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By Root 739 0

was beginning to define the course of marine engineering. During his time, it became less the adventurer’s sport than it had been in his father’s youth, and more the prosaic discipline it was considered by the end of the nineteenth century. David was, admittedly, not an adventurer in his father’s mould. He liked thoroughness, convention, procedure and systems. Out on his own, he relished order, not the pleasures of risk. He was to become, in the best and the worst of senses, the most professional of the Lighthouse Stevensons. But if he lacked his father’s magpie habits, he had many of Robert’s steadier qualities. David was an engineer to the bone, who saw everything – geography, politics, history – through the prism of architecture and construction.

During 1836 and 1837, David had gone on a lengthy tour of English works, and then on a fact-finding trip to America. The journal he kept provides a glimpse of a man now indivisible from his work. On the trip from Liverpool to New York, for instance, he took pains to note the size, weight and towing speed of the tug pulling them out of harbour and spent most of the Atlantic crossing making notes on the air and water temperatures, latitude, longitude and wind speed. Few other observations intruded, other than the information that a young orphan boy had been found stowed away in the hold. The boy, wrote David noncommittally, ‘gave no definite reason for his leaving for New York. He was tied up to the shrouds according to sea fashion – he was however soon released and set to sweep the decks &c by the captain. At 12 noon today the temperature of the air was 42° faht. and the water 49°.’ Likewise, the first thing David noted on arrival in New York was not the glittering images of a foreign city, but a careful record of American dock- and harbour-construction techniques. His tour included Philadelphia, Washington, Mississippi, Ohio and the Great Lakes. Amongst David’s impressions were an index of good, tolerable and poor US inns, the dimensions of American steamships, and several tetchy observations on the grubbiness of American trains. He remained an ambivalent tourist. He liked American engineering but found Americans themselves bizarre. As Robert reported to a colleague, ‘He says he never was so thankful to God than when he got through, or over, the Alenghenny Mountains to Lake Erie. It is well, he says, to go on business, all he has seen is interesting, but to go into the Western States for pleasure is out of the question.’ At least David’s lists of specifications intrigued his father. He saw, noted Robert approvingly, ‘steamers and other vessels of 600 or 700 tons!’ The trip took eight months in total, and on his return through Europe he confessed that he would like to find a publisher for his impressions. David did eventually produce an account of his American wanderings which has since become a useful guide for scientific historians, if not a particularly compelling read.

David might not have recorded them, but other matters besides engineering were beginning to preoccupy all the Stevenson brothers. By 1848, all four of Robert’s children remaining in Scotland had married: David to Elizabeth Mackay in 1840; Alan to Margaret Scott Jones in 1844, and Tom to Margaret Isabella Balfour in 1848. Jane had been married to Dr Adam Warden since 1828, and, to Robert’s delight, had produced seven children, one of whom took over Jane’s role as his companion and secretary. David had courted Elizabeth for a while, finding in her a kind-hearted counterpoint to the stiffness of Stevenson family life. By 1855, Elizabeth had given birth to eight children. Six survived and two, David Alan and Charles, later became the third generation of Lighthouse Stevensons. Tom’s marriage to Margaret, the youngest daughter of the Reverend Balfour of Colinton, was also a fusion of opposites. She countered his moodiness with warmth and was cheery enough to deal with his occasional fits of melancholia. Her arrival also acted as a balance to Robert’s influence. All four children moved away after their marriages