Thomas fitted several of his parabolic reflector lights around the New Town and then, mindful of the need for more business, contacted the Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland. His reflectors, it seemed, had practical applications beyond mere street lighting; would they, enquired Thomas, be useful for lighthouses? As Thomas explained it to them,
Lamps being Inclosed are preserved from the Violence of the wind and weather but Coal lights cannot bereflector of proper power transcends it ixceedingly and is seen at a inclosed…Lamp light of itself has a more pure and bright flame than Coal light and when Conjoined with a reflector of proper power transcends it exceedingly and is seen at a much greater distance…Lamps take less attendance…Lamp lights with reflectors can be distinguished from every Other light in Such a manner as to make it Impossible to mistake them for a light on shore or on board any Other Ship…Coal lights are not capable of this Improvement.
He had, he declared, already prepared a sample reflector and was happy to demonstrate it to ‘any gentleman concerned’. The Trustees inspected his work, and agreed that Thomas’s designs would indeed be useful. Beguiled by his enthusiasm, they sent him south to gain experience from an English lighthouse builder. Once returned, he was made first engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Trust.
The title might have been imposing; the organisation itself was not. The Trust (now the Northern Lighthouse Board, or NLB) had been established after complaints about the state of the Scottish coast had reached boiling point. Several evil-tempered storms during the winter of 1782 had crippled both the naval and the merchant fleets, both of whom urgently petitioned Parliament to remedy the existing situation. Parliament set up a committee which recommended the construction of at least four lighthouses, scattered at vital points around the Scottish coast. In 1786, the bill was passed and the NLB was born. The Act for Erecting Certain Lighthouses in the Northern Parts of Great Britain provided for a management committee and a few officials to collect revenue, stipulated the sites of each light and then left the Board to its own devices. With its leaden cargo of sheriffs, judges and public goodbodies, the committee had only the most feeble knowledge of the sea and none at all about lighthouse construction. The Lighthouse Commissioners, as they were known, had been selected with the intention of providing political and financial canniness to the Board; as public officials, they were accustomed to question the cost of everything and trust the value of nothing. Their appointment was also partly political. Since the lighthouses would be built within the sheriffs’ fiefdoms, it was easier to give each one a place on the Board than to woo them anew every time a light was to be built on their land.
From the beginning, therefore, there was a strict division of roles. The Commissioners figured and the Engineer built. The Commissioners respected the experience and integrity of the Engineer; the Engineer lived within the Commissioner’s restrictions. ‘I beg leave to acquaint you that I am willing to do every thing in my power to bring to perfection the plan proposed,’ wrote Thomas in September, ‘and to superintend the erection of the lights, teach the people how to manage them and to do every thing necessary to put and keep them in a proper state…It is impossible at present to form any judgement of the trouble attending this business as I hope it will turn out a benefit to the Country.’ His first job, they announced, would be to construct four new lights: one at Kinnaird Head just beyond Fraserburgh, one at Mull of Kintyre overlooking the Firth of Clyde, one at Eilean Glas off the edge of Harris, and one on North Ronaldsay, a small island above the Orkney mainland. He could build them, staff them and light them in any way that he wished, they promised, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. The Commissioners, meanwhile, stayed in Edinburgh, counting the costs and squabbling politely with London.
Thomas could have been forgiven for wondering what exactly he had got himself into. For a start, he had no architectural experience, let alone the kind of experience necessary to build a sea-tower exposed to the hardest conditions wind and wave could hurl at it. Lighthouse construction was, to say the least, a specialist subject in the 1780s, although the idea of a lighted tower for mariners’ guidance had existed in some form or another since the Pharos of Alexandria was built by the Egyptians in 300 BC. The Pharos was an immense and ornate tower 450 feet high, topped with an open fire, and considered so splendid that it was usually listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Later attempts were less glamorous. Since there was no state control of lighthouses in Britain until well into the eighteenth century, their design was left to the individuals who built them. Far from being the trim marine spires of popular image, the English lights developed endless exotic variants. Most were coastal towers with large braziers of coal fixed to their roof. Some were church steeples loosely adapted for the purpose. Disused castles and priories were occasionally put to use, and in Ireland, there were several lights built in stone-vaulted cottages. Even those built specifically as lighthouses did not follow any definite pattern. Some looked like stumpy medieval rockets, some like upright coffins, others not much different from the average cow byre. One or two followed the design of fortified keeps, sturdy enough for the hardest gale. Others were no more than an iron basket filled with coal and suspended on a pulley. A number of owners built their lights in wood. Unsurprisingly, not many examples of these survive.
