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By Root 779 0

by the winter seas; it had been used as a convenient roosting place by the local sea birds, who had daubed it with an unwelcome whitewash of guano. Inside, the rooms smelt musty and dank, but were only a little affected by seawater. The stump of the half-made tower was undamaged by the sea, and the masons set about fixing the first few courses of the walls and spiral stairs immediately. Despite storms that delayed work by several days, by early June they had finished the first floor. It was a fidgety task, often more like sculpture than building work, since it was necessary now not just to dovetail the blocks, but to ensure that their outer edges and the tapering gradient never unbalanced the shape of the building. In addition, Robert’s insistence on using pozzolana mortar, which was stronger but took longer to dry, meant that the men spent their days playing a delicate game of grandmother’s footsteps with the sea: wait too long for the mortar to set, and the chance to work disappeared as the tide rose; wait too little, and the damp mortar would be unglued by the salt water.

All work remained dependent on the weather. Robert grew astute at watching for signs of an impending gale, noting the habits of the sea birds and the way in which shoals of fish clustered over the reef in good weather but vanished into the deeps as bad weather approached. During patches of enforced idleness, he would sit watching the waves curl and unfurl against the walls of the tower, and study the way gales behaved. He made loose mental calculations of the weight of each breaker, the way each fourth wave would be mightier than the rest in a storm, and the eerie way in which the air moved around the water. His interest was, in part, detached scientific curiosity, but it was also the habit of a man accustomed to judging tactics. Some of the gales were indeed spectacular; the men ran the constant risk of being flung off the walls of the tower by the waves, many of which broke easily over the top of the seventy-foot top course. Robert, characteristically, was torn between worry for the safety of the workmen and panic at the prospect of stones being washed off the light. ‘The loss even of a single stone,’ he wrote nervously, ‘would have greatly retarded the work.’

After a while, the men grew discontented with their rations, and complained to Robert that they weren’t getting a proper allowance of beer each evening. Robert was unsympathetic, deciding crossly that their complaint was an ‘unexpected and most unnecessary demand’. His initial response was simply to reiterate the list of their existing rations, and to remark that it seemed quite enough to him. The boat-master and another recently arrived workman replied that no change was no answer, and that they, and many of the remaining workforce, would come out on strike if nothing were done. Robert appealed to their humanity, reminded them that they would be sabotaging ‘a building so intimately connected with the best interests of navigation’, and threatened to fling them out to the local press gangs if they didn’t return to work immediately. At the end of his speech, he told them that ‘it was now therefore required of any man who, in this disgraceful manner chose to leave the service, that he should instantly make his appearance on deck.’ Robert’s threats worked. Most of the men returned, grumbling, while Robert dismissed the two ringleaders along with an indignant letter to the Arbroath Foreman. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘can be more unreasonable than the conduct of the seamen on this occasion, as the landing-masters crew not only had their own allowance on board the Tender, but, in the course of this day, they had drawn no fewer than twenty-four quart pots of beer from the stock of the Patriot while unloading her.’ Nothing more of mutiny or strike was heard for the rest of the works.

By early July, the tower was almost finished. The last few stones were being laid and the final journeys from Arbroath completed. Robert made plans for the ceremonial ‘finishing pint’, while the Arbroath stonecutters gathered