The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [97]
Apart from occasional panics at his abandonment, Tom enjoyed his time at Skerryvore, though not, admittedly, for the pleasure in producing a well-made sluice system. He had been there once already in 1841, when the tower was fifty feet high. Unfortunately, it was not the light that had made an impression on him, but the seven-hour journey back to Hynish during which the boat crew had collapsed from seasickness. Three years later, he brought with him several workmen and a notebook which he filled with jottings and opinions. Most of the time, the work bored or exasperated him, since he had none of Alan’s ability to ignore the outside world and thus treated most of his stay on Tiree as a form of grudging exile from Edinburgh. Confined to the island, he took no particular interest in the progress of the works and considered much of it a form of hard labour to be endured rather than enjoyed. He lacked the inclination to understand his workmates fully and usually preferred the intricacies of building materials to the politics of individual relationships. On one occasion, when the scaffolding on the harbour wall collapsed, pitching several of the workmen into the bay below, he recorded laconically that ‘such a scene of confusion presented itself as might have well made me laugh had not there been doubt as to the safety of those who were precipitated. Some were swimming while others were scrambling among the floating logs. There was no damage done however excepting a few scratches.’
On 31 May, in the same unconcerned tones, he noted that he and Dr Campbell, the resident Hynish doctor, had been out for a ride in the evening. ‘I observed that he became gradually more and more incoherent in his conversation till at last he dropt off his horse. At first I thought it must have proceeded from effects of vinum generosum but as he was quite well when we came out I saw it was not that. It arose from his having eaten about an ounce of morphia lozenges during our ride. This is a very curious case. He was delirious during all that night and was unwell for several days after.’ Poor Dr Campbell cannot have found Tom’s reaction very reassuring. At moments it must have seemed as if he could cheerfully have poisoned half the workforce without his boss batting an eyelid. The only matter that did rouse Tom’s attention were proceedings at the local kirk. Tiree, it seemed, was in danger of going over to the Free Church. Tom, who held the same conservative views as his father, found the dissenters distasteful. ‘This week’s work,’ he wrote crossly, ‘has given birth to a new sect of which it has been always thought there were already too many.’ He could not see any problem with ‘her Majesty’s Ministers’, and regarded the dispute as an aimless, vain squabble over ‘peculiar dogma(s) of their own’. He worked himself into a righteous froth over the ‘infidels, doubters and inquirers after a true religion’. His own belief was later to become a point of contention between him and Louis. For the moment, however, he confined himself to mutterings and insults in his journal.
Despite Tom’s apparent irascibility, he did get something useful from his time on the island. His main entertainment was not the works or the workmen, but a series of obscure – and, to observers, absurd – experiments on waves. After complaining about the inconveniences of Tiree’s roads and the monotony of the dredging works, he had taken to watching the sea. The size, weight, shape and impact of waves fascinated him. ‘Nothing can be more beautiful,’ he noted happily, ‘than to see the harmonious intersections of these waves. The waves last night were by the wave pole [measuring height] made out to be 6ft high but they afterwards rose to a great height as our harbour works can testify.’ He began filling his notebooks full of complex lists of different formations: retro-waves, right-angled waves and recoiling waves. He began tests with a home-made dynamometer, a primitive machine for measuring the weight and impact of water against a fixed object. The dynamometer was a box attached