The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [89]
At one point, the weather was so bad that they were stuck on the rock for two full weeks. By the time the sea calmed down enough to allow the supply boat to reach them, they had only a day’s worth of food left.
Alan spent his evenings confined to a tiny cabin in the barracks, writing letters, keeping up his journal and replenishing his need for solitude. He kept a small store of books and confessed later that during long nights and difficult gales he had time to read Don Quixote, Aristophanes and Dante twice through. By now, he had struck up a correspondence with William Wordsworth, and was later to visit him in the Lake District. The friendship had been established through James Wilson, a zoologist in Edinburgh. In 1841, Wilson, a long-standing friend of Wordsworth’s, had sailed round the coast of Scotland on a tour of inspection with the Board of Fisheries and had visited Alan at Hynish. In December 1842, Wilson wrote to Wordsworth introducing Alan and Skerryvore as one of Scotland’s more intriguing native curiosities. According to Wilson’s assessment, Alan was ‘an honest man, of good natural intelligence, but with no pretension to literature’. Alan, he said, had written to Wilson describing his delight at receiving several mementoes from Wordsworth – a lock of his hair, a few laurel leaves from the poet’s home at Rydal Mount and his autograph – and explaining the pleasure and sense of endorsement he gained from Wordsworth’s poetry. ‘I am highly gratified to find that the Poet should receive any satisfaction from the testimony of a remote and obscure doer of daily work like myself to the value of his writings,’ Alan wrote. ‘Many were the moments in my solitude, during which I have felt my commonplace labours ennobled by the Poet’s views of duty and perseverance…while other poets unfit us for an immediate relish of every day labour by carrying us into situations wholly chimerical, Wordsworth so elevates the mind by presenting common objects in their true relations to Man’s more exalted hopes and fears, as to dignify all his worthy thoughts or occupations however humble.’ He had, he confessed, stuck the poet’s mementoes alongside small portraits of Southey and Coleridge on the wall of the barracks to sustain him during the days of work and worry. Alan later kept up the correspondence with Wordsworth, unassisted by the well-intentioned patronisings of Wilson, and the two found common ground in their discussions of poetry, criticism and nature.
Many years later, Wordsworth’s son Gordon wrote to Alan’s daughter Katharine de Mattos correcting Wilson’s estimate of Alan. ‘Prof Wilson may be right in saying that your Father had no literary pretension,’ he pointed out, ‘but it is certain he had very remarkable literary insight and power of expression. It is notoriously difficult to appraise contemporary poetry rightly – even Coleridge was often wrong. Your father seems to me to have been the first to give the same verdict as the most distinguished admirers have since done in no better words, critics like Mill, Matthew Arnold and Lord Morley.’ As Wordsworth himself had noted, acknowledgement from Alan, ostensibly a non-literary figure, was ‘more valued by me, far more than others I receive, both as testimonies to the substantial benefit drawn from my writing by Contemporaries and as presumptive evidence that the same benign operation will go down with them to succeeding times.’
The letters from Wordsworth and others were some of the few outside intrusions in an otherwise hermitic life at Skerryvore. When the weather was good, all the men laboured like navvies. Alan noted proudly that not more than half an hour of working time had been lost during the whole of their time on the rock. ‘I am inclined to believe that throughout this summer in particular, the men have been working close upon the limits at which human strength begins to fail, and I have myself repeatedly fallen asleep in the forenoon with my pen in my hand,’ he reported to the Commissioners. When he was awake, much of his time was spent watching the sea and the