The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [8]
Matters improved erratically, if at all, in the nineteenth century. In 1837, an indignant committee of Edinburgh societies complained to the Treasury that even the best maps and charts of Scotland were so inaccurate that ‘in some charts, the large island of Arran is laid down as six miles from Bute, in others as nine miles, and in a third as 12 miles distant from the island. Pladda Island light in charts is placed at 16° north of Ailsa Craig, where its true distance is only 10°20’. These last are serious errors at the entrance of so important a river as the Clyde.’ Many of the roughest hazards remained unmarked, those that were noted were often wrongly placed, and the pilotage rules, with their ‘Fifty fathoms black ooze and black fishey stones among’, could often be more poetic than practical. Areas given as ‘safe anchoring’ were revealed to be notorious shipwreck spots; ports and harbours were awkward to approach and littered with the bones of old ships.
Not that adversity deterred Scotland’s swelling population from turning away from the land and onto the sea. Like the rest of Britain, Scotland needed it, fed off it, took employment from it and profited by it. From the sixteenth century onwards, the nautical traffic around Britain increased steadily, while the numbers of shipwrecks and groundings rose in tandem. Aside from farming and manufactures, the sea provided one of the principal sources of employment for a large swathe of the population until well into the nineteenth century. Directly, it provided subsistence, fish and ™ indirectly, it provided strength, funds and political muscle. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was also spending a significant amount of her time and money waging wars across it. The navy grew threefold, and with it grew the pirates, privateers and press gangs of legend. Though the end of the Napoleonic wars meant the dwindling or abolition of all three, for the moment they remained a constant threat. The escalation of trade meant the escalation in war to protect that trade. In the century between 1650 and 1750, England was engaged in six major European wars. Old routes were travelled more frequently; new ones were marked out. By the 1750s, Scotland and England had separately built up a regular trade in subsistence goods – corn, coal, livestock – with France, Scandinavia and the Baltic. The French, meanwhile, were involved in so many wars at the time that they were forced to scale down their navy and resort to privateers instead, many of whom spent their time raiding the British coast. At the same time, Scotland in particular depended on the Scandinavian countries as trading partners and maritime allies. The traffic between the two places, always constant, escalated with the growth of industry and the spread of free trade. From the Clyde ports there was the journey to the New World, which by the 1750s was providing a useful new source of tobacco, sugar, manufactured goods and slaves. To the north and south, there were the whaling grounds and beyond the Continent there were the exotic dangers of a new empire. In each direction, there were prizes to be taken and claims to be staked.
Scotland contributed her own heavy percentages to the traffic in other ways. Union with England had brought benefits, albeit slowly. Immediately after 1707, the changes were mainly internal: cattle sales to English markets, corn to English mills or men to English employment. But after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Scotland’s trade with Europe accelerated and the age of the Great Improvers began. Landlords in the Highlands cleared the straths for sheep, packed off the protesting population to stony coastal settlements, taught them how to fish and left them to make a life for themselves. Some of the settlements died quietly,