In practice this meant that Robert often worked blind, unaware of the efforts of his fellow engineers and unable to do more than feel his way through the darkness. In time, Robert established links with many of the most important British and European inventors and an atmosphere of mutual helpfulness, jolted by the occasional hiccup of professional jealousy, gradually developed. For the moment though, Robert was more preoccupied with refining his existing designs. He spent his winter nights making elegant architectural drawings, detailing the dimensions of each lantern, and polishing his reflectors to perfection.

  Robert relished the journeys and fretted at the endless delays spent in harbours or waiting for supplies. Behind the occasional non-committal statement in his diary or the NLB Minutes that he ‘found the light in good order’, lay hours of patient pedantry. His written evidence reveals as much by its omissions as by the endless records of missions accomplished. On paper, Robert was not an eloquent man. His diaries and minutes tell a gruff history only occasionally illuminated by flashes of insight. His grammar, as Louis later noted with some exasperation, was often hopelessly tangled and his occasional attempts at flattery ill-judged. As he wrote offhandedly to a colleague in 1802, ‘In submitting this address to you, I was otherwise impressed than with the view of laying something before you that might afford pleasure from style and composition. Those are no happy talents of mine, for my avocations in life intirely preclude me from such advantages.’ His son Alan was later to find Robert’s habit of referring to himself in official correspondence as ‘the Reporter’ or ‘the Writer’ mystifying. But Robert, unlike his son, remained conscious throughout his life of the gaps in his education. He spent twelve years chasing his degree, and was finally prevented by his lack of Greek or Latin. His solution was to turn their absence into an advantage, and to be as plainspoken as possible in all his dealings. Sometimes, indeed, his brusqueness verged on bullying. In all his work there was a sense of barely stifled urgency; he wanted life to be as fast and as efficient as he was, and he grew almost frantic when transport, communication or human fallibility disappointed him.

  But along with his desperation for haste Robert had extraordinary patience for detail. Most engineers, planning out a bridge or a road or a light, would have given only the most necessary sketchings. Robert gave ornaments or cornicings the same attention as he did load-bearing walls. He didn’t need to bother; he just wanted to. Likewise, he remained meticulous about the regular blizzards of paperwork that the lighthouse service produced. He would often return late at night from a day’s hard journeying and start on a further mileage of instructions. At one stage, he calculated, he had written and received over 3,000 letters in a single year, in addition to preparing the rough and fair copies of reports, estimates, invoices and private correspondence. For a while, he also kept up a separate journal, a memorandum book and a diary. When his youngest son, Thomas, visited England in 1844, Robert handed him a crowded little notebook containing jottings on almost every harbour in Britain. Again, Robert had not written it from necessity, but from an instinctive thoroughness in all his dealings, however apparently irrelevant.

  As chief engineer, Robert was also expected to contend with less predictable difficulties. One of the major hazards of any journey around the Scottish coast at the time were the press gangs. The boom in trade and war and the premium it put on able seamen meant that shipowners often had to find more inspired methods of attracting a crew. At the end of long voyages, ships would frequently find themselves surrounded and boarded by gangs intent on kidnapping or coercing the sailors into work on other boats. Sometimes they acted for themselves; often they acted for the State. The navy, with its voracious hunger for manpower, had become the press gangs’ best customers by the time of the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars. The pressmen used every method, legal and illegal, at their disposal to find sailors, from searching the workhouses to plundering the country’s prisons. Most gangs relied on a steady supply of informers, and were prepared to consider almost anyone, including deserters, criminals, children and the disabled. An Act of 1704 declared that ‘Idle Persons, Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars…are hereby directed to be taken up, sent, conducted, and conveyed into Her Majesty’s service at sea.’ Later amendments to the Act provided for a suit of clothing to be given as a bribe to volunteers, though it made little difference, since the victims of impressment rarely went quietly.

  The sailors, aware of the charmless fate that awaited them, took as much evasive action as possible. Some rioted, some capsized the press gang boats, and some feigned idiocy or injury (burning a fresh wound with vitriol to make it look like scurvy was, for a while, a favoured practice). Even when ashore, competent mariners were unsafe; press gangs patrolled the major maritime cities in search of recruits, while epidemics swept the docks. Fit and healthy men fled inland, or deserted as soon as they came on shore. By 1810, the Royal Navy employed around 150,000 men, many of whom, as one observer noted, were ‘so much disabled by sickness, death and desertion’ it was a miracle they sailed at all.

  From Robert’s viewpoint, the press gangs were at best an inconvenience and at worst an active hazard. Most troublesome of all was the gangs’ habit of taking those who were, in theory at least, exempt from impressment. For a while, Orcadians were excluded from the press gangs’ depredations since they argued that their work on the sea was essential for the survival of the islands. But as the hunger for men increased, they too often found themselves duped into service on the boats. Robert, who often hired builders or sailors from Orkney, swiftly discovered that special pleading made not the smallest difference. On a number of occasions, he was forced to lurk several miles out from harbour to avoid the acquisitive habits of the press gangs. On another occasion, his sailors were only saved by the thoughtfulness of a female passenger on the lighthouse yacht. ‘With much fortitude and presence of mind,’ he wrote later in his diary, ‘she offered to conceal them under the state room bed, she lying on top and feigning illness. This plan succeeded so well that the affair was never suspected and the men got clear.’ The Stevensons found the practice of impressment exasperating, but no matter how much they pleaded that their men were needed for work on the lights, the gangs went on taking their quota time after time.

