the _Regent_ lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a
violent and windless swell. It was still dark, when they were alarmed by
the sound of breakers, and an anchor was immediately let go. The peep of
dawn discovered them swinging in desperate proximity to the Isle of Swona
{54a} and the surf bursting close under their stern. There was in this
place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts
stood close about the head of the beach. All slept; the doors were
closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board ship
seemed to contemplate a village of the dead. It was thought possible to
launch a boat and tow the _Regent_ from her place of danger; and with
this view a signal of distress was made and a gun fired with a red-hot
poker from the galley. Its detonation awoke the sleepers. Door after
door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher
was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head.
Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should rather
stand wrecker after wrecker. There was no emotion, no animation, it
scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously
awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side
and waited also. To the end of his life, my father remembered that
amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach; and with a special and
natural animosity, the boys of his own age. But presently a light air
sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled them again; and
little by little the _Regent_ fetched way against the swell, and clawed
off shore into the turbulent firth.
The purpose of these voyages was to effect a landing on open beaches or
among shelving rocks, not for persons only, but for coals and food, and
the fragile furniture of light-rooms. It was often impossible. In 1831
I find my grandfather ‘hovering for a week’ about the Pentland Skerries
for a chance to land; and it was almost always difficult. Much knack and
enterprise were early developed among the seamen of the service; their
management of boats is to this day a matter of admiration; and I find my
grandfather in his diary depicting the nature of their excellence in one
happily descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain Soutar had
landed ‘the small stores and nine casks of oil _with all the activity of
a smuggler_.’ And it was one thing to land, another to get on board
again. I have here a passage from the diary, where it seems to have been
touch-and-go. ‘I landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point,
in a _mere gale or blast of wind_ from west-south-west, at 2 p.m. It
blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to the
ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore. While I was in the
light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell
Rock, but with the _waving of a tree_! This the light-keepers seemed to
be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that “it was very
pleasant,” perhaps meaning interesting or curious. The captain worked
the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I got on board
again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the point.’ But not even the
dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must at
times have been left in strange berths and with but rude provision. I
may instance the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon
an islet, sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of the
islanders, and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and lobsters.
The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a
vignette. Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the Bell
Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the _Regent_. He was active,
admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear. Once, in
London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his
rusticity and his prodigious accent. They plied him with drink—a
hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed
cards, and Soutar would not play. At last, one of them, regarding him
with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened? ‘I’m
no’ very easy fleyed,’ replied the captain. And the rooks withdrew after
some easier pigeon. So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity
of so many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather’s
estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please
him with much hypocritical skill. He usually dined on Sundays in the
cabin. He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or
whisky, often in his full rig of sou’-wester, oilskins, and long boots;
and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself
on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a
blunt and seamanlike demeanour. My father and uncles, with the devilish
penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father,
indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken. He had
crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place
of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins.
The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy
listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian. Of Soutar, I may
say _tantum vidi_, having met him in the Leith docks now more than thirty
years ago, when he abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged
me (in the most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left
impressed for ever on my memory the image of his own Bardolphian nose.
He died not long after.
The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must
often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond
reach of the mail or the post-chaise, beyond even the tracery of the
bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather. Up to 1807 my
grand-father seems to have travelled much on horseback; but he then gave
up the idea—‘such,’ he writes with characteristic emphasis and capital
letters, ‘is the Plague of Baiting.’ He was a good pedestrian; at the
age of fifty-eight I find him covering seventeen miles over the moors of
the Mackay country in less than seven hours, and that is not bad
travelling for a scramble. The piece of country traversed was already a
familiar track, being that between Loch Eriboll and Cape Wrath; and I
think I can scarce do better than reproduce from the diary some traits of
his first visit. The tender lay in Loch Eriboll; by five in the morning
they sat down to breakfast on board; by six they were ashore—my
grandfather, Mr. Slight an assistant, and Soutar of the jolly nose, and
had been taken in charge by two young gentlemen of the neighbourhood and
a pair of gillies. About noon they reached the Kyle of Durness and
passed the ferry. By half-past three they were at Cape Wrath—not yet
known by the emphatic abbreviation of ‘The Cape’—and beheld upon all
sides of them unfrequented shores, an expanse of desert moor, and the
high-piled Western Ocean. The site of the tower was chosen. Perhaps it
is by inheritance of blood, but I know few things more inspiriting than
this location of a lighthouse in a designated space of heather and air,
through which the sea-birds are still flying. By 9 p.m. the return
journey had brought them again to the shores of the Kyle. The night was
dirty, and as the sea was high and the ferry-boat small, Soutar and Mr.
Stevenson were left on the far side, while the rest of the party embarked
and were received into the darkness. They made, in fact, a safe though
an alarming passage; but the ferryman refused to repeat the adventure;
and my grand-father and the captain long paced the beach, impatient for
their turn to pass, and tormented with rising anxiety as to the fate of
their companions. At length they sought the shelter of a shepherd’s
house. ‘We had miserable up-putting,’ the diary continues, ‘and on both
sides of the ferry much anxiety of mind. Our beds were clean straw, and
but for the circumstance of the boat, I should have slept as soundly as
ever I did after a walk through moss and mire of sixteen hours.’
To go round the lights, even to-day, is to visit past centuries. The
tide of tourists that flows yearly in Scotland, vulgarising all where it
approaches, is still defined by certain barriers. It will be long ere
there is a hotel at Sumburgh or a hydropathic at Cape Wrath; it will be
long ere any _char-à-banc_, laden with tourists, shall drive up to Barra
Head or Monach, the Island of the Monks. They are farther from London
than St. Petersburg, and except for the towers, sounding and shining all
night with fog-bells and the radiance of the light-room, glittering by
day with the trivial brightness of white paint, these island and moorland
stations seem inaccessible to the civilisation of to-day, and even to the
end of my grandfather’s career the isolation was far greater. There ran
no post at all in the Long Island; from the light-house on Barra Head a
boat must be sent for letters as far as Tobermory, between sixty and
seventy miles of open sea; and the posts of Shetland, which had surprised
Sir Walter Scott in 1814, were still unimproved in 1833, when my
grandfather reported on the subject. The group contained at the time a
population of 30,000 souls, and enjoyed a trade which had increased in
twenty years seven-fold, to between three and four thousand tons. Yet
the mails were despatched and received by chance coasting vessels at the
rate of a penny a letter; six and eight weeks often elapsed between
opportunities, and when a mail was to be made up, sometimes at a moment’s
notice, the bellman was sent hastily through the streets of Lerwick.
Between Shetland and Orkney, only seventy miles apart, there was ‘no
trade communication whatever.’
Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when Robert
Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the barbarism
was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their
life perhaps unique in history. Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the
Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up
and to return experienced seamen. On the outlying islands the clergy
lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different country
from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas. My
grandfather’s unrivalled treasury of anecdote was never written down; it
embellished his talk while he yet was, and died with him when he died;
and such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands of
Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group. These bordered on one of
the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually in
their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene and
cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size. In one year,
1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than five vessels on
the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.
‘Hardly a year passed,’ he writes, ‘without instances of this kind;
for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed island,
the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful
manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes
and pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and
has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea. It had even become
proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that “if wrecks
were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor isle of Sanday
as anywhere else.” On this and the neighbouring islands the
inhabitants had certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for the
eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form.
For example, although quarries are to be met with generally in these
islands, and the stones are very suitable for building dykes
(_Anglicé_, walls), yet instances occur of the land being enclosed,
even to a considerable extent, with ship-timbers. The author has
actually seen a park (_Anglicé_, meadow) paled round chiefly with
cedar-wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras-built ship; and
in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the
inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley-meal
porridge. On complaining to one of the pilots of the badness of his
boat’s sails, he replied to the author with some degree of
pleasantry, “Had it been His will that you came na’ here wi’ your
lights, we might ‘a’ had better sails to our boats, and more o’ other
things.” It may further be mentioned that when some of Lord Dundas’s
farms are to be let in these islands a competition takes place for
the lease, and it is _bona fide_ understood that a much higher rent
is paid than the lands would otherwise give were it not for the
chance of making considerably by the agency and advantages attending
shipwrecks on the shores of the respective farms.’
The people of North Ronaldsay still spoke Norse, or, rather, mixed it
with their English. The walls of their huts were built to a great
thickness of rounded stones from the sea-beach; the roof flagged, loaded
with earth, and perforated by a single hole for the escape of smoke. The
grass grew beautifully green on the flat house-top, where the family
would assemble with their dogs and cats, as on a pastoral lawn; there
were no windows, and in my grandfather’s expression, ‘there was really no
demonstration of a house unless it were the diminutive door.’ He once
landed on Ronaldsay with two friends. The inhabitants crowded and
pressed so much upon the strangers that the bailiff, or resident factor
of the island, blew with his ox-horn, calling out to the natives to stand
off and let the gentlemen come forward to the laird; upon which one of
the islanders, as spokesman, called out, “God ha’e us, man! thou needsna
mak’ sic a noise. It’s no’ every day we ha’e _three hatted men_ on our
isle.”’ When the Surveyor of Taxes came (for the first time, perhaps) to
Sanday, and began in the King’s name to complain of the unconscionable
swarms of dogs, and to menace the inhabitants with taxation, it chanced
that my grandfather and his friend, Dr. Patrick Neill, were received by
an old lady in a Ronaldsay hut. Her hut, which was similar to the model
described, stood on a Ness, or point of land jutting into the sea. They
were made welcome in the firelit cellar, placed ‘in _casey_ or
straw-worked chairs, after the Norwegian fashion, with arms, and a canopy
overhead,’ and given milk in a wooden dish. These hospitalities attended
to, the old lady turned at once to Dr. Neill, whom she took for the
Surveyor of Taxes. ‘Sir,’ said she, ‘gin ye’ll tell the King that I
canna keep the Ness free o’ the Bangers (sheep) without twa hun’s, and
twa guid hun’s too, he’ll pass me threa the tax on dugs.’
This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are
characters of a secluded people. Mankind—and, above all, islanders—come
very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily, upon one convention or
another, a tolerable corporate life. The danger is to those from
without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands, but appear
suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions. For these no
bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened by their
peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like the fisher-folk of Lunga, as
spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach strewn with
dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and, after a
decent grace, sup claret to their porridge. It is not wickedness: it is
scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power, the sense of isolation and
the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor races. Think how many
viking ships had sailed by these islands in the past, how many vikings
had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the dead,
and carried off the wines of the living; and blame them, if you are able,
for that belief (which may be called one of the parables of the devil’s
gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will prove the bane of his
deliverer. It might be thought that my grandfather, coming there
unknown, and upon an employment so hateful to the inhabitants, must have
run the hazard of his life. But this were to misunderstand. He came
franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was the King’s officer; the
work was ‘opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter Trail, minister of the
parish’; God and the King had decided it, and the people of these pious
islands bowed their heads. There landed, indeed, in North Ronaldsay,
during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a traveller whose life
seems really to have been imperilled. A very little man of a swarthy
complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved, from a long boat
passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the parish schoolmaster.
But he had been seen landing. The inhabitants had identified him for a
Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark and
dwarfish aboriginal people of the land. Immediately the obscure ferment
of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their
bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with fearful
whisperings. For some time the schoolmaster held them at bay, and at
last despatched a messenger to call my grand-father. He came: he found
the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome resurrection of the
dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular of testimony, the
traveller’s uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued, and finding
argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and examine with his own
eyes the sleeping Pict. One glance was sufficient: the man was now a
missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom
my grandfather had dealt. He came forth again with this report, and the
folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to their own houses. They
were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets; that was all. But the Lord
deliver us from the tender mercies of a frightened flock!
