The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [114]
Back at home, Louis was reluctantly coming to terms with engineering. His father’s threats and pleadings had finally brought about much the same conclusion as they had a generation previously. Louis was to spend his winters in the south studying theory, and his summers in the north supervising different Stevenson projects. For three long summers, Louis tried dutifully to adjust to his new profession. Admittedly, his first posting to Fife in 1868 did not much encourage his enthusiasm. ‘I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘I have a little cold in my head, which makes my eyes sore; and you can’t tell how utterly sick I am, and how anxious to get back among trees and flowers and some thing less meaningless than this bleak fertility.’ Occasionally, he made it obvious how far he was from adjusting to his new profession. ‘What is the weight of a square foot of salt water?’ he asked his father plaintively, ‘and how many lbs are there to a ton?’ With his mother, he was more honest. ‘Tell Papa that his boatbuilders are the most illiterate writers with whom I have ever had any dealing,’ he wrote to Maggie.
Louis’s apprenticeship coincided with the greatest challenge of his father’s career. By 1857, Tom had concluded that something must be done to light the infamous Torran reef, twelve miles off the Ross of Mull and thirty-three miles south-east of Skerryvore. The main rock, the ‘black and dismal’ Dhu Heartach (now spelt Dubh Artach) ‘is an egg-shaped mass of black trap, rising thirty feet above high water mark’, according to Louis. ‘The full Atlantic swell beats upon it without hindrance, and the tides sweep round it like a mill-race. This rock is only the first outpost of a great black brotherhood – the Torran reef that lies behind, between which and the shore the Iona Steamers have to pick their way on their return to Oban. The tourist on this trip can see upwards of three miles of ocean thickly sown with these fatal rocks, the sea breaking white and heavy over some and others showing their dark heads threateningly above the water.’ Years later, he used the reef as the ‘stoneyard’ on which David Balfour and Alan Breck were shipwrecked in Kidnapped.
The Commissioners began to collect petitions from captains and seamasters who used the area. All of them argued strongly in favour of a light; Captain Ticktack of the Palmer, who had been carrying a cargo of logwood from Jamaica to Liverpool, was wrecked on Seil Island. He had, he declared, ‘lost Seaman, Wife and Child as well as Ship’, and considered that a light on Dhu Heartach would have saved him ‘all his subsequent sorrows and losses’. Captain Bedford of the Royal Navy reported the fate of the JP Wheeler, bound for Glasgow from America. On 31 December 1865, the captain had attempted the tricky passage between the Ross of Mull and the Torran Rocks, while the Mate busied himself with necessary repairs. The captain ‘was sitting at the side of his bed when he heard a heavy sea break upon the deck – his idea was that the Vessel was in the tideway of the North Channel – running out he met the Mate coming to report that the Ship was among the breakers. It was too true, for all around him the sea was breaking as high as his topmast head. He went up the Mizzen rigging – thought he could discover a smooth, set more sail (which he expected every moment would go to ribbons) and succeeded in extracting his Ship from the Torrens Rocks.’ Tom himself was in no doubt about the need for the light. During the annual inspection of 1854 he had tried to make a landing on the rock, but even on a sunny day with a placid sea, it proved to be ‘impracticable’. Between 1800 and 1854, he noted, thirty ships had been wrecked