The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [37]
Over the course of the centuries, various attempts had been made to mark the Inchcape Rock, as it was originally known. During the fourteenth century, the Abbot of Aberbrothock (Arbroath) fixed a bell on the reef to warn passing sailors. A Dutch pirate, intent on accumulating as much wreck as possible, removed it. ‘A yeare thereafter,’ an early Scots historian noted smugly, ‘he perished upon the same rocke with ships and goodes, in the righteous judgement of God.’ The Inchcape was gradually retitled in honour of the bishop, becoming instead the Bell Rock. The poet Robert Southey, impressed with the legend of its naming, wrote The Ballad of the Inchcape Rock in 1815 after a visit to Scotland.
Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair
He curst himself in his despair,
The waves rush in on every side;
But the ship sinks fast beneathe the tide
For even in his dying fear
The dreadful sound could the Rover hear
A sound as if with the Inchcape Bell
The Devil below was ringing his knell.
Though perhaps not his finest poetic moment, Southey’s contribution only added to the Inchcape’s myths.
Reality also intervened. In December 1799, a gale lasting three days destroyed over seventy ships around the Scottish coast. The warship HMS York, caught offguard by the storm, ran aground on the Bell Rock and sank with the loss of all on board. The resulting furore in Parliament and the rising pressure from local shipowners and merchants made the Northern Lighthouse Commissioners increasingly uncomfortable. But even the loss of a major warship did not appear to move them. Over the years, they had become so accustomed to the rumble of complaints that they had a standard reply prepared. They were, they said, most attentive to the concerns of seafaring men, ‘but their funds were never in a situation to attempt so expensive and hazardous an enterprise’. At present, they had scarcely enough money to pay for a candle, let alone something as complex and sophisticated as a lighthouse eleven miles out to sea. All their funding came from dues levied on shipping, and those barely scraped the costs of maintaining the existing lights. In addition, they needed the permission of Parliament for any further lights, which meant drafting and presenting a special bill and then waiting for months, maybe years, while it made its slow passage through the debating chambers. Besides, they added privately, the Bell Rock was an impossible site, there wasn’t the engineer in existence foolhardy enough to attempt even a platform on it, and that was an end of it. Anyone who had actually seen the place would realise it was an absurd request. The Bell Rock was deadly, and that was that.
Their chief engineer, however, had other ideas. Robert Stevenson believed that a light on the rock was both possible and necessary. From his long experience with the Northern Lights, he argued, he was eminently qualified to decide on exactly where and how to build lighthouses. A tower on a submerged rock was an awkward endeavour, but not an impossible one. His recent visit to the English lights had only confirmed his view. If Smeaton had managed to build a lighthouse on the Eddystone then he, Robert Stevenson, could go one step further and build one on the Bell Rock. It would indeed be expensive, but the Commissioners should weigh the cost of a lighthouse against the price of another century of wrecks and deaths. Furthermore, as he was fond of pointing out, he considered himself the best qualified candidate to build the light. He had been applying himself to the science of lighthouses now for over ten years; he understood them better than any other engineer in Britain, and he had absolute faith in his own judgement. Once confronted with a true test of his abilities, Robert rose to the occasion.
From 1800 onwards he lobbied, cajoled and pressured the Commissioners for the chance to design and build a suitable lighthouse. The NLB meetings, usually staid affairs devoted to finance and keepers