Close
In 1831, Robert Stevenson, a seasoned civil engineer, built the lighthouse at Dunnet Head to warn sailors of dangerous rocks that threatened to add them to the vast cemetery of sunken ships littering the seafloor off of Scotland’s deadly coasts. The lighthouse is a brisk walk around the headland from the House of the Northern Gate and sits at the northernmost point of mainland Scotland. Robert Stevenson’s grandson, the renowned writer Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote the story of his vocation of building lighthouses. He saw his grandfather as an artist shaping nature as he explored the untouched, unspoiled hinterlands of Scotland.
Robert Stevenson’s father—Robert Louis Stevenson’s great-grandfather—harbored ambitions of making a fortune off slaves and sugar in the West Indies in the late 18th century. Instead, he died at twenty and left a young widow, Jean-Lillie Stevenson, and a two-year-old Robert in poverty. All that was left for future generations of Stevensons to remember him by was a painting of a ship laden with Caribbean goods, perhaps the very same ship that carried him on his last voyage in hot pursuit of an employee who had stolen from him. A pious Presbyterian, Jean-Lillie yearned for her son to join the ministry, but she could only afford a charity school. By 15, Robert knew no Greek and an insufficient amount of Latin (in the 19th century, that meant he could read Cicero but could not analyze Latin like a scholar). He had neither the means. the connections, nor the education to enter the ministry. But then Jean-Lillie remarried, and a new door opened. She wed an upwardly mobile, hardworking civil engineer named Thomas Smith. Although he was only in his early thirties, he was twice widowed and had five children. The two families blended seamlessly, and Robert Stevenson caught his stepfather’s infectious passion for engineering lighthouses.
The stakes of their work were high. Unlike England’s calmer beaches dotted with inviting villages, Scotland’s cliffs drop into the sea and rocky islands off its coast threaten to sink passing ships. As long as its coasts remained a death trap, sailors tried to avoid Scotland, especially at night. When Thomas Smith became the chief engineer of the Northern Lighthouse Board, the only lighthouse on the entire Scottish coastline was on the Isle of May. He added another ten, and Robert Stevenson built another 20. Three of Stevenson’s sons in turn joined the trade, and in all the family built approximately 150 lighthouses in Scotland.
Robert Louis Stevenson saw civil engineering of the 1700s as a frontier that needed men who were not only adept with numbers and maps, but who also had the imagination to shape nature like artists without the help of any textbooks or proven models. Robert Stevenson had to work in harrowing circumstances with minimal technology; at Bell Rock, he built a lighthouse on an island that the sea covered for all but a few hours of the day without the help of any machine. An engineer’s projects were “at once inventions and adventures,” and his trade was more a “living art” than a science, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it in his book about his family history published posthumously in 1896. He described how his grandfather never flagged in his dedication to his art, always perfecting each lighthouse so that it could outshine the last. He invented improvements such as rotating and flashing lights with distinct color patterns so that sailors could recognize each lighthouse at a distance. Dunnet Head was one of his last lighthouses, the product of decades of careful study and improvement. To this day it continues to warn sailors of the dangers at Dunnet Head and the Pentland Firth beyond.
Robert Louis Stevenson felt that his grandfather shared the sense of romance that made the sea so fascinating to him. Robert Stevenson became the leading engineer at the Northern Lighthouse Board after his stepfather, and he traveled through Scotland from May to November inspecting new locations for lighthouses and checking in on the growing number already built. He delivered oil and food to lighthouse keepers and their families who were stranded in the desolate, undeveloped hinterlands. He traveled where neither roads, nor mail carts, nor the Queen’s own police ventured. He worked on islands off the coast of northern Scotland that were so isolated that their inhabitants still spoke a blend of English and Norse brought over by the Vikings. For his writer grandson, the work was all excitement: “The seas into which his labour carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage.” He wrote with fascination about how his grandfather planted lighthouses amid wrecks that had killed men just weeks before and rode through dangerous swaths of rural Scotland uncharted by any map.
Robert Louis Stevenson broke a generations-long tradition when he decided against becoming an engineer. In his 1887 book of poetry, Underwoods, he wrote:
Say not of me that weakly I declined
The labours of my sires, and fled the sea,
The towers we founded and the lamps we lit,
To play at home with paper like a child.
But rather say: In the afternoon of time
A strenuous family dusted from its hands
The sand of granite, and beholding far
Along the sounding coast its pyramids
And tall memorials catch the dying sun,
Smiled well content, and to this childish task
Around the fire addressed its evening hours.
Indeed, he did not abandon the spirit of his family’s work. He followed his father on several of his lighthouse tours and absorbed details of the sea that would later animate his fiction. He listened to his family’s tales of seafarers’ exploits, fatal shipwrecks, and rural Scotland where modernity had yet to arrive. His family of engineers set the scene for the colorful characters and romantic stories that still make his novels so delightful.
To read more about Robert Louis Stevenson’s family of lighthouse engineers, please see: Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson
Storied Collection