  Nor was Robert exempt from the attention of the wreckers. When he complained to one of the local fishermen on Sanday about the conditions of his boat’s sails, the man replied slyly that if Robert hadn’t brought his lights, then all the islanders might have had better sails, better boats and a better life. Visiting mariners might have welcomed their efforts; the locals usually hated them. As Robert reported to John Gray, the Clerk of the NLB, in 1802, ‘You would hardly believe with what an evil eye the Wreck Brokers of Sanday view any improvement upon this coast, and how openly they regret it…You will readily see…how deeply their interest is concerned when I can assure you that since the erection of North Ronaldsay lighthouse, a period of about 12 years, upwards of Twenty Vessels have been wrecked upon the island of Sanday.’ While on one of the lighthouse inspection voyages many years later, Robert and his young son Thomas (father of Robert Louis Stevenson) were making their way through the Pentland Firth when fog came down and the crew dropped anchor for the night. When they woke at dawn the next morning, they discovered that the ship had drifted close to the isle of Swona. As the mist rose, they found themselves staring at a broad sandy bay, and above it, a small hamlet of fishermen’s huts with all the occupants apparently still asleep. If the current pulled them any closer to the island, the ship would have run aground, so the captain fired a gun as a distress signal. One by one, the villagers emerged from their huts, and stared across the beach at the drifting ship. There was a long, slow silence. Louis took up his grandfather’s account. ‘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.’ The ship escaped but Robert’s and Thomas’s memory of the wreckers remained.

  Robert’s reaction to the wreckers and pressmen was characteristic. He saw the work he was doing as the errands of public duty. If he ever had a moment’s doubt in the need for his work, he never expressed it. Those who opposed him – the wreckers, the locals, the pressmen, and even the sailors themselves – he found inexplicable or downright criminal. He regarded his mission to bring light into darkness as self-evidently justified, and remained bewildered by anyone who saw matters otherwise. ‘We have been boarded by the press-gang,’ he wrote wearily to John Gray in 1804 while in the lighthouse sloop off Kirkwall, ‘we have much of privateers here, but hope should any of them come in our way that they will consider the importance of our mission and let the vessel pass.’ It was a forlorn hope. As Robert discovered, not everyone felt as he did, and not everyone could be persuaded by logic, reason or force. Once in a while, he found himself becoming a little cynical. In a letter of 1806 to his newly appointed foreman, Charles Peebles, he gave vent to his frustrations. ‘I have the fullest confidence in your candour,’ he wrote, ‘and that you would use no man ill, but I fear you have been too indulgent on the [men]. 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 with business.’

  Once the first few lights had been completed around the coast, Robert returned to Edinburgh and the usual winter battles with the Lighthouse Commissioners. They, like Robert, were keen to continue the construction programme, having been petitioned by various town councils for lights in their area. During the long Edinburgh evenings Robert drew up schemes for new lights and kept an eye on Thomas’s ironmongery business. His records for the time show a steady flow of reports and estimates for harbours, bridges, piers, canals, drainage schemes, steamboats, roads, memorials, prisons, railways and fog-signals. He spent time drawing up a scheme for heating churches with steam, considered the improvement of Highland roads, and addressed at length the problem of gunpowder storage. He also wrote to local landowners, suggesting the construction of harbours, breakwaters or roads in their areas, and playing heavily on their desire for improvement and prosperity. He might have undertaken the lighthouse work from a strong sense of altruism, but he was also rigorous at maintaining the commercial side of the business.

  As an addition to his already burdensome commitments, Robert decided to make several trips to the English lighthouses. They would, he hoped, teach him much about the conditions of the English coast and make an interesting comparison to his work in Scotland. And so, in 1801, he set out for the south. That journey and the two subsequent trips he made in 1813 and 1821, were more revealing than he could have hoped. The lighthouses that he came to inspect had been built on altogether different principles to the Scottish lights. Their development had been a disjointed affair, which provided its own exotic history of heroes and villains. What Robert saw was the culmination of three centuries of work and occasionally misguided effort; and the English lights were to prove useful to the Stevensons not just as templates for their own endeavours but as excellent cautionary tales.

  The English lighthouse service started with good intentions but rapidly degenerated into an early example of the perils and benefits of privatisation. While the lighthouses were in the gift of the Crown, their administration was controlled by Trinity House. The governing body, known as the Elder Brethren, had been granted the sole right to build lighthouses in England and Wales since 1514. Unfortunately, its original charter had not given Trinity House any authority to collect dues from shipping, and the Guild was therefore left without funds to build new lights or maintain old ones. It fell back on the obvious solution, and got someone else to do it. For nearly three centuries, all the lights around the English coast were built by individuals who had been granted private patents by Trinity House. The patents, which usually cost only a nominal sum, were repaid through light dues charged to any shipowners using the lights. Lighthouses thus provided a tidy source of funds for many private owners, who had the satisfaction of having achieved something civic-minded at the same time as harvesting a useful income. But apart from granting charters, Trinity House seemed to do everything it possibly could to avoid building lighthouses itself. Between 1600 and 1836, it managed to construct only one light of its own; all the remaining lights around the English coastline were either built privately, or taken over by Trinity House once they had become profitable.