I will give two more instances of their superstition. When Sir Walter
Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his pocket a
hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.
‘Some years afterwards,’ he writes, ‘one of my assistants on a visit
to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage close
by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of
the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
professional appendage. She said: “O sir, ane of the bairns fand it
lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and
thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole,
and it has layen there ever since.”’
This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of
Scott himself:
‘At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped
out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners. He was
a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness
without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie! Her fee was
extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her
kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she
disclaimed all unlawful acts. The wind thus petitioned for was sure,
she said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners had to wait
some time for it. The woman’s dwelling and appearance were not
unbecoming her pretensions. Her house, which was on the brow of the
steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a
series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have
been the abode of Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant
dealt. She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years
old, withered and dried up like a mummy. A clay-coloured kerchief,
folded round her neck, corresponded in colour to her corpse-like
complexion. Two light blue eyes that gleamed with a lustre like that
of insanity, an utterance of astonishing rapidity, a nose and chin
that almost met together, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave
her the effect of Hecate. Such was Bessie Millie, to whom the
mariners paid a sort of tribute with a feeling between jest and
earnest.’
II
From about the beginning of the century up to 1807 Robert Stevenson was
in partnership with Thomas Smith. In the last-named year the partnership
was dissolved; Thomas Smith returning to his business, and my grandfather
becoming sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights.
I must try, by excerpts from his diary and correspondence, to convey to
the reader some idea of the ardency and thoroughness with which he threw
himself into the largest and least of his multifarious engagements in
this service. But first I must say a word or two upon the life of
lightkeepers, and the temptations to which they are more particularly
exposed. The lightkeeper occupies a position apart among men. In
sea-towers the complement has always been three since the deplorable
business in the Eddystone, when one keeper died, and the survivor,
signalling in vain for relief, was compelled to live for days with the
dead body. These usually pass their time by the pleasant human expedient
of quarrelling; and sometimes, I am assured, not one of the three is on
speaking terms with any other. On shore stations, which on the Scottish
coast are sometimes hardly less isolated, the usual number is two, a
principal and an assistant. The principal is dissatisfied with the
assistant, or perhaps the assistant keeps pigeons, and the principal
wants the water from the roof. Their wives and families are with them,
living cheek by jowl. The children quarrel; Jockie hits Jimsie in the
eye, and the mothers make haste to mingle in the dissension. Perhaps
there is trouble about a broken dish; perhaps Mrs. Assistant is more
highly born than Mrs. Principal and gives herself airs; and the men are
drawn in and the servants presently follow. ‘Church privileges have been
denied the keeper’s and the assistant’s servants,’ I read in one case,
and the eminently Scots periphrasis means neither more nor less than
excommunication, ‘on account of the discordant and quarrelsome state of
the families. The cause, when inquired into, proves to be
_tittle_-_tattle_ on both sides.’ The tender comes round; the foremen
and artificers go from station to station; the gossip flies through the
whole system of the service, and the stories, disfigured and exaggerated,
return to their own birthplace with the returning tender. The English
Board was apparently shocked by the picture of these dissensions. ‘When
the Trinity House can,’ I find my grandfather writing at Beachy Head, in
1834, ‘they do not appoint two keepers, they disagree so ill. A man who
has a family is assisted by his family; and in this way, to my experience
and present observation, the business is very much neglected. One keeper
is, in my view, a bad system. This day’s visit to an English lighthouse
convinces me of this, as the lightkeeper was walking on a staff with the
gout, and the business performed by one of his daughters, a girl of
thirteen or fourteen years of age.’ This man received a hundred a year!
It shows a different reading of human nature, perhaps typical of Scotland
and England, that I find in my grandfather’s diary the following pregnant
entry: ‘_The lightkeepers_, _agreeing ill_, _keep one another to their
duty_.’ But the Scottish system was not alone founded on this cynical
opinion. The dignity and the comfort of the northern lightkeeper were
both attended to. He had a uniform to ‘raise him in his own estimation,
and in that of his neighbour, which is of consequence to a person of
trust. The keepers,’ my grandfather goes on, in another place, ‘are
attended to in all the detail of accommodation in the best style as
shipmasters; and this is believed to have a sensible effect upon their
conduct, and to regulate their general habits as members of society.’ He
notes, with the same dip of ink, that ‘the brasses were not clean, and
the persons of the keepers not _trig’_; and thus we find him writing to a
culprit: ‘I have to complain that you are not cleanly in your person, and
that your manner of speech is ungentle, and rather inclines to rudeness.
You must therefore take a different view of your duties as a
lightkeeper.’ A high ideal for the service appears in these expressions,
and will be more amply illustrated further on. But even the Scottish
lightkeeper was frail. During the unbroken solitude of the winter
months, when inspection is scarce possible, it must seem a vain toil to
polish the brass hand-rail of the stair, or to keep an unrewarded vigil
in the light-room; and the keepers are habitually tempted to the
beginnings of sloth, and must unremittingly resist. He who temporises
with his conscience is already lost. I must tell here an anecdote that
illustrates the difficulties of inspection. In the days of my uncle
David and my father there was a station which they regarded with
jealousy. The two engineers compared notes and were agreed. The tower
was always clean, but seemed always to bear traces of a hasty cleansing,
as though the keepers had been suddenly forewarned. On inquiry, it
proved that such was the case, and that a wandering fiddler was the
unfailing harbinger of the engineer. At last my father was storm-stayed
one Sunday in a port at the other side of the island. The visit was
quite overdue, and as he walked across upon the Monday morning he
promised himself that he should at last take the keepers unprepared.
They were both waiting for him in uniform at the gate; the fiddler had
been there on Saturday!
My grandfather, as will appear from the following extracts, was much a
martinet, and had a habit of expressing himself on paper with an almost
startling emphasis. Personally, with his powerful voice, sanguine
countenance, and eccentric and original locutions, he was well qualified
to inspire a salutary terror in the service.
‘I find that the keepers have, by some means or another, got into the
way of cleaning too much with rotten-stone and oil. I take the
principal keeper to _task_ on this subject, and make him bring a
clean towel and clean one of the brazen frames, which leaves the
towel in an odious state. This towel I put up in a sheet of paper,
seal, and take with me to confront Mr. Murdoch, who has just left the
station.’ ‘This letter’—a stern enumeration of complaints—‘to lie a
week on the light-room book-place, and to be put in the Inspector’s
hands when he comes round.’ ‘It is the most painful thing that can
occur for me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the
keepers; and when I come to the Lighthouse, instead of having the
satisfaction to meet them with approbation, it is distressing when
one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour; but
from such culpable negligence as you have shown there is no avoiding
it. I hold it as a fixed maxim that, when a man or a family put on a
slovenly appearance in their houses, stairs, and lanterns, I always
find their reflectors, burners, windows, and light in general, ill
attended to; and, therefore, I must insist on cleanliness
throughout.’ ‘I find you very deficient in the duty of the high
tower. You thus place your appointment as Principal Keeper in
jeopardy; and I think it necessary, as an old servant of the Board,
to put you upon your guard once for all at this time. I call upon
you to recollect what was formerly and is now said to you. The state
of the backs of the reflectors at the high tower was disgraceful, as
I pointed out to you on the spot. They were as if spitten upon, and
greasy finger-marks upon the back straps. I demand an explanation of
this state of things.’ ‘The cause of the Commissioners dismissing
you is expressed in the minute; and it must be a matter of regret to
you that you have been so much engaged in smuggling, and also that
the Reports relative to the cleanliness of the Lighthouse, upon being
referred to, rather added to their unfavourable opinion.’ ‘I do not
go into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for
the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.’ ‘The families of
the two lightkeepers here agree very ill. I have effected a
reconciliation for the present.’ ‘Things are in a very _humdrum_
state here. There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste
or tidiness displayed. Robert’s wife _greets_ and M’Gregor’s scolds;
and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty. I
told him that if he was to mind wives’ quarrels, and to take them up,
the only way was for him and M’Gregor to go down to the point like
Sir G. Grant and Lord Somerset.’ ‘I cannot say that I have
experienced a more unpleasant meeting than that of the lighthouse
folks this morning, or ever saw a stronger example of unfeeling
barbarity than the conduct which the ---s exhibited. These two
cold-hearted persons, not contented with having driven the daughter
of the poor nervous woman from her father’s house, _both_ kept
_pouncing_ at her, lest she should forget her great misfortune.
Write me of their conduct. Do not make any communication of the
state of these families at Kinnaird Head, as this would be like
_Tale-bearing_.’
There is the great word out. Tales and Tale-bearing, always with the
emphatic capitals, run continually in his correspondence. I will give
but two instances:—
‘Write to David [one of the lightkeepers] and caution him to be more
prudent how he expresses himself. Let him attend his duty to the
Lighthouse and his family concerns, and give less heed to
Tale-bearers.’ ‘I have not your last letter at hand to quote its
date; but, if I recollect, it contains some kind of tales, which
nonsense I wish you would lay aside, and notice only the concerns of
your family and the important charge committed to you.’
Apparently, however, my grandfather was not himself inaccessible to the
Tale-bearer, as the following indicates:
‘In walking along with Mr. --- , I explain to him that I should be
under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here
from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of
weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of
him. His answer was, “That will be with regard to the lass?” I told
him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject.’ ‘Mr.
Miller appears to be master and man. I am sorry about this foolish
fellow. Had I known his train, I should not, as I did, have rather
forced him into the service. Upon finding the windows in the state
they were, I turned upon Mr. Watt, and especially upon Mr. Stewart.
The latter did not appear for a length of time to have visited the
light-room. On asking the cause—did Mr. Watt and him (_sic_)
disagree; he said no; but he had got very bad usage from the
assistant, “who was a very obstreperous man.” I could not bring Mr.
Watt to put in language his objections to Miller; all I could get was
that, he being your friend, and saying he was unwell, he did not like
to complain or to push the man; that the man seemed to have no liking
to anything like work; that he was unruly; that, being an educated
man, he despised them. I was, however, determined to have out of
these _unwilling_ witnesses the language alluded to. I fixed upon
Mr. Stewart as chief; he hedged. My curiosity increased, and I
urged. Then he said, “What would I think, just exactly, of Mr. Watt
being called an Old B-?” You may judge of my surprise. There was
not another word uttered. This was quite enough, as coming from a
person I should have calculated upon quite different behaviour from.
It spoke a volume of the man’s mind and want of principle.’ ‘Object
to the keeper keeping a Bull-Terrier dog of ferocious appearance. It
is dangerous, as we land at all times of the night.’ ‘Have only to
complain of the storehouse floor being spotted with oil. Give orders
for this being instantly rectified, so that on my return to-morrow I
may see things in good order.’ ‘The furniture of both houses wants
much rubbing. Mrs. ---’s carpets are absurd beyond anything I have
seen. I want her to turn the fenders up with the bottom to the
fireplace: the carpets, when not likely to be in use, folded up and
laid as a hearthrug partly under the fender.’
My grandfather was king in the service to his finger-tips. All should go
in his way, from the principal lightkeeper’s coat to the assistant’s
fender, from the gravel in the garden-walks to the bad smell in the
kitchen, or the oil-spots on the store-room floor. It might be thought
there was nothing more calculated to awake men’s resentment, and yet his
rule was not more thorough than it was beneficent. His thought for the
keepers was continual, and it did not end with their lives. He tried to
manage their successions; he thought no pains too great to arrange
between a widow and a son who had succeeded his father; he was often
harassed and perplexed by tales of hardship; and I find him writing,
almost in despair, of their improvident habits and the destitution that
awaited their families upon a death. ‘The house being completely
furnished, they come into possession without necessaries, and they go out
NAKED. The insurance seems to have failed, and what next is to be
tried?’ While they lived he wrote behind their backs to arrange for the
education of their children, or to get them other situations if they
seemed unsuitable for the Northern Lights. When he was at a lighthouse
on a Sunday he held prayers and heard the children read. When a keeper
was sick, he lent him his horse and sent him mutton and brandy from the
ship. ‘The assistant’s wife having been this morning confined, there was
sent ashore a bottle of sherry and a few rusks—a practice which I have
always observed in this service,’ he writes. They dwelt, many of them,
in uninhabited isles or desert forelands, totally cut off from shops.
