A Good Book for Sailors

I promised you no more book reviews in 2014; but the new year is in full swing.  This book was given to me at least several months before we left NY in early October by Judy, a dear friend of mine and Lenes, who sailed with us for a few days in the Turks and Caicos in early 2012. Her book group read it and liked it even though they are not sailors; sailors will appreciate it more.

It is about three generations of the Scottish Stevenson family. Robert Louis Stevenson would have been the fourth had he not forsaken engineering for literature to the great disappointment of his family and with a personal sense of shame. The three generations built most of the lighthouses of Scotland and supervised their operation.

Two threads are woven through the book. One is the biographical -- the marriages, births, deaths and personalities of the men, mostly the men, and their wives-- a personal story. The other and vastly larger part tells the story of how they built the lighthouses, against all sorts of obstacles.

Both parts were interesting, though the later was far more interesting to me. Much of the personal part relates to the efforts of fathers to induce their children to follow their footsteps into the family engineering business. Robert Louiss father was himself drawn to literature but was forced to abandon it to study engineering, which he then tried to force his son into.  The fathers drove themselves very hard and demanded as much from subordinates and their children. Except for the first generation, the men suffered from weak health, which was exacerbated by long days of strenuous physical activity in cold wet places.

There is a skeleton family tree which is incomplete, in the sense that the text names various members of the family who are described on the tree merely as part of, e.g.,  "two daughters."

More irritating to me, the sketch map of Scotland at the front shows the names of some of the cities, islands, firths and lighthouses, but is terribly incomplete. The lack of a proper map in a book that is about locations was the major obstacle to my enjoyment of the book. The author refers to so many places, possibly presuming that only persons who are quite familiar with Scottish geography would read her book. The Stevenson family also designed much of the "new city" of their home, Edinburgh. I tried to use Google Earth to figure out which roads were joined with others. Subsequent changes to the landscape are what I blame for my inability to complete that task. There are sixteen plates showing the most famous lights and portraits of the Stevensons, but none of Edinburgh. Bathurst is very able to draw pictures with words, but maps would be so much better.

Bathurst also mentions big events in Scottish history with which I had not even the vaguest idea. Jacobites were Scottish revolutionaries, and "The Clearances" was the process by which the landed gentry forced the "highland" Celtic peasants off the land to make more money from sheep. This contributed to the Scottish Potato Famine. Some of the "crofters" went to the "lowlands", areas in the southern and eastern parts of Scotland, others to America. But all this I learned from Google after Bathurst merely mentioned the terms.

Another minor defect in the book is the absence of any footnotes to support the statements made. I would like to know if a given statement about a person is the authors conclusion from one or more documented episodes, from her reading of his letters or journals, or based on a secondary source: either a biographer or a newspaper. I am used to David McCulloch and Dorris Kearnes Goodwin, who give you the source of every statement in their books. It is not that I want to read all of those footnotes, but one feels more comfortable knowing that they are there. Ms. Bathurst does include a bibliography and she seems quite knowledgeable and won my trust after a while.

Most of the chapter titles are the names of the most famous of the lighthouses, each more challenging to build than the last, by which successive generations of  Stevensons made their reputations. Bathurst makes the point that each lighthouse needs to be designed to fit the requirements of its site, not aesthetically (though that was true too) but from the viewpoint of the engineering involved, especially the base on which it was to be built. Earlier lighthouses had been knocked down by the waves.

There were also political battles to be won, by the Scottish Lighthouse Board against British control, and by the builders against the wreckers who made their living from salvage and accurately perceived that the lighthouses would diminish their livelihood. Religious people argued that God had put the shoals where he did, and if he had wanted to, he would have put lighthouses there too. How can one argue with such a person.

Bell Rock, the Stevensons first, was built on a rock that was underwater at high tide. So work could only be done there, until the tower was partly built:  at high tide, in daylight, in the summer and in good weather. Not many hours of work per year.

The process of building the lights seemed to me like a scaling of Everest, where one has to establish a series of base camps leading to the final assault. In the case of lighthouses, these were to locate a quarry, create a remote land base where the materials could be assembled, acquire a ship to convey them to the rock, and then create: a landing place, a smaller temporary structure in which the workmen could live, the ring cut in the rock for a foundation, the foundation, the tower and finally the light at its top, before hiring and training the keepers.  And in some locations  during big storms, the waves threw tons of salt water over the top of and  into uncompleted lights and tore away blocks of granite weighing several tons.

The story also tells of the advances in lighting technology during the years, from a coal fire on a hilltop to candles with parabolic mirror reflectors behind them, to early glass lens concentrators, to Fresnel lenses.  And fuels advanced from whale oil to paraffin and even, after the Stevensons, electric bulbs, and the automation of the lights with consequent elimination of the keepers.

Bathurst includes other advances in safety at sea such as lifesaving organizations with boats, life vests, Plimsoll lines (to prevent overloading), licensing in an attempt to require competence and, in an epilogue after the Stevensons era, radio, GPS, and EPIRB. Bathurst notes the Volvo phenomenon -- as safety and navigation equipment improves, recreational boaters take greater chances, like Volvo drivers who drive faster because they are lulled into a false sense of safety by the safety built into their vehicles. A cautionary advice to all sailors.

My enjoyment of the book was enhanced by two others I have read. The first half of Robert Louis Stevensens "Kidnapped" is in essence a counterclockwise circumnavigation of Scotland, punctuated by a shipwreck, which, took place on the Isle of Erran, near the site of Skerryvore, the largest, tallest Scottish light.
The wreck was before the light was built. I added the route of the hero of "Kidnapped" to the crude map in my book. The second was Joshua Slocums Sailing Alone Around The World, reviewed in this blog, which included a gift of books from Robert Louis Stevensons widow to Captain Slocum.

The first in the line of Stevensons began as a metal worker who invented polished curved mirrors to concentrate light. He built lighthouses to provide a market for his polished mirrors. He was self taught and valued education and the dynasty grew up coincident with the development of engineering as a profession. He considered himself inferior because of his lack of a classical education.
Here is Robert Louis, painted by his friend, John Singer Sargent, obtained in August 2015 at a show at the Met Museum of  Art.

Many people love lighthouses as works of beauty. Our Maine trip in 2013 has pictures of many of them. And one underestimates the value of lighthouses to navigation if one thinks them as useful only at night. As God led the Children of Israel through the desert for 40 years (Exodus 13) by manifesting himself as a pillar of clouds by day and a pillar of fire by night, lighthouses guide mariners by their light by night and their bulk by day.        A good read.

Related Posts by Categories