  Robert’s first English tour was aimed partly as a method of gathering information on the English lights, and partly as a comparison of his own experience with that of the Trinity House men. The Scots service might have been in its infancy, but England’s was nearing its dotage, and had much to offer the expert tourist. Robert visited fourteen lighthouses, covered a distance of 2,500 miles and picked up several useful tips for his own work. The differences between the Scottish and English lights, he noted, were often to his, and Scotland’s, advantage. The main variations were in materials; the English used timber and metal more than stone and most lights used copper reflectors rather than mirrored ones. From the size of windows and the design of the towers, Robert concluded that the English lights were often less sturdy than the Scots. Costs varied too. The average price of an English reflector and lamp at the time was £1,000. In Scotland it was £600. His account of the trip is characteristic; he showed concern for the standards of English lights alongside a desire to learn and not just to preach. He also disagreed with the practice of allowing individuals to build lighthouses, dismissing the owners as merely ‘private adventurers’. In his account, there is also a glow of satisfied competition. In many instances, he found, the lights that he had read so much about did not live up to his expectations. ‘I was made fully sensible that the pleasures of anticipation often greatly exceed what is really enjoyed,’ he noted.

  Not everything on his tour went according to plan. While making enquiries about the Lizard light, ‘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.”’ The authorities, it emerged, believed him to be a French spy.

  The complaint proffered 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 and the sets of the currents and tides along that coast; that I seemed particularly to regard the situation of the rocks called the Seven Stones, and regret the loss of a beacon which the Trinity Board had caused to be fixed upon the Wolf Rock; that I had taken notes of the bearings of several sunken rocks…Further, that I refused the honour of Lord Edgecombe’s invitation to dinner.

  Robert produced his letters of introduction and authority and was told by the local Justice of the Peace that these were ‘merely bits of paper’. For a while, it seemed as if he would be kept in custody indefinitely until two further Justices cleared him of any suspicion of espionage and left him to go on his way, ‘which I did with so much eagerness that I gave the two coal lights upon the Lizard Point only a very transient look’.

  The most famous of all English lighthouses, and the one which most interested Robert, was the Eddystone light. He was unable to see it in 1801 but returned twelve years later, intent on examining the light that had provided him with inspiration for many years. The journey was part research, part pilgrimage; the Eddystone was built by flawed heroes and, though Robert did not know it then, was to go through four different designs before it was finally completed. It was the first light to be built offshore in Britain and provided each subsequent generation of engineers with a useful precis of lighthouse design. The history of its multiple constructions also gave Robert vital guidance for his future career.

  The Eddystone reef lies fourteen miles south-west of Plymouth. Most of it is submerged, with only three feet protruding from the sea at high tide. The rust-coloured gneiss is as resilient as diamonds and the currents that surround it send up abrupt spouts of water on even the calmest days. It is thought of as a bad-tempered place, full of sulks and strange moods, and by the sixteenth century its reputation for destruction had already spread well beyond Cornwall. Plymouth had every other advantage, including a wide, sheltered bay, a naval dockyard and a vigorous trade with the New World. But merchant captains were so alarmed by the prospect of being wrecked on the Eddystone that they often ran themselves aground on the Channel Islands or the northern French coast trying to avoid it. In 1664, Trinity House was petitioned by two local men for permission to build a lighthouse on the reef. The Elder Brethren rejected the petition, citing the risks involved and complaining, with impressive illogicality, that, since there was no precedent for an offshore light, it must therefore be impossible to build one. Thirty years later, with local pressure mounting, another petition was presented. Trinity House dithered for two further years and then decided that, instead of undertaking the project themselves, they would hand it out to a Plymouth man, ‘at his own cost and entire financial risk’. If it worked, they would, after a discreet interval, take the dues; if it didn’t, they had lost nothing.

  The owner passed the project over to Henry Winstanley, an English eccentric of the finest breed. He was a man of many enthusiasms, an investor, designer, engraver, painter, pamphleteer, illusionist and inspiration for Winstanley’s Waterworks in Hyde Park, a show of ‘the greatest curiosities in waterworks, the like never performed by any’, which ran for over thirty years. Up until 1696, his only connection with engineering or the sea had been as a shipowner. One of his five merchant vessels had already been wrecked on the Eddystone, and a second, the Constant, ran aground on the reef before the end of the year. When Winstanley heard of the grounding, he galloped angrily off to Plymouth, demanded an explanation, and was told of the problems in lighting the rock. Winstanley presented himself to the new owner, and told him that he personally would build a lighthouse on the Eddystone. The owner, unconcerned by Winstanley’s lack of experience and wayward reputation, accepted.

 

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