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noted, were almost always heavier than those from the North Sea. The pounding that Skerryvore took in a heavy gale was almost twice what the Bell Rock endured. In a later essay, he cited the experience at Muckle Flugga and at Whalsey Skerries, where six-ton blocks of stone had been lifted clean from their foundations seventy feet above sea level. Tom was fascinated by the sea’s random malignity. At one point he described standing on the cliff at Whalsey examining the ‘indications of a violent, destructive agency which seemed to have been lately at work upon the hard rock…The only visible agent was the ocean, the unruffled surface of which appeared far below the place where I stood…Here, then, was a phenomenon so remarkable as almost to stagger belief – a mass of 5.5 tons not only moved at a spot which is 72 feet above high water spring tides, but actually quarried from its position in situ.’ In published papers, Tom kept his findings dry, but in private jottings he took his experiments as proof of the existence of something far greater than straightforward science. As Louis noted, ‘storms were his sworn adversaries,’ something he took personally. They provided him with a battleground, a place where man and nature confronted each other. The Stevensons had made their name and trade out of subduing the elements, and Tom understood that confrontation with particular astuteness. It worried him that his knowledge of the sea was, and would always remain, strictly finite, and that, despite all the advances of the last century, the sea still had the power to shock. Standing above a placid ocean, watching the displaced masses of rock and gauging the immensity of the forces that had moved them both frightened and intrigued him. His family, it seemed, could build lighthouses till the end of time, constructed with all the tenacity that stone and physics permitted, and yet the sea could still wipe out every fragment within seconds.

Faced with such an incomprehensible force, Tom’s usual reaction was to take notes. He filled more books with scribblings, skittering from an admission that measuring waves was ‘excessively difficult and unsatisfactory’, to passionate notes on the Crucifixion and ‘heathen writers’. ‘All waves are to a greater or lesser extent waves of translation,’ he mused, next to ‘Observations on a Remarkable Formation of Cloud at the Isle of Skye’, and the assertion that, ‘The nonconformist is often one of the most overbearing of modern pests.’ His beliefs were always vehement, his interests always fanatic. He was a black-and-white man at war with a life of greys. Small wonder that even Louis struggled to reach the furthest points of his father’s character. As he pointed out, Tom was not a born scientist, yet he had chosen to pick an intellectual fight with the ocean itself. ‘He was a man of a somewhat antique strain,’ mused Louis many years later, ‘with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewed and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life’s troubles.’ He had inherited Robert’s dogmatism but not his self-confidence. The arguments between Tom and Louis became more than just an illustration of a father’s hopes for his only son; they were also about Tom’s own precarious hold on the world.

When back in Edinburgh, Louis’s greatest friend was Alan’s son Bob. He was the child for whom Alan had written his despairing poem and was already developing into a character, ‘more unfitted for the world’, as Louis put it, ‘than an angel fresh from heaven’. Their games of pirates and adventures were necessary pleasures for both of them. Bob wanted a refuge from the dark atmosphere of Alan’s decline at home, and Louis provided it. The prospect of their father trapped in a fading body and tortured by Godly remorse was scarcely welcoming to his children.