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By Root 785 0

with Cummy, who stoked his imagination on a diet of Calvinist history and adored him with all the passion of a thwarted mother. The atmosphere of the house in Howard Place took on its own feverish quality with Tom downstairs writing passionate tracts on waves or nonconformism, Maggie fretting over her husband and her child, and Cummy soothing Louis with another tale of retribution. When Louis was a little older, the family would board a boat for France or Italy to take the waters and find healthier air. Cummy would accompany them, and on one journey in 1863 she kept a diary famed for its pungent disapproval of everything foreign. She complained about the devilish papist practices of the Continentals, and found most of Italy hopelessly inadequate compared to Edinburgh. Rome, she wrote, ‘is about the size of Edinburgh, though not nearly so bonny as Auld Reekie’. Catholic practices she found worst of all. ‘No wonder the Frenchmen think our quaint Scottish Sabbath dull,’ she wrote smugly, ‘for here is everything to please the unconverted heart of man – worldly pleasure of every kind, operas too!’

When she wasn’t hurling herself into churches and complaining about foreign food, Cummy kept a record of the ailments that plagued the Stevensons. Mrs S. had a nasty cough, Mr S. had troublesome piles, Mrs S. was afflicted by headaches, Cummy herself had seasickness and ‘peculiar feelings’, while Louis ran the gamut of everything from fevers to bleedings. The sick little band of Scots wandered from place to place, perpetually chasing better health. But if illness made them a gloomy party, it also made them a close one. Tom’s concern for his son showed itself in an unexpected sweetness of spirit. When Louis woke screaming from nightmares, only his father could reassure him. As Louis later acknowledged, Tom would ‘rise from his own bed and sit by mine, full of childish talk and reproducing aimless conversations with the guard or the driver of a mail coach, until he had my mind disengaged from the causes of my panic.’ Tom had his own strange preoccupations, and there was a deep seam of understanding between father and son which was later to form the basis of many of their ferocious arguments.

Despite Tom’s dotings, there was still work to be done. David was still nominally chief engineer to the NLB, but the two brothers nearly always worked in tandem, David tending towards organisation and Tom towards details. Tom’s interest in the shape of waves was also beginning to form itself into a well-respected expertise. After completing his work at Hynish, he despatched log-books and dynamometers to the keepers at Skerryvore and the Bell Rock, instructing them to take regular note of wind speeds, the height of the spray and the maximum water pressure per square foot. The keepers were evidently nonplussed by Tom’s ‘wave engines’ and letters of instruction, but were shrewd enough to keep their own counsel. Tom also collected anecdotal accounts. The oldest fisherman in Aberdeen, he discovered, had stated that the waves were always highest when the wind was from the south-east; ‘10 of the oldest and most intelligent fishermen’ in Argyllshire stated unequivocally that the worst storms were from the south-west; and one of the keepers at Calf Point wrote in describing an unusually fierce sea lifting a ten-ton block of stone from the landing slip and shifting it several feet to landward. There was also some documentary evidence of storms so powerful they overturned normal physical laws. During the seventeenth century, a merchant ship was wrecked in a hurricane off the west coast while carrying £750,000-worth of gold coins and ingots. When the ship’s cargo was salvaged, it was found that the structural ironwork was embedded with one of the ingots and several sovereigns. If waves could solder gold into iron, it was evident that there were forces at work that no amount of clever engineering could account for.

In all, Tom made 267 experiments over two years, which he finally published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Atlantic swells, he