The Lighthouse Stevensons. Bella Bathurst

frequently wreck themselves on the nearby coasts trying to escape.

      Until the mid-nineteenth century, navigation remained a ramshackle skill. Sailors within sight of the shore depended on being able to recognise the coastline. A church roof, a solitary copice or a coastal hamlet were reference points as dependable as any more thorough knowledge of the sea’s geography. In England, Elizabeth I had made altering or dismantling the most significant coastal landmarks a criminal offence. The law had little effect. After dark, without lights, landmarks were of only the most limited help. Many accounts of shipwrecks from the time note laconically that the pilot had mistaken one bay or harbour for another, and ended up paying for it. Even when the first primitive fires were lit on headlands to mark the way, they could easily be confused with stubble fires or temporary beacons. Nor was it possible to rely on written evidence. Even now, with the benefits of sonar and satellite surveying, there is no such thing as a definitive chart. Some parts of the Scottish coastline have not been surveyed for 150 years or more; others could be surveyed till the end of time and still not keep pace with the shiftiness of the sea. In the late eighteenth century, charts, maps and pilot books were drawn up by trial and painful error, and they were as often produced by merchants or traders as by any regularised state system. It was not until 1750 that Murdoch Mackenzie published a sea chart of Orkney and Lewis based on a rigid triangulation framework. Farther south, the situation remained poor for several more decades. In 1788, Murdo Downie, the Master of HM Champion at Leith, was complaining to the government that he could find ‘no chart published of the East Coast of Scotland that could in any degree be relied upon’. The old cherub-covered maps, with their foreshortened coasts and squint-eyed headlands, might look endearing now, but for several long centuries they were the only detailed information on the British coast available. When Daniel Defoe made his tour of Scotland in the 1720s, he discovered that the Forth and Clyde did not, in fact, run into one another, as his map suggested. ‘When I came more critically to survey the ground,’ he complained, ‘I found the map-makers greatly mistaken, and that they had not only given the situation and courses of the rivers wrong, but the distances also.’ Farther north, in ‘that mountainous, barren and frightful country’, the Highlands, things were even worse. ‘Our geographers seem to be almost as much at a loss in the description of this north part of Scotland, as the Romans were to conquer it,’ Defoe noted disconsolately, ‘and they are obliged to fill it up with hills and mountains, as they do the inner parts of Africa with lions and elephants, for want of knowing what else to place there.’

      Matters improved erratically, if at all, in the nineteenth century. In 1837, an indignant committee of Edinburgh societies complained to the Treasury that even the best maps and charts of Scotland were so inaccurate that ‘in some charts, the large island of Arran is laid down as six miles from Bute, in others as nine miles, and in a third as 12 miles distant from the island. Pladda Island light in charts is placed at 16° north of Ailsa Craig, where its true distance is only 10°20’. These last are serious errors at the entrance of so important a river as the Clyde.’ Many of the roughest hazards remained unmarked, those that were noted were often wrongly placed, and the pilotage rules, with their ‘Fifty fathoms black ooze and black fishey stones among’, could often be more poetic than practical. Areas given as ‘safe anchoring’ were revealed to be notorious shipwreck spots; ports and harbours were awkward to approach and littered with the bones of old ships.

      Not that adversity deterred Scotland’s swelling population from turning away from the land and onto the sea. Like the rest of Britain, Scotland needed it, fed off it, took employment from it and profited by it. From the sixteenth century onwards, the nautical traffic around Britain increased steadily, while the numbers of shipwrecks and groundings rose in tandem. Aside from farming and manufactures, the sea provided one of the principal sources of employment for a large swathe of the population until well into the nineteenth century. Directly, it provided subsistence, fish and ™ indirectly, it provided strength, funds and political muscle. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was also spending a significant amount of her time and money waging wars across it. The navy grew threefold, and with it grew the pirates, privateers and press gangs of legend. Though the end of the Napoleonic wars meant the dwindling or abolition of all three, for the moment they remained a constant threat. The escalation of trade meant the escalation in war to protect that trade. In the century between 1650 and 1750, England was engaged in six major European wars. Old routes were travelled more frequently; new ones were marked out. By the 1750s, Scotland and England had separately built up a regular trade in subsistence goods – corn, coal, livestock – with France, Scandinavia and the Baltic. The French, meanwhile, were involved in so many wars at the time that they were forced to scale down their navy and resort to privateers instead, many of whom spent their time raiding the British coast. At the same time, Scotland in particular depended on the Scandinavian countries as trading partners and maritime allies. The traffic between the two places, always constant, escalated with the growth of industry and the spread of free trade. From the Clyde ports there was the journey to the New World, which by the 1750s was providing a useful new source of tobacco, sugar, manufactured goods and slaves. To the north and south, there were the whaling grounds and beyond the Continent there were the exotic dangers of a new empire. In each direction, there were prizes to be taken and claims to be staked.

      Scotland contributed her own heavy percentages to the traffic in other ways. Union with England had brought benefits, albeit slowly. Immediately after 1707, the changes were mainly internal: cattle sales to English markets, corn to English mills or men to English employment. But after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Scotland’s trade with Europe accelerated and the age of the Great Improvers began. Landlords in the Highlands cleared the straths for sheep, packed off the protesting population to stony coastal settlements, taught them how to fish and left them to make a life for themselves. Some of the settlements died quietly, others took root and became export centres for wool, flax or fish. The subjugated regiments joined English wars and British battles or went south to the new shipbuilding yards in Glasgow or Greenock. Several thousand Highlanders left for the New World on leaky ships, some of which did not last the journey. Edinburgh functioned as both Continental trading post and garrison town, providing goods for export and men for war. When the press gangs sought fodder for their frigates, they looked first to the Scottish capital. For whatever cause, the population of Scotland was on the move in a way that it had not been before, and much of that movement was by sea.

      And as the sea cluttered up with shipping, so it accumulated shipwrecks. In the 1790s, an average of 550 ships were wrecked every year on British shores; by the 1830s, the numbers had risen to well over two a day. The vast increase in nautical traffic around Europe had not yet been matched by any improvement in safety. There was no regulated distress code and only the most clumsy and primitive of aids: heavy leather lifejackets or inadequate row-boats. By 1800, Lloyds of London estimated that one ship was lost or wrecked every day around Britain; between 1854 and 1879, almost 50,000 wrecks were registered. The figure is probably ludicrously low. Many wrecks never reached the attention of the local Admiralty officer, either through difficulties in communication or, more likely, through deliberate concealment. Both the navy and the merchant shipowners learned through bitter experience to expect a certain percentage of their ships to sink every year they sailed. With the mortality rate so high and conditions so bad, the sailors themselves could only cultivate a brutal fatalism about their work. They lived in a twilit world, with their own jargon and codes; most did not expect to live beyond the age of forty. They regarded the government with suspicion, the law with indifference, and their landlubber compatriots with derision. They were accustomed to shipwreck or injury, they accepted that the sea was unsafe, and they remained suspicious of men who promised salvation.

      Given such an ominous background, it was evident that changes would have to be made. By the 1780s, the swell of public agitation had become too strong for the government to ignore any longer. But it is notable that the pressure for lighthouses did not emerge from the sailors most at risk or indeed the organisations best equipped to provide lights. The pressure came from the shipowners and the naval captains, both of whom were keen to minimise the risks in sending precious cargo to sea. Their crews, the men who did the dying, seemed either so pessimistic about their chances for survival or so sceptical of innovation that it took several decades to convince them of the need for lights. It was the captains, the money men and the merchants who agitated most fiercely for action.