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By Root 726 0

wrecked upon the island of Sanday.’ While on one of the lighthouse inspection voyages many years later, Robert and his young son Thomas (father of Robert Louis Stevenson) were making their way through the Pentland Firth when fog came down and the crew dropped anchor for the night. When they woke at dawn the next morning, they discovered that the ship had drifted close to the isle of Swona. As the mist rose, they found themselves staring at a broad sandy bay, and above it, a small hamlet of fishermen’s huts with all the occupants apparently still asleep. If the current pulled them any closer to the island, the ship would have run aground, so the captain fired a gun as a distress signal. One by one, the villagers emerged from their huts, and stared across the beach at the drifting ship. There was a long, slow silence. Louis took up his grandfather’s account. ‘There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and waited also. To the end of his life, my father remembered that amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach, and with a special and natural animosity, the boys of his own age.’ The ship escaped but Robert’s and Thomas’s memory of the wreckers remained.

Robert’s reaction to the wreckers and pressmen was characteristic. He saw the work he was doing as the errands of public duty. If he ever had a moment’s doubt in the need for his work, he never expressed it. Those who opposed him – the wreckers, the locals, the pressmen, and even the sailors themselves – he found inexplicable or downright criminal. He regarded his mission to bring light into darkness as self-evidently justified, and remained bewildered by anyone who saw matters otherwise. ‘We have been boarded by the press-gang,’ he wrote wearily to John Gray in 1804 while in the lighthouse sloop off Kirkwall, ‘we have much of privateers here, but hope should any of them come in our way that they will consider the importance of our mission and let the vessel pass.’ It was a forlorn hope. As Robert discovered, not everyone felt as he did, and not everyone could be persuaded by logic, reason or force. Once in a while, he found himself becoming a little cynical. In a letter of 1806 to his newly appointed foreman, Charles Peebles, he gave vent to his frustrations. ‘I have the fullest confidence in your candour,’ he wrote, ‘and that you would use no man ill, but I fear you have been too indulgent on the [men]. I am sorry to add that men do not answer to be too well treated, a circumstance which I have experienced and which you will learn as you go on with business.’

Once the first few lights had been completed around the coast, Robert returned to Edinburgh and the usual winter battles with the Lighthouse Commissioners. They, like Robert, were keen to continue the construction programme, having been petitioned by various town councils for lights in their area. During the long Edinburgh evenings Robert drew up schemes for new lights and kept an eye on Thomas’s ironmongery business. His records for the time show a steady flow of reports and estimates for harbours, bridges, piers, canals, drainage schemes, steamboats, roads, memorials, prisons, railways and fog-signals. He spent time drawing up a scheme for heating churches with steam, considered the improvement of Highland roads, and addressed at length the problem of gunpowder storage. He also wrote to local landowners, suggesting the construction of harbours, breakwaters or roads in their areas, and playing heavily on their desire for improvement and prosperity. He might have undertaken the lighthouse work from a strong sense of altruism, but he was also rigorous at maintaining the commercial side of the business.

As an addition to his already burdensome commitments, Robert decided to make several trips to the English lighthouses. They would, he hoped, teach him much about the conditions of the English coast and make an interesting comparison to his work in Scotland. And so, in 1801, he set