Books: Records of a Family of Engineers

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Records of a Family of Engineers

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk Additional proofing by Peter Barnes.

RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS

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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15