Many of them were, besides, fallen into a rustic dishabitude of life, so
that even when they visited a city they could scarce be trusted with
their own affairs, as (for example) he who carried home to his children,
thinking they were oranges, a bag of lemons. And my grandfather seems to
have acted, at least in his early years, as a kind of gratuitous agent
for the service. Thus I find him writing to a keeper in 1806, when his
mind was already preoccupied with arrangements for the Bell Rock: ‘I am
much afraid I stand very unfavourably with you as a man of promise, as I
was to send several things of which I believe I have more than once got
the memorandum. All I can say is that in this respect you are not
singular. This makes me no better; but really I have been driven about
beyond all example in my past experience, and have been essentially
obliged to neglect my own urgent affairs.’ No servant of the Northern
Lights came to Edinburgh but he was entertained at Baxter’s Place to
breakfast. There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down delightedly
with his broad-spoken, homespun officers. His whole relation to the
service was, in fact, patriarchal; and I believe I may say that
throughout its ranks he was adored. I have spoken with many who knew
him; I was his grandson, and their words may have very well been words of
flattery; but there was one thing that could not be affected, and that
was the look and light that came into their faces at the name of Robert
Stevenson.
In the early part of the century the foreman builder was a young man of
the name of George Peebles, a native of Anstruther. My grandfather had
placed in him a very high degree of confidence, and he was already
designated to be foreman at the Bell Rock, when, on Christmas-day 1806,
on his way home from Orkney, he was lost in the schooner _Traveller_.
The tale of the loss of the _Traveller_ is almost a replica of that of
the _Elizabeth_ of Stromness; like the _Elizabeth_ she came as far as
Kinnaird Head, was then surprised by a storm, driven back to Orkney, and
bilged and sank on the island of Flotta. It seems it was about the dusk
of the day when the ship struck, and many of the crew and passengers were
drowned. About the same hour, my grandfather was in his office at the
writing-table; and the room beginning to darken, he laid down his pen and
fell asleep. In a dream he saw the door open and George Peebles come in,
‘reeling to and fro, and staggering like a drunken man,’ with water
streaming from his head and body to the floor. There it gathered into a
wave which, sweeping forward, submerged my grandfather. Well, no matter
how deep; versions vary; and at last he awoke, and behold it was a dream!
But it may be conceived how profoundly the impression was written even on
the mind of a man averse from such ideas, when the news came of the wreck
on Flotta and the death of George.
George’s vouchers and accounts had perished with himself; and it appeared
he was in debt to the Commissioners. But my grandfather wrote to Orkney
twice, collected evidence of his disbursements, and proved him to be
seventy pounds ahead. With this sum, he applied to George’s brothers,
and had it apportioned between their mother and themselves. He
approached the Board and got an annuity of £5 bestowed on the widow
Peebles; and we find him writing her a long letter of explanation and
advice, and pressing on her the duty of making a will. That he should
thus act executor was no singular instance. But besides this we are able
to assist at some of the stages of a rather touching experiment; no less
than an attempt to secure Charles Peebles heir to George’s favour. He is
despatched, under the character of ‘a fine young man’; recommended to
gentlemen for ‘advice, as he’s a stranger in your place, and indeed to
this kind of charge, this being his first outset as Foreman’; and for a
long while after, the letter-book, in the midst of that thrilling first
year of the Bell Rock, is encumbered with pages of instruction and
encouragement. The nature of a bill, and the precautions that are to be
observed about discounting it, are expounded at length and with
clearness. ‘You are not, I hope, neglecting, Charles, to work the
harbour at spring-tides; and see that you pay the greatest attention to
get the well so as to supply the keeper with water, for he is a very
helpless fellow, and so unfond of hard work that I fear he could do ill
to keep himself in water by going to the other side for it.’—‘With regard
to spirits, Charles, I see very little occasion for it.’ These abrupt
apostrophes sound to me like the voice of an awakened conscience; but
they would seem to have reverberated in vain in the ears of Charles.
There was trouble in Pladda, his scene of operations; his men ran away
from him, there was at least a talk of calling in the Sheriff. ‘I fear,’
writes my grandfather, ‘you have been too indulgent, and I am sorry to
add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a circumstance which I
have experienced, and which you will learn as you go on in business.’ I
wonder, was not Charles Peebles himself a case in point? Either death,
at least, or disappointment and discharge, must have ended his service in
the Northern Lights; and in later correspondence I look in vain for any
mention of his name—Charles, I mean, not Peebles: for as late as 1839 my
grandfather is patiently writing to another of the family: ‘I am sorry
you took the trouble of applying to me about your son, as it lies quite
out of my way to forward his views in the line of his profession as a
Draper.’
III
A professional life of Robert Stevenson has been already given to the
world by his son David, and to that I would refer those interested in
such matters. But my own design, which is to represent the man, would be
very ill carried out if I suffered myself or my reader to forget that he
was, first of all and last of all, an engineer. His chief claim to the
style of a mechanical inventor is on account of the Jib or Balance Crane
of the Bell Rock, which are beautiful contrivances. But the great merit
of this engineer was not in the field of engines. He was above all
things a projector of works in the face of nature, and a modifier of
nature itself. A road to be made, a tower to be built, a harbour to be
constructed, a river to be trained and guided in its channel—these were
the problems with which his mind was continually occupied; and for these
and similar ends he travelled the world for more than half a century,
like an artist, note-book in hand.
He once stood and looked on at the emptying of a certain oil-tube; he did
so watch in hand, and accurately timed the operation; and in so doing
offered the perfect type of his profession. The fact acquired might
never be of use: it was acquired: another link in the world’s huge chain
of processes was brought down to figures and placed at the service of the
engineer. ‘The very term mensuration sounds _engineer-like_,’ I find him
writing; and in truth what the engineer most properly deals with is that
which can be measured, weighed, and numbered. The time of any operation
in hours and minutes, its cost in pounds, shillings, and pence, the
strain upon a given point in foot-pounds—these are his conquests, with
which he must continually furnish his mind, and which, after he has
acquired them, he must continually apply and exercise. They must be not
only entries in note-books, to be hurriedly consulted; in the actor’s
phrase, he must be _stale_ in them; in a word of my grandfather’s, they
must be ‘fixed in the mind like the ten fingers and ten toes.’
These are the certainties of the engineer; so far he finds a solid
footing and clear views. But the province of formulas and constants is
restricted. Even the mechanical engineer comes at last to an end of his
figures, and must stand up, a practical man, face to face with the
discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of theory. After the machine is
finished, and the steam turned on, the next is to drive it; and
experience and an exquisite sympathy must teach him where a weight should
be applied or a nut loosened. With the civil engineer, more properly so
called (if anything can be proper with this awkward coinage), the
obligation starts with the beginning. He is always the practical man.
The rains, the winds and the waves, the complexity and the fitfulness of
nature, are always before him. He has to deal with the unpredictable,
with those forces (in Smeaton’s phrase) that ‘are subject to no
calculation’; and still he must predict, still calculate them, at his
peril. His work is not yet in being, and he must foresee its influence:
how it shall deflect the tide, exaggerate the waves, dam back the
rain-water, or attract the thunderbolt. He visits a piece of sea-board;
and from the inclination and soil of the beach, from the weeds and
shell-fish, from the configuration of the coast and the depth of
soundings outside, he must deduce what magnitude of waves is to be looked
for. He visits a river, its summer water babbling on shallows; and he
must not only read, in a thousand indications, the measure of winter
freshets, but be able to predict the violence of occasional great floods.
Nay, and more; he must not only consider that which is, but that which
may be. Thus I find my grandfather writing, in a report on the North Esk
Bridge: ‘A less waterway might have sufficed, but the _valleys may come
to be meliorated by drainage_.’ One field drained after another through
all that confluence of vales, and we come to a time when they shall
precipitate by so much a more copious and transient flood, as the gush of
the flowing drain-pipe is superior to the leakage of a peat.
It is plain there is here but a restricted use for formulas. In this
sort of practice, the engineer has need of some transcendental sense.
Smeaton, the pioneer, bade him obey his ‘feelings’; my father, that
‘power of estimating obscure forces which supplies a coefficient of its
own to every rule.’ The rules must be everywhere indeed; but they must
everywhere be modified by this transcendental coefficient, everywhere
bent to the impression of the trained eye and the _feelings_ of the
engineer. A sentiment of physical laws and of the scale of nature, which
shall have been strong in the beginning and progressively fortified by
observation, must be his guide in the last recourse. I had the most
opportunity to observe my father. He would pass hours on the beach,
brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection,
noting when they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne or Manor, we have spent
together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to
him, as I am now sorry to think, bitterly mortifying. The river was to
me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see—I could not be made to
see—it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces,
which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and
enduring interest. ‘That bank was being under-cut,’ he might say. ‘Why?
Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the _filum fluminis_
be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge upon
the other shore? and what would be the result? Or suppose you were to
blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it—use the eyes God has
given you—can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed
upon this side?’ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until
I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight. Thus he
pored over the engineer’s voluminous handy-book of nature; thus must,
too, have pored my grand-father and uncles.
But it is of the essence of this knowledge, or this knack of mind, to be
largely incommunicable. ‘It cannot be imparted to another,’ says my
father. The verbal casting-net is thrown in vain over these evanescent,
inferential relations. Hence the insignificance of much engineering
literature. So far as the science can be reduced to formulas or
diagrams, the book is to the point; so far as the art depends on intimate
study of the ways of nature, the author’s words will too often be found
vapid. This fact—that engineering looks one way, and literature
another—was what my grand-father overlooked. All his life long, his pen
was in his hand, piling up a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself
against all possible contingencies. Scarce anything fell under his
notice but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled
it in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes inexact
and wordy, style. The Travelling Diary (so he called it) was kept in
fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up, rudely indexed,
and put by for future reference. Such volumes as have reached me contain
a surprising medley: the whole details of his employment in the Northern
Lights and his general practice; the whole biography of an enthusiastic
engineer. Much of it is useful and curious; much merely otiose; and much
can only be described as an attempt to impart that which cannot be
imparted in words. Of such are his repeated and heroic descriptions of
reefs; monuments of misdirected literary energy, which leave upon the
mind of the reader no effect but that of a multiplicity of words and the
suggested vignette of a lusty old gentleman scrambling among tangle. It
is to be remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the
egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession
widen daily. He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine,
introduced. He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside
of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself had ‘often been twelve
hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two days’! The
profession was still but in its second generation, and had already broken
down the barriers of time and space. Who should set a limit to its
future encroachments? And hence, with a kind of sanguine pedantry, he
pursued his design of ‘keeping up with the day’ and posting himself and
his family on every mortal subject. Of this unpractical idealism we
shall meet with many instances; there was not a trade, and scarce an
accomplishment, but he thought it should form part of the outfit of an
engineer; and not content with keeping an encyclopaedic diary himself, he
would fain have set all his sons to work continuing and extending it.
They were more happily inspired. My father’s engineering pocket-book was
not a bulky volume; with its store of pregnant notes and vital formulas,
it served him through life, and was not yet filled when he came to die.
