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reputation of the Bell Rock and the inaction of the Lighthouse Commissioners that he decided to take matters into his own hands. Having prepared a model of a light which was to rest on four cast-iron pillars and be bound together with metal strapping, he presented it with due ceremony to the Commissioners. The Commissioners rejected it. Undaunted, Brodie ignored them and sailed off to the rock where he built two temporary wooden beacons. Almost immediately, the sea destroyed them. Brodie then enlisted the support of several Leith shipowners, and sailed out again. This time, he prepared a sturdier framework made of timber and iron and planted well into the rock. The beacon lasted for five months before being sunk by a hard winter. Brodie, still unwilling to admit failure, returned to the Commissioners and offered to build yet another light, this time constructed entirely out of iron. The Commissioners turned the offer down, but promised to reimburse him a small sum in recognition of his efforts, however apparently unproductive. Brodie presented a bill for several thousand pounds. The Commissioners, outraged by the demand, told him he could take £400 or nothing. Brodie refused it. Eventually, after years of futile dispute, the £400 was paid to his widow. And still no light appeared on the Bell Rock.

Cochrane’s complaints and Brodie’s thwarted efforts had not been lone protests. Both were accompanied by a flurry of petitions from like-minded men. Captains, shipowners, sheriffs and landowners had all written to the Commissioners at various times pleading in tones of mixed desperation and severity for a light on the Bell Rock. Ever since the Board’s establishment in 1786, petitions had been raised and schemes debated, running through the Minute books in a plaintive refrain. Endless solutions were proposed: replacement bells, lights on stone or wooden pillars, even lights on rafts. The suggested designs varied from simple beacons to elaborate contraptions built to impossible specifications. The reason for their agitation was obvious – the Bell Rock wrecked ships, year after year; it was a danger and a discouragement to shipping in the area. Sooner or later, the Commissioners were going to have to do something about it.

Both the shipowners’ alarm and the Commissioners’ intransigence were understandable. The Bell Rock, a sharp sandstone reef twenty-seven miles east of Dundee and eleven miles south of Arbroath, was indeed deadly. In all, the rock extended for around 1,400 feet and was shaped roughly like a slice of cheese turned on its side. Its danger lay in the fact that for much of the time, the reef was underwater. Even at low tide, its rocky spikes protruded only a little way out of the sea, and the whole area was only visible from a distance because of the ill-tempered currents and white water lacing its surface. At high tide, the reef vanished under seven foot of water, leaving nothing except the occasional flash of spray to betray its presence. Even in the mildest weathers, the submerged sides set up a whirligig of eddies into which unwary ships could be drawn. By the turn of the century, the Bell Rock’s habit of demolishing ships coming in or out of the Firth of Tay had given it a notoriety far beyond Scotland. As Louis later explained, the rock was positioned unusually awkwardly. ‘Placed right in the fairway of two navigations, and one of these the entrance to the only harbour of refuge between the Downs and the Moray Firth, it breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror and perplexity; and no ship sailed that part of the North Sea at night, but what the ears of those on board would be strained to catch the roaring of the seas on the Bell Rock.’ Those who tried to avoid it often sailed too close inland and grounded themselves on the jagged coastline nearby. Those who sailed too far to the west gave up the chance of refuge from the North Sea. Unsurprisingly, it had become a favourite among the local wrecking population, who, providing they could escape being wrecked on the rock themselves, found it a