The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [76]
Two hundred years ago, when the stones in Happy Valley were a little less smooth, that distant stub brought its rewards. Skerryvore wrecked ships year after year, and every time it did so, the fragments – wood, cargo, broken bodies – would drift towards Tiree and fetch up on one of the nearby beaches. By the 1830s, the rewards from the reef were considered so reliable that, as Robert had found on Sanday, rents on the Hynish side of the island remained higher than elsewhere. The east side stayed poor; the west side got rich on a steady harvest of wreck. When the NLB’s clerk of works came to assess the damage done, he calculated that at least thirty ships had been destroyed on Skerryvore between 1804 and 1844. He drew up a list, though, as he pointed out, it was not comprehensive. ‘Very many vessels were wrecked on this dangerous reef whose names could never be learned,’ he wrote later, ‘and of which nothing but portions of the drift wood or cargo came ashore; and there have, no doubt, been many shipwrecks of which not a single trace has been left. Nothing, indeed, is more probable than that many of the foreign vessels whose course lay through the North Irish Channel, and whose fate has been briefly and vaguely described, as “foundered at sea”, have met their fate on the infames scopuli of the Skerryvore.’ The Tiree fishermen, he noted, were in the ‘constant practice’ of sailing out to Skerryvore after a storm in the hope of finding wreck trapped in the rocks. Time and the lighthouse have evened out conditions on the island, and now there are few indications of prosperity in Happy Valley.
By the 1830s, Skerryvore had been bothering the consciences of the Commissioners of Northern Lights for over forty years. Letters pleading for a light had been arriving in George Street almost on a weekly basis. Suggested designs for towers made of stone, cast iron, even bronze were submitted by impatient amateurs. By 1835, when the Board invited interested parties to submit their opinions, the stream broadened to a flood. The Commanders of Revenue Cruisers, the Committee of the Glasgow Chambers of Commerce and the Chairman of the Liverpool Ship Owners Association all pressed the point. ‘I have frequently passed the rocks of Skerrivore,’ wrote the Inspector General of the Leith Coastguard, Captain Knight, ‘and consider them of so dangerous a nature and so completely in the direct Track of Vessels that I have no doubt many are wrecked on them and never heard of.’ James Melville, captain of the Revenue Cruiser Swift, agreed: ‘I am fully satisfied that there is not a station on that Coast, where a light is required more urgently for the safety of Vessels than upon these dangerous Rocks.’ The Board recorded only the petitions of the governmental organisations and the shipowners. The sailors who were most at risk from Skerryvore – the islanders and the local fishermen – stayed silent. Money and politics, as usual, shouted loudest, but there was also a darker undercurrent to the islanders’ silence. In part, it was the old suspicion of meddling southern men and the lure of profits from wreck. In part, it was still the settled belief that there was no need for a light on the Skerryvore rocks; God had placed those rocks there, God had meant them to be a warning to the unwary, and if God had meant a lighthouse to be built on the rocks, he would have put it there himself. Sailors and islanders are traditionally fatalistic. In the case of Skerryvore they had good reason to be.
Robert Stevenson had visited the reef twice: once in 1804, and once during his pleasure-tripping inspection tour with Sir Walter Scott in 1814. Scott’s glum assessment of the place (‘a most desolate position for a lighthouse – the Bell