As for Robert Stevenson and the Travelling Diary, I should be ungrateful
to complain, for it has supplied me with many lively traits for this and
subsequent chapters; but I must still remember much of the period of my
study there as a sojourn in the Valley of the Shadow.
The duty of the engineer is twofold—to design the work, and to see the
work done. We have seen already something of the vociferous thoroughness
of the man, upon the cleaning of lamps and the polishing of reflectors.
In building, in road-making, in the construction of bridges, in every
detail and byway of his employments, he pursued the same ideal.
Perfection (with a capital P and violently under-scored) was his design.
A crack for a penknife, the waste of ‘six-and-thirty shillings,’ ‘the
loss of a day or a tide,’ in each of these he saw and was revolted by the
finger of the sloven; and to spirits intense as his, and immersed in
vital undertakings, the slovenly is the dishonest, and wasted time is
instantly translated into lives endangered. On this consistent idealism
there is but one thing that now and then trenches with a touch of
incongruity, and that is his love of the picturesque. As when he laid
out a road on Hogarth’s line of beauty; bade a foreman be careful, in
quarrying, not ‘to disfigure the island’; or regretted in a report that
‘the great stone, called the _Devil in the Hole_, was blasted or broken
down to make road-metal, and for other purposes of the work.’
CHAPTER III: THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK
Off the mouths of the Tay and the Forth, thirteen miles from Fifeness,
eleven from Arbroath, and fourteen from the Red Head of Angus, lies the
Inchcape or Bell Rock. It extends to a length of about fourteen hundred
feet, but the part of it discovered at low water to not more than four
hundred and twenty-seven. At a little more than half-flood in fine
weather the seamless ocean joins over the reef, and at high-water springs
it is buried sixteen feet. As the tide goes down, the higher reaches of
the rock are seen to be clothed by _Conferva rupestris_ as by a sward of
grass; upon the more exposed edges, where the currents are most swift and
the breach of the sea heaviest, Baderlock or Henware flourishes; and the
great Tangle grows at the depth of several fathoms with luxuriance.
Before man arrived, and introduced into the silence of the sea the smoke
and clangour of a blacksmith’s shop, it was a favourite resting-place of
seals. The crab and lobster haunt in the crevices; and limpets, mussels,
and the white buckie abound.
According to a tradition, a bell had been once hung upon this rock by an
abbot of Arbroath, {91a} ‘and being taken down by a sea-pirate, a year
thereafter he perished upon the same rock, with ship and goods, in the
righteous judgment of God.’ From the days of the abbot and the
sea-pirate no man had set foot upon the Inchcape, save fishers from the
neighbouring coast, or perhaps—for a moment, before the surges swallowed
them—the unfortunate victims of shipwreck. The fishers approached the
rock with an extreme timidity; but their harvest appears to have been
great, and the adventure no more perilous than lucrative. In 1800, on
the occasion of my grandfather’s first landing, and during the two or
three hours which the ebb-tide and the smooth water allowed them to pass
upon its shelves, his crew collected upwards of two hundredweight of old
metal: pieces of a kedge anchor and a cabin stove, crowbars, a hinge and
lock of a door, a ship’s marking-iron, a piece of a ship’s caboose, a
soldier’s bayonet, a cannon ball, several pieces of money, a shoe-buckle,
and the like. Such were the spoils of the Bell Rock.
From 1794 onward, the mind of my grandfather had been exercised with the
idea of a light upon this formidable danger. To build a tower on a sea
rock, eleven miles from shore, and barely uncovered at low water of
neaps, appeared a fascinating enterprise. It was something yet
unattempted, unessayed; and even now, after it has been lighted for more
than eighty years, it is still an exploit that has never been repeated.
{92a} My grandfather was, besides, but a young man, of an experience
comparatively restricted, and a reputation confined to Scotland; and when
he prepared his first models, and exhibited them in Merchants’ Hall, he
can hardly be acquitted of audacity. John Clerk of Eldin stood his
friend from the beginning, kept the key of the model room, to which he
carried ‘eminent strangers,’ and found words of counsel and encouragement
beyond price. ‘Mr. Clerk had been personally known to Smeaton, and used
occasionally to speak of him to me,’ says my grandfather; and again: ‘I
felt regret that I had not the opportunity of a greater range of practice
to fit me for such an undertaking; but I was fortified by an expression
of my friend Mr. Clerk in one of our conversations. “This work,” said he,
“is unique, and can be little forwarded by experience of ordinary masonic
operations. In this case Smeaton’s ‘Narrative’ must be the text-book,
and energy and perseverance the pratique.”’
A Bill for the work was introduced into Parliament and lost in the Lords
in 1802–3. John Rennie was afterwards, at my grandfather’s suggestion,
called in council, with the style of chief engineer. The precise meaning
attached to these words by any of the parties appears irrecoverable.
Chief engineer should have full authority, full responsibility, and a
proper share of the emoluments; and there were none of these for Rennie.
I find in an appendix a paper which resumes the controversy on this
subject; and it will be enough to say here that Rennie did not design the
Bell Rock, that he did not execute it, and that he was not paid for it.
{94a} From so much of the correspondence as has come down to me, the
acquaintance of this man, eleven years his senior, and already famous,
appears to have been both useful and agreeable to Robert Stevenson. It
is amusing to find my grandfather seeking high and low for a brace of
pistols which his colleague had lost by the way between Aberdeen and
Edinburgh; and writing to Messrs. Dollond, ‘I have not thought it
necessary to trouble Mr. Rennie with this order, but _I beg you will see
to get two minutes of him as he passes your door_’—a proposal calculated
rather from the latitude of Edinburgh than from London, even in 1807. It
is pretty, too, to observe with what affectionate regard Smeaton was held
in mind by his immediate successors. ‘Poor old fellow,’ writes Rennie to
Stevenson, ‘I hope he will now and then take a peep at us, and inspire
you with fortitude and courage to brave all difficulties and dangers to
accomplish a work which will, if successful, immortalise you in the
annals of fame.’ The style might be bettered, but the sentiment is
charming.
Smeaton was, indeed, the patron saint of the Bell Rock. Undeterred by
the sinister fate of Winstanley, he had tackled and solved the problem of
the Eddystone; but his solution had not been in all respects perfect. It
remained for my grand-father to outdo him in daring, by applying to a
tidal rock those principles which had been already justified by the
success of the Eddystone, and to perfect the model by more than one
exemplary departure. Smeaton had adopted in his floors the principle of
the arch; each therefore exercised an outward thrust upon the walls,
which must be met and combated by embedded chains. My grandfather’s
flooring-stones, on the other hand, were flat, made part of the outer
wall, and were keyed and dovetailed into a central stone, so as to bind
the work together and be positive elements of strength. In 1703
Winstanley still thought it possible to erect his strange pagoda, with
its open gallery, its florid scrolls and candlesticks: like a rich man’s
folly for an ornamental water in a park. Smeaton followed; then
Stevenson in his turn corrected such flaws as were left in Smeaton’s
design; and with his improvements, it is not too much to say the model
was made perfect. Smeaton and Stevenson had between them evolved and
finished the sea-tower. No subsequent builder has departed in anything
essential from the principles of their design. It remains, and it seems
to us as though it must remain for ever, an ideal attained. Every stone
in the building, it may interest the reader to know, my grandfather had
himself cut out in the model; and the manner in which the courses were
fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as
a puzzle and beautiful by ingenuity.
In 1806 a second Bill passed both Houses, and the preliminary works were
at once begun. The same year the Navy had taken a great harvest of
prizes in the North Sea, one of which, a Prussian fishing dogger,
flat-bottomed and rounded at the stem and stern, was purchased to be a
floating lightship, and re-named the _Pharos_. By July 1807 she was
overhauled, rigged for her new purpose, and turned into the lee of the
Isle of May. ‘It was proposed that the whole party should meet in her
and pass the night; but she rolled from side to side in so extraordinary
a manner, that even the most seahardy fled. It was humorously observed
of this vessel that she was in danger of making a round turn and
appearing with her keel uppermost; and that she would even turn a
half-penny if laid upon deck.’ By two o’clock on the morning of the 15th
July this purgatorial vessel was moored by the Bell Rock.
A sloop of forty tons had been in the meantime built at Leith, and named
the _Smeaton_; by the 7th of August my grandfather set sail in her—
‘carrying with him Mr. Peter Logan, foreman builder, and five
artificers selected from their having been somewhat accustomed to the
sea, the writer being aware of the distressing trial which the
floating light would necessarily inflict upon landsmen from her
rolling motion. Here he remained till the 10th, and, as the weather
was favourable, a landing was effected daily, when the workmen were
employed in cutting the large seaweed from the sites of the
lighthouse and beacon, which were respectively traced with pickaxes
upon the rock. In the meantime the crew of the _Smeaton_ was
employed in laying down the several sets of moorings within about
half a mile of the rock for the convenience of vessels. The
artificers, having, fortunately, experienced moderate weather,
returned to the workyard of Arbroath with a good report of their
treatment afloat; when their comrades ashore began to feel some
anxiety to see a place of which they had heard so much, and to change
the constant operations with the iron and mallet in the process of
hewing for an occasional tide’s work on the rock, which they figured
to themselves as a state of comparative ease and comfort.’
I am now for many pages to let my grandfather speak for himself, and tell
in his own words the story of his capital achievement. The tall quarto
of 533 pages from which the following narrative has been dug out is
practically unknown to the general reader, yet good judges have perceived
its merit, and it has been named (with flattering wit) ‘The Romance of
Stone and Lime’ and ‘The Robinson Crusoe of Civil Engineering.’ The
tower was but four years in the building; it took Robert Stevenson, in
the midst of his many avocations, no less than fourteen to prepare the
_Account_. The title-page is a solid piece of literature of upwards of a
hundred words; the table of contents runs to thirteen pages; and the
dedication (to that revered monarch, George IV) must have cost him no
little study and correspondence. Walter Scott was called in council, and
offered one miscorrection which still blots the page. In spite of all
this pondering and filing, there remain pages not easy to construe, and
inconsistencies not easy to explain away. I have sought to make these
disappear, and to lighten a little the baggage with which my grandfather
marches; here and there I have rejointed and rearranged a sentence,
always with his own words, and all with a reverent and faithful hand; and
I offer here to the reader the true Monument of Robert Stevenson with a
little of the moss removed from the inscription, and the Portrait of the
artist with some superfluous canvas cut away.
I—OPERATIONS OF 1807
[Sunday, 16th Aug.]
Everything being arranged for sailing to the rock on Saturday the 15th,
the vessel might have proceeded on the Sunday; but understanding that
this would not be so agreeable to the artificers it was deferred until
Monday. Here we cannot help observing that the men allotted for the
operations at the rock seemed to enter upon the undertaking with a degree
of consideration which fully marked their opinion as to the hazardous
nature of the undertaking on which they were about to enter. They went
in a body to church on Sunday, and whether it was in the ordinary course,
or designed for the occasion, the writer is not certain, but the service
was, in many respects, suitable to their circumstances.
[Monday, 17th Aug.]
The tide happening to fall late in the evening of Monday the 17th, the
party, counting twenty-four in number, embarked on board of the _Smeaton_
about ten o’clock p.m., and sailed from Arbroath with a gentle breeze at
west. Our ship’s colours having been flying all day in compliment to the
commencement of the work, the other vessels in the harbour also saluted,
which made a very gay appearance. A number of the friends and
acquaintances of those on board having been thus collected, the piers,
though at a late hour, were perfectly crowded, and just as the _Smeaton_
cleared the harbour, all on board united in giving three hearty cheers,
which were returned by those on shore in such good earnest, that, in the
still of the evening, the sound must have been heard in all parts of the
town, re-echoing from the walls and lofty turrets of the venerable Abbey
of Aberbrothwick. The writer felt much satisfaction at the manner of
this parting scene, though he must own that the present rejoicing was, on
his part, mingled with occasional reflections upon the responsibility of
his situation, which extended to the safety of all who should be engaged
in this perilous work. With such sensations he retired to his cabin; but
as the artificers were rather inclined to move about the deck than to
remain in their confined berths below, his repose was transient, and the
vessel being small every motion was necessarily heard. Some who were
musically inclined occasionally sung; but he listened with peculiar
pleasure to the sailor at the helm, who hummed over Dibdin’s
characteristic air:—
‘They say there’s a Providence sits up aloft,
To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.’
