Books: Records of a Family of Engineers
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Records of a Family of Engineers
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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-a-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 (Anglice, walls), yet
instances occur of the land being enclosed, even to a considerable
extent, with ship-timbers. The author has actually seen a park
(Anglice, 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.'
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