Until the 1780s, the only permanent light in Scotland was on the Isle of May which had been alternately saving and exasperating mariners for a century or more. The lighthouse had been built in 1636 on a small, low-lying islet at the entrance to the Firth of Forth. The mouth of the river was filled with snags for unwary shipping; rocks, sandbanks and awkward reefs on the surface and a graveyard of dead ships underneath. The islet was the first and the largest of these rocks and had gained a vicious reputation for shipwreck and destruction. In 1635, the Scottish Privy Council had given the task of constructing a light to three of Charles I’s favoured Scottish courtiers, who designed it, built it and maintained it at their own expense and then charged local shipping for its use.
Even by the make-do standards of the age, conditions for the lone keeper were unusually grim. The isle, a mile long by a third of a mile wide, was barren except for a little pasturage and a low, squat tower like a medieval keep with a brazier on the roof. The owners hired a local man, George Anderson, to tend and supervise the fire, and arranged for a boatman to appear every few days to drop a new delivery of coal into the shallow waters by the island’s rocky shore. Anderson would pick the coal out of the waters, haul it along to the tower on his back and winch it up in a bucket to the roof. For this, he was given a salary of £7 a year, 30 bushels of meal for his family and all the fishing rights he could want. Since he therefore spent most of his time away from the island looking for fish, the fire stayed untended and usually went out at the crucial moment. It was several years before someone took pity on the poor man and offered him the assistance of a second keeper and a horse.
Even when the fire was maintained, one light was hardly satisfactory for all Scotland. As the Isle of May proved, coal lights were inefficient, gobbled fuel and expired just when they were most needed, in gales or heavy rain. They required constant supervision, were usually clogged by smoke and could easily be mistaken for fires inland. Thomas was evidently going to have to start from scratch, devising new buildings, new fuels and new solutions if he was to succeed in improving the current situation. But if lighthouses came without templates, so too did their architects. There was, as yet, no such thing as an archetypal engineer, let alone a civil or marine specialist. The qualifications and bureaucracy of the modern profession did not exist 200 years ago. When Samuel Johnson published his famous Dictionary in 1755, he described an engineer as ‘an officer in the army or fortified place, whose business is to inspect attacks, defences, works’. As Louis later pointed out, ‘the engineer of today is confronted with a library of acquired results; tables, and formulae to the value of folios-full have been calculated and recorded; and the student finds everywhere in front of him the footprints of the pioneers. In the eighteenth century the field was unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature; he arose a volunteer, from the workshop or the mill, to undertake works which were at once inventions and adventures. ’ If he was to design, build, supervise, and maintain each of the NLB’s new lights, Thomas therefore needed to become an inventor in his own right. Much of his work was without precedent, and where tested methods did not already exist, Thomas had to improvise as best he could.
Trudging around the rim of Scotland, he soon realised that his new role entailed far more than merely fitting reflectors. Initially, he used the English lighthouses as his template, but was forced almost immediately to adapt to Scotland’s particular rigours. Most English lights of the time were built safely inland out of dependable local stone. Any building on the stormy coast of Scotland needed to withstand all that the elements could hurl at it; a lighthouse, with its flimsy glass and curlicues of ironwork, required a particular kind of strength. The first four lights were, according to Robert Stevenson, ‘on the smallest, plainest and most simple plan that could be devised, and with such materials as could be easily transported and most speedily erected’. All were built of unembellished stone, with walls thick enough to resist the strongest assaults of water or wind, and with plain lanterns bound with a tight corsetry of metal stanchions. The light at Kinnaird Head was adapted from an old fortified tower, and did just as well withstanding the elements as it had done withstanding invasion.
Despite the economy of the designs, Thomas soon discovered that his workload doubled. His assistants were untrained and his experience was suited more to the refinements of New Town ironwork than it was to designing weather-beaten coastal buildings. Two of the four planned lighthouses were on remote islands, which meant long, dangerous sea journeys and difficulties with supervision. Even on the Mull of Kintyre, which was at least on the mainland, materials could not be landed on the coast and therefore had to be carried over twelve miles of stark moorland to the site. Every slate, every block of stone, every fragment of lens and gallon of fuel, had to be taken on horseback and even then the journey was considered so difficult that only one trip could be made each day. Moreover, many of the materials for the lighthouses were new and untried. It was difficult for instance to manufacture glass large and strong enough for the storm-stressed lanterns, since reinforced glass had not yet been invented and metal supports would only have obscured the light.
Many of Thomas’s experiments worked well in his Edinburgh workshop, but when transported out to the edges of Scotland were found to be impractical or unusable. Where possible, he used local building materials, with the trusted Scottish combination of granite, slate and wood as the basis of the buildings. The delicate mirrored reflectors, however, had to be transported from his Bristo Street workshop by sea to the site, and were sometimes found to be ill-fitted for their purpose. The numbers of reflectors in each light had to be varied, and each one brought its own difficulties of transportation and installation. For a long while the task of constructing the lights seemed so impossible that Thomas had considerable difficulty persuading the incredulous local builders to work for him.