[Tuesday, 18th Aug.]
The weather had been very gentle all night, and, about four in the
morning of the 18th, the _Smeaton_ anchored. Agreeably to an arranged
plan of operations, all hands were called at five o’clock a.m., just as
the highest part of the Bell Rock began to show its sable head among the
light breakers, which occasionally whitened with the foaming sea. The
two boats belonging to the floating light attended the _Smeaton_, to
carry the artificers to the rock, as her boat could only accommodate
about six or eight sitters. Every one was more eager than his neighbour
to leap into the boats and it required a good deal of management on the
part of the coxswains to get men unaccustomed to a boat to take their
places for rowing and at the same time trimming her properly. The
landing-master and foreman went into one boat, while the writer took
charge of another, and steered it to and from the rock. This became the
more necessary in the early stages of the work, as places could not be
spared for more than two, or at most three seamen to each boat, who were
always stationed, one at the bow, to use the boat-hook in fending or
pushing off, and the other at the aftermost oar, to give the proper time
in rowing, while the middle oars were double-banked, and rowed by the
artificers.
As the weather was extremely fine, with light airs of wind from the east,
we landed without difficulty upon the central part of the rock at
half-past five, but the water had not yet sufficiently left it for
commencing the work. This interval, however, did not pass unoccupied.
The first and last of all the principal operations at the Bell Rock were
accompanied by three hearty cheers from all hands, and, on occasions like
the present, the steward of the ship attended, when each man was regaled
with a glass of rum. As the water left the rock about six, some began to
bore the holes for the great bats or holdfasts, for fixing the beams of
the Beacon-house, while the smith was fully attended in laying out the
site of his forge, upon a somewhat sheltered spot of the rock, which also
recommended itself from the vicinity of a pool of water for tempering his
irons. These preliminary steps occupied about an hour, and as nothing
further could be done during this tide towards fixing the forge, the
workmen gratified their curiosity by roaming about the rock, which they
investigated with great eagerness till the tide overflowed it. Those who
had been sick picked dulse (_Fucus palmatus_), which they ate with much
seeming appetite; others were more intent upon collecting limpets for
bait, to enjoy the amusement of fishing when they returned on board of
the vessel. Indeed, none came away empty-handed, as everything found
upon the Bell Rock was considered valuable, being connected with some
interesting association. Several coins, and numerous bits of shipwrecked
iron, were picked up, of almost every description; and, in particular, a
marking-iron lettered JAMES—a circumstance of which it was thought proper
to give notice to the public, as it might lead to the knowledge of some
unfortunate shipwreck, perhaps unheard of till this simple occurrence led
to the discovery. When the rock began to be overflowed, the
landing-master arranged the crews of the respective boats, appointing
twelve persons to each. According to a rule which the writer had laid
down to himself, he was always the last person who left the rock.
In a short time the Bell Rock was laid completely under water, and the
weather being extremely fine, the sea was so smooth that its place could
not be pointed out from the appearance of the surface—a circumstance
which sufficiently demonstrates the dangerous nature of this rock, even
during the day, and in the smoothest and calmest state of the sea.
During the interval between the morning and the evening tides, the
artificers were variously employed in fishing and reading; others were
busy in drying and adjusting their wet clothes, and one or two amused
their companions with the violin and German flute.
About seven in the evening the signal bell for landing on the rock was
again rung, when every man was at his quarters. In this service it was
thought more appropriate to use the bell than to _pipe_ to quarters, as
the use of this instrument is less known to the mechanic than the sound
of the bell. The landing, as in the morning, was at the eastern harbour.
During this tide the seaweed was pretty well cleared from the site of the
operations, and also from the tracks leading to the different
landing-places; for walking upon the rugged surface of the Bell Rock,
when covered with seaweed, was found to be extremely difficult and even
dangerous. Every hand that could possibly be occupied now employed in
assisting the smith to fit up the apparatus for his forge. At 9 p.m. the
boats returned to the tender, after other two hours’ work, in the same
order as formerly—perhaps as much gratified with the success that
attended the work of this day as with any other in the whole course of
the operations. Although it could not he said that the fatigues of this
day had been great, yet all on board retired early to rest. The sea
being calm, and no movement on deck, it was pretty generally remarked in
the morning that the bell awakened the greater number on board from their
first sleep; and though this observation was not altogether applicable to
the writer himself, yet he was not a little pleased to find that thirty
people could all at once become so reconciled to a night’s quarters
within a few hundred paces of the Bell Rock.
[Wednesday, 19th Aug.]
Being extremely anxious at this time to get forward with fixing the
smith’s forge, on which the progress of the work at present depended, the
writer requested that he might be called at daybreak to learn the
landing-master’s opinion of the weather from the appearance of the rising
sun, a criterion by which experienced seamen can generally judge pretty
accurately of the state of the weather for the following day. About five
o’clock, on coming upon deck, the sun’s upper limb or disc had just begun
to appear as if rising from the ocean, and in less than a minute he was
seen in the fullest splendour; but after a short interval he was
enveloped in a soft cloudy sky, which was considered emblematical of fine
weather. His rays had not yet sufficiently dispelled the clouds which
hid the land from view, and the Bell Rock being still overflowed, the
whole was one expanse of water. This scene in itself was highly
gratifying; and, when the morning bell was tolled, we were gratified with
the happy forebodings of good weather and the expectation of having both
a morning and an evening tide’s work on the rock.
The boat which the writer steered happened to be the last which
approached the rock at this tide; and, in standing up in the stern, while
at some distance, to see how the leading boat entered the creek, he was
astonished to observe something in the form of a human figure, in a
reclining posture, upon one of the ledges of the rock. He immediately
steered the boat through a narrow entrance to the eastern harbour, with a
thousand unpleasant sensations in his mind. He thought a vessel or boat
must have been wrecked upon the rock during the night; and it seemed
probable that the rock might be strewed with dead bodies, a spectacle
which could not fail to deter the artificers from returning so freely to
their work. In the midst of these reveries the boat took the ground at
an improper landing-place; but, without waiting to push her off, he leapt
upon the rock, and making his way hastily to the spot which had privately
given him alarm, he had the satisfaction to ascertain that he had only
been deceived by the peculiar situation and aspect of the smith’s anvil
and block, which very completely represented the appearance of a lifeless
body upon the rock. The writer carefully suppressed his feelings, the
simple mention of which might have had a bad effect upon the artificers,
and his haste passed for an anxiety to examine the apparatus of the
smith’s forge, left in an unfinished state at evening tide.
In the course of this morning’s work two or three apparently distant
peals of thunder were heard, and the atmosphere suddenly became thick and
foggy. But as the _Smeaton_, our present tender, was moored at no great
distance from the rock, the crew on board continued blowing with a horn,
and occasionally fired a musket, so that the boats got to the ship
without difficulty.
[Thursday, 20th Aug.]
The wind this morning inclined from the north-east, and the sky had a
heavy and cloudy appearance, but the sea was smooth, though there was an
undulating motion on, the surface, which indicated easterly winds, and
occasioned a slight surf upon the rock. But the boats found no
difficulty in landing at the western creek at half-past seven, and, after
a good tide’s work, left it again about a quarter from eleven. In the
evening the artificers landed at half-past seven, and continued till
half-past eight, having completed the fixing of the smith’s forge, his
vice, and a wooden board or bench, which were also batted to a ledge of
the rock, to the great joy of all, under a salute of three hearty cheers.
From an oversight on the part of the smith, who had neglected to bring
his tinder-box and matches from the vessel, the work was prevented from
being continued for at least an hour longer.
The smith’s shop was, of course, in _open space_: the large bellows were
carried to and from the rock every tide, for the serviceable condition of
which, together with the tinder-box, fuel, and embers of the former fire,
the smith was held responsible. Those who have been placed in situations
to feel the inconveniency and want of this useful artisan, will be able
to appreciate his value in a case like the present. It often happened,
to our annoyance and disappointment, in the early state of the work, when
the smith was in the middle of a _favourite heat_ in making some useful
article, or in sharpening the tools, after the flood-tide had obliged the
pickmen to strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks, dash out
the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the bellows. If the
sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water,
the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of the
fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the
fire from below. The writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing
anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring to avert
the effects of the rising tide.
[Friday, 21st Aug.]
Everything connected with the forge being now completed, the artificers
found no want of sharp tools, and the work went forward with great
alacrity and spirit. It was also alleged that the rock had a more
habitable appearance from the volumes of smoke which ascended from the
smith’s shop and the busy noise of his anvil, the operations of the
masons, the movements of the boats, and shipping at a distance—all
contributed to give life and activity to the scene. This noise and
traffic had, however, the effect of almost completely banishing the herd
of seals which had hitherto frequented the rock as a resting-place during
the period of low water. The rock seemed to be peculiarly adapted to
their habits, for, excepting two or three days at neap-tides, a part of
it always dries at low water—at least, during the summer season—and as
there was good fishing-ground in the neighbourhood, without a human being
to disturb or molest them, it had become a very favourite residence of
these amphibious animals, the writer having occasionally counted from
fifty to sixty playing about the rock at a time. But when they came to
be disturbed every tide, and their seclusion was broken in upon by the
kindling of great fires, together with the beating of hammers and picks
during low water, after hovering about for a time, they changed their
place, and seldom more than one or two were to be seen about the rock
upon the more detached outlayers which dry partially, whence they seemed
to look with that sort of curiosity which is observable in these animals
when following a boat.
[Saturday, 22nd Aug.]
Hitherto the artificers had remained on board the _Smeaton_, which was
made fast to one of the mooring buoys at a distance only of about a
quarter of a mile from the rock, and, of course, a very great conveniency
to the work. Being so near, the seamen could never be mistaken as to the
progress of the tide, or state of the sea upon the rock, nor could the
boats be much at a loss to pull on board of the vessel during fog, or
even in very rough weather; as she could be cast loose from her moorings
at pleasure, and brought to the lee side of the rock. But the _Smeaton_
being only about forty register tons, her accommodations were extremely
limited. It may, therefore, be easily imagined that an addition of
twenty-four persons to her own crew must have rendered the situation of
those on board rather uncomfortable. The only place for the men’s
hammocks on board being in the hold, they were unavoidably much crowded:
and if the weather had required the hatches to be fastened down, so great
a number of men could not possibly have been accommodated. To add to
this evil, the _co-boose_ or cooking-place being upon deck, it would not
have been possible to have cooked for so large a company in the event of
bad weather.
The stock of water was now getting short, and some necessaries being also
wanted for the floating light, the _Smeaton_ was despatched for Arbroath;
and the writer, with the artificers at the same time shifted their
quarters from her to the floating light.
Although the rock barely made its appearance at this period of the tides
till eight o’clock, yet, having now a full mile to row from the floating
light to the rock, instead of about a quarter of a mile from the moorings
of the _Smeaton_, it was necessary to be earlier astir, and to form
different arrangements; breakfast was accordingly served up at seven
o’clock this morning. From the excessive motion of the floating light,
the writer had looked forward rather with anxiety to the removal of the
workmen to this ship. Some among them, who had been congratulating
themselves upon having become sea-hardy while on board the _Smeaton_, had
a complete relapse upon returning to the floating light. This was the
case with the writer. From the spacious and convenient berthage of the
floating light, the exchange to the artificers was, in this respect, much
for the better. The boats were also commodious, measuring sixteen feet
in length on the keel, so that, in fine weather, their complement of
sitters was sixteen persons for each, with which, however, they were
rather crowded, but she could not stow two boats of larger dimensions.
When there was what is called a breeze of wind, and a swell in the sea,
the proper number for each boat could not, with propriety, be rated at
more than twelve persons.
When the tide-bell rung the boats were hoisted out, and two active seamen
were employed to keep them from receiving damage alongside. The floating
light being very buoyant, was so quick in her motions that when those who
were about to step from her gunwale into a boat, placed themselves upon a
cleat or step on the ship’s side, with the man or rail ropes in their
hands, they had often to wait for some time till a favourable opportunity
occurred for stepping into the boat. While in this situation, with the
vessel rolling from side to side, watching the proper time for letting go
the man-ropes, it required the greatest dexterity and presence of mind to
leap into the boats. One who was rather awkward would often wait a
considerable period in this position: at one time his side of the ship
would be so depressed that he would touch the boat to which he belonged,
while the next sea would elevate him so much that he would see his
comrades in the boat on the opposite side of the ship, his friends in the
one boat calling to him to ‘Jump,’ while those in the boat on the other
side, as he came again and again into their view, would jocosely say,
‘Are you there yet? You seem to enjoy a swing.’ In this situation it
was common to see a person upon each side of the ship for a length of
time, waiting to quit his hold.
On leaving the rock to-day a trial of seamanship was proposed amongst the
rowers, for by this time the artificers had become tolerably expert in
this exercise. By inadvertency some of the oars provided had been made
of fir instead of ash, and although a considerable stock had been laid
in, the workmen, being at first awkward in the art, were constantly
breaking their oars; indeed it was no uncommon thing to see the broken
blades of a pair of oars floating astern, in the course of a passage from
the rock to the vessel. The men, upon the whole, had but little work to
perform in the course of a day; for though they exerted themselves
extremely hard while on the rock, yet, in the early state of the
operations, this could not be continued for more than three or four hours
at a time, and as their rations were large—consisting of one pound and a
half of beef, one pound of ship biscuit, eight ounces oatmeal, two ounces
barley, two ounces butter, three quarts of small beer, with vegetables
and salt—they got into excellent spirits when free of sea-sickness. The
rowing of the boats against each other became a favourite amusement,
which was rather a fortunate circumstance, as it must have been attended
with much inconvenience had it been found necessary to employ a
sufficient number of sailors for this purpose. The writer, therefore,
encouraged the spirit of emulation, and the speed of their respective
boats became a favourite topic. Premiums for boat-races were instituted,
which were contended for with great eagerness, and the respective crews
kept their stations in the boats with as much precision as they kept
their beds on board of the ship. With these and other pastimes, when the
weather was favourable, the time passed away among the inmates of the
forecastle and waist of the ship. The writer looks back with interest
upon the hours of solitude which he spent in this lonely ship with his
small library.
This being the first Saturday that the artificers were afloat, all hands
were served with a glass of rum and water at night, to drink the sailors’
favourite toast of ‘Wives and Sweethearts.’ It was customary, upon these
occasions, for the seamen and artificers to collect in the galley, when
the musical instruments were put in requisition: for, according to
invariable practice, every man must play a tune, sing a song, or tell a
story.
[Sunday, 23rd Aug.]
Having, on the previous evening, arranged matters with the landing-master
as to the business of the day, the signal was rung for all hands at
half-past seven this morning. In the early state of the spring-tides the
artificers went to the rock before breakfast, but as the tides fell later
in the day, it became necessary to take this meal before leaving the
ship. At eight o’clock all hands were assembled on the quarter-deck for
prayers, a solemnity which was gone through in as orderly a manner as
circumstances would admit. When the weather permitted, the flags of the
ship were hung up as an awning or screen, forming the quarter-deck into a
distinct compartment; the pendant was also hoisted at the mainmast, and a
large ensign flag was displayed over the stern; and lastly, the ship’s
companion, or top of the staircase, was covered with the _flag proper_ of
the Lighthouse Service, on which the Bible was laid. A particular toll
of the bell called all hands to the quarter-deck, when the writer read a
chapter of the Bible, and, the whole ship’s company being uncovered, he
also read the impressive prayer composed by the Reverend Dr. Brunton, one
of the ministers of Edinburgh.
Upon concluding this service, which was attended with becoming reverence
and attention, all on board retired to their respective berths to
breakfast, and, at half-past nine, the bell again rung for the artificers
to take their stations in their respective boats. Some demur having been
evinced on board about the propriety of working on Sunday, which had
hitherto been touched upon as delicately as possible, all hands being
called aft, the writer, from the quarter-deck, stated generally the
nature of the service, expressing his hopes that every man would feel
himself called upon to consider the erection of a lighthouse on the Bell
Rock, in every point of view, as a work of necessity and mercy. He knew
that scruples had existed with some, and these had, indeed, been fairly
and candidly urged before leaving the shore; but it was expected that,
after having seen the critical nature of the rock, and the necessity of
the measure, every man would now be satisfied of the propriety of
embracing all opportunities of landing on the rock when the state of the
weather would permit. The writer further took them to witness that it
did not proceed from want of respect for the appointments and established
forms of religion that he had himself adopted the resolution of attending
the Bell Rock works on the Sunday; but, as he hoped, from a conviction
that it was his bounden duty, on the strictest principles of morality.
At the same time it was intimated that, if any were of a different
opinion, they should be perfectly at liberty to hold their sentiments
without the imputation of contumacy or disobedience; the only difference
would be in regard to the pay.
Upon stating this much, he stepped into his boat, requesting all who were
so disposed to follow him. The sailors, from their habits, found no
scruple on this subject, and all of the artificers, though a little
tardy, also embarked, excepting four of the masons, who, from the
beginning, mentioned that they would decline working on Sundays. It may
here be noticed that throughout the whole of the operations it was
observable that the men wrought, if possible, with more keenness upon the
Sundays than at other times from an impression that they were engaged in
a work of imperious necessity, which required every possible exertion.
On returning to the floating light, after finishing the tide’s work, the
boats were received by the part of the ship’s crew left on board with the
usual attention of handing ropes to the boats and helping the artificers
on board; but the four masons who had absented themselves from the work
did not appear upon deck.
[Monday, 24th Aug.]
The boats left the floating light at a quarter-past nine o’clock this
morning, and the work began at three-quarters past nine; but as the
neap-tides were approaching the working time at the rock became gradually
shorter, and it was now with difficulty that two and a half hours’ work
could be got. But so keenly had the workmen entered into the spirit of
the beacon-house operations, that they continued to bore the holes in the
rock till some of them were knee-deep in water.
The operations at this time were entirely directed to the erection of the
beacon, in which every man felt an equal interest, as at this critical
period the slightest casualty to any of the boats at the rock might have
been fatal to himself individually, while it was perhaps peculiar to the
writer more immediately to feel for the safety of the whole. Each log or
upright beam of the beacon was to be fixed to the rock by two strong and
massive bats or stanchions of iron. These bats, for the fixture of the
principal and diagonal beams and bracing chains, required fifty-four
holes, each measuring two inches in diameter and eighteen inches in
depth. There had already been so considerable a progress made in boring
and excavating the holes that the writer’s hopes of getting the beacon
erected this year began to be more and more confirmed, although it was
now advancing towards what was considered the latter end of the proper
working season at the Bell Rock. The foreman joiner, Mr. Francis Watt,
was accordingly appointed to attend at the rock to-day, when the
necessary levels were taken for the step or seat of each particular beam
of the beacon, that they might be cut to their respective lengths, to
suit the inequalities of the rock; several of the stanchions were also
tried into their places, and other necessary observations made, to
prevent mistakes on the application of the apparatus, and to facilitate
the operations when the beams came to be set up, which would require to
be done in the course of a single tide.
[Tuesday, 25th Aug.]
We had now experienced an almost unvaried tract of light airs of easterly
wind, with clear weather in the fore-part of the day and fog in the
evenings. To-day, however, it sensibly changed; when the wind came to
the south-west, and blew a fresh breeze. At nine a.m. the bell rung, and
the boats were hoisted out, and though the artificers were now pretty
well accustomed to tripping up and down the sides of the floating light,
yet it required more seamanship this morning than usual. It therefore
afforded some merriment to those who had got fairly seated in their
respective boats to see the difficulties which attended their companions,
and the hesitating manner in which they quitted hold of the man-ropes in
leaving the ship. The passage to the rock was tedious, and the boats did
not reach it till half-past ten.
It being now the period of neap-tides, the water only partially left the
rock, and some of the men who were boring on the lower ledges of the site
of the beacon stood knee-deep in water. The situation of the smith
to-day was particularly disagreeable, but his services were at all times
indispensable. As the tide did not leave the site of the forge, he stood
in the water, and as there was some roughness on the surface it was with
considerable difficulty that, with the assistance of the sailors, he was
enabled to preserve alive his fire; and, while his feet were immersed in
water, his face was not only scorched but continually exposed to volumes
of smoke, accompanied with sparks from the fire, which were occasionally
set up owing to the strength and direction of the wind.
[Wednesday, 26th Aug.]
The wind had shifted this morning to N.N.W., with rain, and was blowing
what sailors call a fresh breeze. To speak, perhaps, somewhat more
intelligibly to the general reader, the wind was such that a fishing-boat
could just carry full sail. But as it was of importance, specially in
the outset of the business, to keep up the spirit of enterprise for
landing on all practicable occasions, the writer, after consulting with
the landing-master, ordered the bell to be rung for embarking, and at
half-past eleven the boats reached the rock, and left it again at a
quarter-past twelve, without, however, being able to do much work, as the
smith could not be set to work from the smallness of the ebb and the
strong breach of sea, which lashed with great force among the bars of the
forge.
Just as we were about to leave the rock the wind shifted to the S.W.,
and, from a fresh gale, it became what seamen term a hard gale, or such
as would have required the fisherman to take in two or three reefs in his
sail. It is a curious fact that the respective tides of ebb and flood
are apparent upon the shore about an hour and a half sooner than at the
distance of three or four miles in the offing. But what seems chiefly
interesting here is that the tides around this small sunken rock should
follow exactly the same laws as on the extensive shores of the mainland.
When the boats left the Bell Rock to-day it was overflowed by the
flood-tide, but the floating light did not swing round to the flood-tide
for more than an hour afterwards. Under this disadvantage the boats had
to struggle with the ebb-tide and a hard gale of wind, so that it was
with the greatest difficulty that they reached the floating light. Had
this gale happened in spring-tides when the current was strong we must
have been driven to sea in a very helpless condition.
The boat which the writer steered was considerably behind the other, one
of the masons having unluckily broken his oar. Our prospect of getting
on board, of course, became doubtful, and our situation was rather
perilous, as the boat shipped so much sea that it occupied two of the
artificers to bale and clear her of water. When the oar gave way we were
about half a mile from the ship, but, being fortunately to windward, we
got into the wake of the floating light, at about 250 fathoms astern,
just as the landing-master’s boat reached the vessel. He immediately
streamed or floated a life-buoy astern, with a line which was always in
readiness, and by means of this useful implement the boat was towed
alongside of the floating light, where, from her rolling motion, it
required no small management to get safely on board, as the men were much
worn out with their exertions in pulling from the rock. On the present
occasion the crews of both boats were completely drenched with spray, and
those who sat upon the bottom of the boats to bale them were sometimes
pretty deep in the water before it could be cleared out. After getting
on board, all hands were allowed an extra dram, and, having shifted and
got a warm and comfortable dinner, the affair, it is believed, was little
more thought of.