Appointing the first lighthouse keepers also presented unexpected difficulties. In the early years, Thomas looked mainly for retired shipmasters and mariners, either hired locally or brought to him by word of mouth. They too had to be pioneers of a kind; much of their role could only be resolved through experience, and a precise definition of their duties only emerged over time. But they were also responsible for a great deal of delicate and expensive equipment, and Thomas left little to chance. James Park, the first keeper at Kinnaird Head, was instructed to
clean the Reflectors and the panes in the windows every day the proper manner of cleaning the Reflectors is to take off any Oil or Smoke that may be found upon them with soft tow and then rub them with a soft linnen rag and Spanish white or finely pounded Chalk till they are perfectly bright this must be strictly attended to or else a great part of the effect of the lights will be lost…You will light the lamps half an hour after Sun-seting and keep them burning till half an hour before Sunrising every day for which purpose you must attend them every two or three hours throughout the night to help any of the lights that may be turning dim but you must take care not to stand before the lights any longer than is necessary of that purpose and you are to observe that in stormy weather you must not leave the light room the whole night.
In return, Park was given a shilling per night, free lodging, and pasturage for a cow. He remained contentedly in the job for a decade, before retiring aged almost eighty.
There were also some staffing difficulties Thomas could not have foreseen. At North Ronaldsay, the keeper took good relations with his neighbours too far, and had started his own local black market in lighthouse fuel. ‘The keeper,’ Smith wrote indignantly in his report to the NLB, ‘has acted the most dishonest and infamous part that can be imagined. He has by his own confessions before a number of witnesses sold the oil sent him in very great quantities throughout North Ronaldsay and the neighbouring island of Sanday, so that his conduct is notorious in the whole country.’ Smith rapidly discovered that, despite all his efforts, the keepers themselves kept introducing an unwelcome dose of chaos.
Perhaps most striking of all was his pained discovery that not everyone wanted or encouraged the lighthouses. Thomas and his Stevenson successors found that they did not merely have to compete with primitive materials and impossible geography, they also found themselves at war with inertia, hostility, superstition and disbelief. They had to do battle with landowners and government to get the lights built, and they found themselves challenging the prejudices of those whom those lights were supposed to save. Many people did not believe that lighthouses would work; many believed they were too expensive, many saw them as a form of religious defiance. Many people simply did not see the need for them. During the original inquiry into the need for a light on the Isle of May back in 1635, all the predictable excuses had arisen: the light would be too weak to be seen, the shipowners would be financially broken by the charges, there was no need for a light, the rock itself was not dangerous.
There were also more imaginative protestations. John Cowtrey, a skipper from Largs, complained that a light on the Isle of May would only guide ships to destruction on the nearby Inchcape and Carr rocks. George Scot, another skipper from Dysart, complained that since the light would not be visible in a snowstorm, there was no point in having one. Richard Ross, a merchant in Bruntisland, thought that boats would always be wrecked on the isle, and that a light would make no difference. James Lochoir, a skipper from Kinghorn, believed that ships which ran aground on the isle were stupid, and no light on earth would save them from their own imbecility. Exactly the same crop of complaints arose with subsequent lights; even when the benefits were there for all to see, there were plenty of souls who resolutely refused to acknowledge their usefulness.
Down in England, the protests were even more elaborate. Curiously, many of those complaints came from the lighthouse service itself. Like the NLB, Trinity House was impoverished for much of its early existence, since the Crown had originally given it the authority to build lights, but not to charge for them. It therefore spent much of its life finding ingenious new ways to wriggle out of its duties. During the seventeenth-century debate over the construction of the lights at North and South Foreland near Dover, Trinity House objected on the grounds that lights would only alert foreign ships to the British coast. They complained bitterly of ‘such costly follies as lighthouses…The Goodwins [the notorious Goodwin Sands] are no more dangerous now than time out of mind they were, and lighthouses would never lull tempests, the real cause of shipwreck.’ And, as they concluded with a final, divine flourish of illogic, ‘If lighthouses had been of any service at the Forelands the Trinity House as guardians of the interests of the shipping would have put them there.’
The most serious threat to the lighthouses, and one which was to bother both Thomas and Robert for far longer, were the wreckers. They, unlike the shipowners, the skippers or even Trinity House, had a vested interest in ensuring that ships were destroyed. Many coastal villages staked their livelihoods on the exotic plunder to be found in dead and dying ships; the wreckers saw their lootings as a perk of nautical life and bitterly resented any attempts to interfere. As Thomas discovered, the wreckers were furious at the prospect of a safer sea.