[Thursday, 27th Aug.]
The tides were now in that state which sailors term the dead of the neap,
and it was not expected that any part of the rock would be seen above
water to-day; at any rate, it was obvious, from the experience of
yesterday, that no work could be done upon it, and therefore the
artificers were not required to land. The wind was at west, with light
breezes, and fine clear weather; and as it was an object with the writer
to know the actual state of the Bell Rock at neap-tides, he got one of
the boats manned, and, being accompanied by the landing-master, went to
it at a quarter-past twelve. The parts of the rock that appeared above
water being very trifling, were covered by every wave, so that no landing
was made. Upon trying the depth of water with a boathook, particularly
on the sites of the lighthouse and beacon, on the former, at low water,
the depth was found to be three feet, and on the central parts of the
latter it was ascertained to be two feet eight inches. Having made these
remarks, the boat returned to the ship at two p.m., and the weather being
good, the artificers were found amusing themselves with fishing. The
_Smeaton_ came from Arbroath this afternoon, and made fast to her
moorings, having brought letters and newspapers, with parcels of clean
linen, etc., for the workmen, who were also made happy by the arrival of
three of their comrades from the workyard ashore. From these men they
not only received all the news of the workyard, but seemed themselves to
enjoy great pleasure in communicating whatever they considered to be
interesting with regard to the rock. Some also got letters from their
friends at a distance, the postage of which for the men afloat was always
free, so that they corresponded the more readily.
The site of the building having already been carefully traced out with
the pick-axe, the artificers this day commenced the excavation of the
rock for the foundation or first course of the lighthouse. Four men only
were employed at this work, while twelve continued at the site of the
beacon-house, at which every possible opportunity was embraced, till this
essential art of the operations should be completed.
[Wednesday, 2nd Sept.]
The floating light’s bell rung this morning at half-past four o’clock, as
a signal for the boats to be got ready, and the landing took place at
half-past five. In passing the _Smeaton_ at her moorings near the rock,
her boat followed with eight additional artificers who had come from
Arbroath with her at last trip, but there being no room for them in the
floating light’s boats, they had continued on board. The weather did not
look very promising in the morning, the wind blowing pretty fresh from
W.S.W.: and had it not been that the writer calculated upon having a
vessel so much at command, in all probability he would not have ventured
to land. The _Smeaton_ rode at what sailors call a _salvagee_, with a
cross-head made fast to the floating buoy. This kind of attachment was
found to be more convenient than the mode of passing the hawser through
the ring of the buoy when the vessel was to be made fast. She had then
only to be steered very close to the buoy, when the salvagee was laid
hold of with a boat-hook, and the _bite_ of the hawser thrown over the
cross-head. But the salvagee, by this method, was always left at the
buoy, and was, of course, more liable to chafe and wear than a hawser
passed through the ring, which could be wattled with canvas, and shifted
at pleasure. The salvagee and cross method is, however, much practised;
but the experience of this morning showed it to be very unsuitable for
vessels riding in an exposed situation for any length of time.
Soon after the artificers landed they commenced work; but the wind coming
to blow hard, the _Smeaton’s_ boat and crew, who had brought their
complement of eight men to the rock, went off to examine her riding
ropes, and see that they were in proper order. The boat had no sooner
reached the vessel than she went adrift, carrying the boat along with
her. By the time that she was got round to make a tack towards the rock,
she had drifted at least three miles to leeward, with the praam-boat
astern; and, having both the wind and a tide against her, the writer
perceived, with no little anxiety, that she could not possibly return to
the rock till long after its being overflowed; for, owing to the anomaly
of the tides formerly noticed, the Bell Rock is completely under water
when the ebb abates to the offing.
In this perilous predicament, indeed, he found himself placed between
hope and despair—but certainly the latter was by much the most
predominant feeling of his mind—situate upon a sunken rock in the middle
of the ocean, which, in the progress of the flood-tide, was to be laid
under water to the depth of at least twelve feet in a stormy sea. There
were this morning thirty-two persons in all upon the rock, with only two
boats, whose complement, even in good weather, did not exceed twenty-four
sitters; but to row to the floating light with so much wind, and in so
heavy a sea, a complement of eight men for each boat was as much as
could, with propriety, be attempted, so that, in this way, about one-half
of our number was unprovided for. Under these circumstances, had the
writer ventured to despatch one of the boats in expectation of either
working the _Smeaton_ sooner up towards the rock, or in hopes of getting
her boat brought to our assistance, this must have given an immediate
alarm to the artificers, each of whom would have insisted upon taking to
his own boat, and leaving the eight artificers belonging to the _Smeaton_
to their chance. Of course a scuffle might have ensued, and it is hard
to say, in the ardour of men contending for life, where it might have
ended. It has even been hinted to the writer that a party of the
_pickmen_ were determined to keep exclusively to their own boat against
all hazards.
The unfortunate circumstance of the _Smeaton_ and her boat having drifted
was, for a considerable time, only known to the writer and to the
landing-master, who removed to the farther point of the rock, where he
kept his eye steadily upon the progress of the vessel. While the
artificers were at work, chiefly in sitting or kneeling postures,
excavating the rock, or boring with the jumpers, and while their numerous
hammers, with the sound of the smith’s anvil, continued, the situation of
things did not appear so awful. In this state of suspense, with almost
certain destruction at hand, the water began to rise upon those who were
at work on the lower parts of the sites of the beacon and lighthouse.
From the run of sea upon the rock, the forge fire was also sooner
extinguished this morning than usual, and the volumes of smoke having
ceased, objects in every direction became visible from all parts of the
rock. After having had about three ‘hours’ work, the men began, pretty
generally, to make towards their respective boats for their jackets and
stockings, when, to their astonishment, instead of three, they found only
two boats, the third being adrift with the _Smeaton_. Not a word was
uttered by any one, but all appeared to be silently calculating their
numbers, and looking to each other with evident marks of perplexity
depicted in their countenances. The landing-master, conceiving that
blame might be attached to him for allowing the boat to leave the rock,
still kept at a distance. At this critical moment the author was
standing upon an elevated part of Smith’s Ledge, where he endeavoured to
mark the progress of the _Smeaton_, not a little surprised that her crew
did not cut the praam adrift, which greatly retarded her way, and amazed
that some effort was not making to bring at least the boat, and attempt
our relief. The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned
occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward. {122a} All this
passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the
group made an impression never to be effaced from his mind.
The writer had all along been considering of various schemes—providing
the men could be kept under command—which might be put in practice for
the general safety, in hopes that the _Smeaton_ might be able to pick up
the boats to leeward, when they were obliged to leave the rock. He was,
accordingly, about to address the artificers on the perilous nature of
their circumstances, and to propose that all hands should unstrip their
upper clothing when the higher parts of the rock were laid under water;
that the seamen should remove every unnecessary weight and encumbrance
from the boats; that a specified number of men should go into each boat,
and that the remainder should hang by the gunwales, while the boats were
to be rowed gently towards the _Smeaton_, as the course to the _Pharos_,
or floating light, lay rather to windward of the rock. But when he
attempted to speak his mouth was so parched that his tongue refused
utterance, and he now learned by experience that the saliva is as
necessary as the tongue itself for speech. He turned to one of the pools
on the rock and lapped a little water, which produced immediate relief.
But what was his happiness, when on rising from this unpleasant beverage,
some one called out, ‘A boat! a boat!’ and, on looking around, at no
great distance, a large boat was seen through the haze making towards the
rock. This at once enlivened and rejoiced every heart. The timeous
visitor proved to be James Spink, the Bell Rock pilot, who had come
express from Arbroath with letters. Spink had for some time seen the
_Smeaton_, and had even supposed, from the state of the weather, that all
hands were on board of her till he approached more nearly and observed
people upon the rock; but not supposing that the assistance of his boat
was necessary to carry the artificers off the rock, he anchored on the
lee-side and began to fish, waiting, as usual, till the letters were sent
for, as the pilot-boat was too large and unwieldy for approaching the
rock when there was any roughness or run of the sea at the entrance of
the landing creeks.
Upon this fortunate change of circumstances, sixteen of the artificers
were sent, at two trips, in one of the boats, with instructions for Spink
to proceed with them to the floating light. This being accomplished, the
remaining sixteen followed in the two boats belonging to the service of
the rock. Every one felt the most perfect happiness at leaving the Bell
Rock this morning, though a very hard and even dangerous passage to the
floating light still awaited us, as the wind by this time had increased
to a pretty hard gale, accompanied with a considerable swell of sea.
Every one was as completely drenched in water as if he had been dragged
astern of the boats. The writer, in particular, being at the helm,
found, on getting on board, that his face and ears were completely coated
with a thin film of salt from the sea spray, which broke constantly over
the bows of the boat. After much baling of water and severe work at the
oars, the three boats reached the floating light, where some new
difficulties occurred in getting on board in safety, owing partly to the
exhausted state of the men, and partly to the violent rolling of the
vessel.
As the tide flowed, it was expected that the _Smeaton_ would have got to
windward; but, seeing that all was safe, after tacking for several hours
and making little progress, she bore away for Arbroath, with the
praam-boat. As there was now too much wind for the pilot-boat to return
to Arbroath, she was made fast astern of the floating light, and the crew
remained on board till next day, when the weather moderated. There can
be very little doubt that the appearance of James Spink with his boat on
this critical occasion was the means of preventing the loss of lives at
the rock this morning. When these circumstances, some years afterwards,
came to the knowledge of the Board, a small pension was ordered to our
faithful pilot, then in his seventieth year; and he still continues to
wear the uniform clothes and badge of the Lighthouse service. Spink is a
remarkably strong man, whose _tout ensemble_ is highly characteristic of
a North-country fisherman. He usually dresses in a _pé-jacket_, cut
after a particular fashion, and wears a large, flat, blue bonnet. A
striking likeness of Spink in his pilot-dress, with the badge or insignia
on his left arm which is characteristic of the boatmen in the service of
the Northern Lights, has been taken by Howe, and is in the writer’s
possession.
[Thursday, 3rd Sept.]
The bell rung this morning at five o’clock, but the writer must
acknowledge, from the circumstances of yesterday, that its sound was
extremely unwelcome. This appears also to have been the feelings of the
artificers, for when they came to be mustered, out of twenty-six, only
eight, besides the foreman and seamen, appeared upon deck to accompany
the writer to the rock. Such are the baneful effects of anything like
misfortune or accident connected with a work of this description. The
use of argument to persuade the men to embark in cases of this kind would
have been out of place, as it is not only discomfort, or even the risk of
the loss of a limb, but life itself that becomes the question. The
boats, notwithstanding the thinness of our ranks, left the vessel at
half-past five. The rough weather of yesterday having proved but a
summer’s gale, the wind came to-day in gentle breezes; yet, the
atmosphere being cloudy, it a not a very favourable appearance. The
boats reached the rock at six a.m., and the eight artificers who landed
were employed in clearing out the bat-holes for the beacon-house, and had
a very prosperous tide of four hours’ work, being the longest yet
experienced by half an hour.
The boats left the rock again at ten o’clock, and the weather having
cleared up as we drew near the vessel, the eighteen artificers who had
remained on board were observed upon deck, but as the boats approached
they sought their way below, being quite ashamed of their conduct. This
was the only instance of refusal to go to the rock which occurred during
the whole progress of the work, excepting that of the four men who
declined working upon Sunday, a case which the writer did not conceive to
be at all analogous to the present. It may here be mentioned, much to
the credit of these four men, that they stood foremost in embarking for
the rock this morning.
[Saturday, 5th Sept.]
It was fortunate that a landing was not attempted this evening, for at
eight o’clock the wind shifted to E.S.E., and at ten it had become a hard
gale, when fifty fathoms of the floating light’s hempen cable were veered
out. The gale still increasing, the ship rolled and laboured
excessively, and at midnight eighty fathoms of cable were veered out;
while the sea continued to strike the vessel with a degree of force which
had not before been experienced.
[Sunday, 6th Sept.]
During the last night there was little rest on board of the _Pharos_, and
daylight, though anxiously wished for, brought no relief, as the gale
continued with unabated violence. The sea struck so hard upon the
vessel’s bows that it rose in great quantities, or in ‘green seas,’ as
the sailors termed it, which were carried by the wind as far aft as the
quarter-deck, and not infrequently over the stern of the ship altogether.
It fell occasionally so heavily on the skylight of the writer’s cabin,
though so far aft as to be within five feet of the helm, that the glass
was broken to pieces before the dead-light could be got into its place,
so that the water poured down in great quantities. In shutting out the
water, the admission of light was prevented, and in the morning all
continued in the most comfortless state of darkness. About ten o’clock
a.m. the wind shifted to N.E., and blew, if possible, harder than before,
and it was accompanied by a much heavier swell of sea. In the course of
the gale, the part of the cable in the hause-hole had been so often
shifted that nearly the whole length of one of her hempen cables, of 120
fathoms, had been veered out, besides the chain-moorings. The cable, for
its preservation, was also carefully served or wattled with pieces of
canvas round the windlass, and with leather well greased in the
hause-hole. In this state things remained during the whole day, every
sea which struck the vessel—and the seas followed each other in close
succession—causing her to shake, and all on board occasionally to
tremble. At each of these strokes of the sea the rolling and pitching of
the vessel ceased for a time, and her motion was felt as if she had
either broke adrift before the wind or were in the act of sinking; but,
when another sea came, she ranged up against it with great force, and
this became the regular intimation of our being still riding at anchor.
About eleven o’clock, the writer with some difficulty got out of bed,
but, in attempting to dress, he was thrown twice upon the floor at the
opposite end of the cabin. In an undressed state he made shift to get
about half-way up the companion-stairs, with an intention to observe the
state of the sea and of the ship upon deck; but he no sooner looked over
the companion than a heavy sea struck the vessel, which fell on the
quarter-deck, and rushed downstairs in the officers’ cabin in so
considerable a quantity that it was found necessary to lift one of the
scuttles in the floor, to let the water into the limbers of the ship, as
it dashed from side to side in such a manner as to run into the lower
tier of beds. Having been foiled in this attempt, and being completely
wetted, he again got below and went to bed. In this state of the weather
the seamen had to move about the necessary or indispensable duties of the
ship with the most cautious use both of hands and feet, while it required
all the art of the landsman to keep within the precincts of his bed. The
writer even found himself so much tossed about that it became necessary,
in some measure, to shut himself in bed, in order to avoid being thrown
upon the floor. Indeed, such was the motion of the ship that it seemed
wholly impracticable to remain in any other than a lying posture. On
deck the most stormy aspect presented itself, while below all was wet and
comfortless.
About two o’clock p.m. a great alarm was given throughout the ship from
the effects of a very heavy sea which struck her, and almost filled the
waist, pouring down into the berths below, through every chink and
crevice of the hatches and skylights. From the motion of the vessel
being thus suddenly deadened or checked, and from the flowing in of the
water above, it is believed there was not an individual on board who did
not think, at the moment, that the vessel had foundered, and was in the
act of sinking. The writer could withstand this no longer, and as soon
as she again began to range to the sea he determined to make another
effort to get upon deck. In the first instance, however, he groped his
way in darkness from his own cabin through the berths of the officers,
where all was quietness. He next entered the galley and other
compartments occupied by the artificers. Here also all was shut up in
darkness, the fire having been drowned out in the early part of the gale.
Several of the artificers were employed in prayer, repeating psalms and
other devotional exercises in a full tone of voice; others protesting
that, if they should fortunately get once more on shore, no one should
ever see them afloat again. With the assistance of the landing-master,
the writer made his way, holding on step by step, among the numerous
impediments which lay in the way. Such was the creaking noise of the
bulk-heads or partitions, the dashing of the water, and the whistling
noise of the winds, that it was hardly possible to break in upon such a
confusion of sounds. In one or two instances, anxious and repeated
inquiries were made by the artificers as to the state of things upon
deck, to which the captain made the usual answer, that it could not blow
long in this way, and that we must soon have better weather. The next
berth in succession, moving forward in the ship, was that allotted for
the seamen. Here the scene was considerably different. Having reached
the middle of this darksome berth without its inmates being aware of any
intrusion, the writer had the consolation of remarking that, although
they talked of bad weather and the cross accidents of the sea, yet the
conversation was carried on in that sort of tone and manner which bespoke
an ease and composure of mind highly creditable to them and pleasing to
him. The writer immediately accosted the seamen about the state of the
ship. To these inquiries they replied that the vessel being light, and
having but little hold of the water, no top-rigging, with excellent
ground-tackle, and everything being fresh and new, they felt perfect
confidence in their situation.
It being impossible to open any of the hatches in the fore part of the
ship in communicating with the deck, the watch was changed by passing
through the several berths to the companion-stair leading to the
quarter-deck. The writer, therefore, made the best of his way aft, and,
on a second attempt to look out, he succeeded, and saw indeed an
astonishing sight. The sea or waves appeared to be ten or fifteen feet
in height of unbroken water, and every approaching billow seemed as if it
would overwhelm our vessel, but she continued to rise upon the waves and
to fall between the seas in a very wonderful manner. It seemed to be
only those seas which caught her in the act of rising which struck her
with so much violence and threw such quantities of water aft. On deck
there was only one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm in
the event of the ship breaking from her moorings. The seaman on watch
continued only two hours; he who kept watch at this time was a tall,
slender man of a black complexion; he had no greatcoat nor over-all of
any kind, but was simply dressed in his ordinary jacket and trousers; his
hat was tied under his chin with a napkin, and he stood aft the foremast,
to which he had lashed himself with a gasket or small rope round his
waist, to prevent his falling upon deck or being washed overboard. When
the writer looked up, he appeared to smile, which afforded a further
symptom of the confidence of the crew in their ship. This person on
watch was as completely wetted as if he had been drawn through the sea,
which was given as a reason for his not putting on a greatcoat, that he
might wet as few of his clothes as possible, and have a dry shift when he
went below. Upon deck everything that was movable was out of sight,
having either been stowed below, previous to the gale, or been washed
overboard. Some trifling parts of the quarter boards were damaged by the
breach of the sea; and one of the boats upon deck was about one-third
full of water, the oyle-hole or drain having been accidently stopped up,
and part of her gunwale had received considerable injury. These
observations were hastily made, and not without occasionally shutting the
companion, to avoid being wetted by the successive seas which broke over
the bows and fell upon different parts of the deck according to the
impetus with which the waves struck the vessel. By this time it was
about three o’clock in the afternoon, and the gale, which had now
continued with unabated force for twenty-seven hours, had not the least
appearance of going off.
In the dismal prospect of undergoing another night like the last, and
being in imminent hazard of parting from our cable, the writer thought it
necessary to advise with the master and officers of the ship as to the
probable event of the vessel’s drifting from her moorings. They
severally gave it as their opinion that we had now every chance of riding
out the gale, which, in all probability, could not continue with the same
fury many hours longer; and that even if she should part from her anchor,
the storm-sails had been laid to hand, and could be bent in a very short
time. They further stated that from the direction of the wind being
N.E., she would sail up the Firth of Forth to Leith Roads. But if this
should appear doubtful, after passing the Island and Light of May, it
might be advisable at once to steer for Tyningham Sands, on the western
side of Dunbar, and there run the vessel ashore. If this should happen
at the time of high-water, or during the ebbing of the tide, they were of
opinion, from the flatness and strength of the floating light, that no
danger would attend her taking the ground, even with a very heavy sea.
The writer, seeing the confidence which these gentlemen possessed with
regard to the situation of things, found himself as much relieved with
this conversation as he had previously been with the seeming indifference
of the forecastle men, and the smile of the watch upon deck, though
literally lashed to the foremast. From this time he felt himself almost
perfectly at ease; at any rate, he was entirely resigned to the ultimate
result.
About six o’clock in the evening the ship’s company was heard moving upon
deck, which on the present occasion was rather the cause of alarm. The
writer accordingly rang his bell to know what was the matter, when he was
informed by the steward that the weather looked considerably better, and
that the men upon deck were endeavouring to ship the smoke-funnel of the
galley that the people might get some meat. This was a more favourable
account than had been anticipated. During the last twenty-one hours he
himself had not only had nothing to eat, but he had almost never passed a
thought on the subject. Upon the mention of a change of weather, he sent
the steward to learn how the artificers felt, and on his return he stated
that they now seemed to be all very happy, since the cook had begun to
light the galley-fire and make preparations for the suet-pudding of
Sunday, which was the only dish to be attempted for the mess, from the
ease with which it could both be cooked and served up.
The principal change felt upon the ship as the wind abated was her
increased rolling motion, but the pitching was much diminished, and now
hardly any sea came farther aft than the foremast: but she rolled so
extremely hard as frequently to dip and take in water over the gunwales
and rails in the waist. By nine o’clock all hands had been refreshed by
the exertions of the cook and steward, and were happy in the prospect of
the worst of the gale being over. The usual complement of men was also
now set on watch, and more quietness was experienced throughout the ship.
Although the previous night had been a very restless one, it had not the
effect of inducing repose in the writer’s berth on the succeeding night;
for having been so much tossed about in bed during the last thirty hours,
he found no easy spot to turn to, and his body was all sore to the touch,
which ill accorded with the unyielding materials with which his bed-place
was surrounded.
[Monday, 7th Sept.]
This morning, about eight o’clock, the writer was agreeably surprised to
see the scuttle of his cabin sky-light removed, and the bright rays of
the sun admitted. Although the ship continued to roll excessively, and
the sea was still running very high, yet the ordinary business on board
seemed to be going forward on deck. It was impossible to steady a
telescope, so as to look minutely at the progress of the waves and trace
their breach upon the Bell Rock; but the height to which the
cross-running waves rose in sprays when they met each other was truly
grand, and the continued roar and noise of the sea was very perceptible
to the ear. To estimate the height of the sprays at forty or fifty feet
would surely be within the mark. Those of the workmen who were not much
afflicted with sea-sickness, came upon deck, and the wetness below being
dried up, the cabins were again brought into a habitable state. Every
one seemed to meet as if after a long absence, congratulating his
neighbour upon the return of good weather. Little could be said as to
the comfort of the vessel, but after riding out such a gale, no one felt
the least doubt or hesitation as to the safety and good condition of her
moorings. The master and mate were extremely anxious, however, to heave
in the hempen cable, and see the state of the clinch or iron ring of the
chain-cable. But the vessel rolled at such a rate that the seamen could
not possibly keep their feet at the windlass nor work the hand-spikes,
though it had been several times attempted since the gale took off.
About twelve noon, however, the vessel’s motion was observed to be
considerably less, and the sailors were enabled to walk upon deck with
some degree of freedom. But, to the astonishment of every one, it was
soon discovered that the floating light was adrift! The windlass was
instantly manned, and the men soon gave out that there was no strain upon
the cable. The mizzen sail, which was bent for the occasional purpose of
making the vessel ride more easily to the tide, was immediately set, and
the other sails were also hoisted in a short time, when, in no small
consternation, we bore away about one mile to the south-westward of the
former station, and there let go the best bower anchor and cable in
twenty fathoms water, to ride until the swell of the sea should fall,
when it might be
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