The increase in shipping, and the consequent increase in shipwrecks, meant that by the late eighteenth century, they were thriving on salvage and theft. Wrecks were so frequent that many coastal populations had come to regard the cargo as their right. Sailors who survived gales and destruction were often murdered by locals within sight of the shore, and certain areas of the country became notorious for wreckers’ exploits. In the south, it was claimed by one early historian that
If a wreck happened to occur in Cornwall while Divine Service was being held, notice of it was given out from the pulpit by the parson. It is said of the wreckers, I know not with what truth, that the strongest among them would swim out through the breakers and drown the exhausted survivors by thrusting them under water as the poor wretches struggled, with failing strength, to reach the shore. There were even pious fanatics who went so far as to admonish the people that it was sinful to succour a vessel in distress upon the Sabbath; that it was, in fact, sinful to save life. On the other hand, refusal to do so was a proof of true religiousness since it showed that they realised it was God’s will that the ship should sink and the crew perish.
Some shipwreck survivors would be saved by a stray compassionate soul; more often they were regarded as a dangerous inconvenience and left to die. The wreckers worked furtively, away from the censorship of officialdom, and did what they could to prevent the local customs officers from becoming too curious. In many cases, those officials were either easily corruptible or practised at turning a blind eye. Their leniency was perhaps understandable, since in many areas of Britain the population desperately needed the sea’s harvest. The Hebrides in particular included islands naked of a single tree, and their islanders were forced to import even the most basic materials for life. They thus relied heavily on driftwood and wreck to build their houses, make their boats, warm their families and cultivate their food, and they regarded Thomas and his mirror-lamps as a mortal threat not just to their livelihood but to their lives.
More awkwardly, the wreckers could, with some justification, claim salvage from a ship as a legal right. Until 1852 and the Customs Consolidation Act which appointed official Receivers of Wreck, the law remained confused and uneasy, and little could be done to prevent thefts. Previously, all wrecks in British waters came under the jurisdiction of the Lord Admiral whose role was to take ‘cognisance of the death of man, and mayhem done in great ships’, and who delegated responsibility to lord lieutenants in each county. All cargo was divided into four categories: flotsam – cargo that floated; jetsam – jettisoned cargo abandoned by the crew in their attempts to save the ship; ligan – cargo that sank and was marked with a buoy for later retrieval, and wreck – the cargo that was washed ashore. For many years, all four types became the subject of an undignified wrestle between the finder, the landowner, and the Crown. If the rightful owner did not claim his cargo within a year and a day, it was forfeit to the Crown, although the finder was entitled to a reward proportionate to the value of the goods.
Landowners could claim the ‘privilege of right’ to anything washed up on their foreshores. Their tenants then adapted that privilege to suit themselves. Wreckers took advantage of the silences in legislation to justify their lootings either under civil law, or under a shrewd interpretation of divine justice. Eventually, the impasse developed into a very British truce, part opportunism, part Queensberry Rules, and part amateur criminality. With the increase in customs and smuggling patrols during the early nineteenth century, wreckers realised that their safest chance lay in staying within the law; if they came across a stricken ship, they must rescue the crew first, but, having done so, the ship became theirs to plunder or sell as they pleased. The practice still exists to this day; any ship (other than those of the coastguard or RNLI) that assists another ship in distress is entitled to claim a portion of the value of that ship in return for saving the lives of the crew. Given that a captain therefore risks forfeiting his ship, this also gives rise to the reluctance of many crews to issue Mayday calls, even in extremis.
The early wreckers also brought a certain grim ingenuity to their tasks. Many locals in areas in which ships were regularly wrecked did not just wait for disaster; they created it. Luring ships onto the rocks was a particular favourite. The Scilly Isles, the West Country and the Hebrides were all rumoured to have wreckers who put up false lights to guide the mariner onto the rocks. It was easy enough to light a bonfire on a dangerous coastline, or tie a lantern to a horse’s tail so it imitated the swinging of a ship’s light. For a while, the first lighthouses only made the situation worse. The local wreckers, aware that ships relied on the towers to know their position near land, set up rival lights nearby in order to beguile the pilots away from their true course and onto the nearby coast. There were other methods as well. The Wolf Rock, eight miles south-west of Land’s End, was a notorious hazard for shipping, and was regarded by the local Cornish wreckers as an excellent source of plunder. Within the rock, however, there was a cavern hollowed out over centuries by the movement of the tides. When the waves crashed through it, trapping and then releasing the air within, the cavern made a sound eerily similar to a wolf’s howl. The wreckers, worried that the lonely baying of the rock would alert ships to the Wolf’s existence, stopped up the cavern with stones to silence it.
Unfortunately, the Scots were no kinder. Compton Mackenzie’s amiable fable of the SS Politician in Whisky Galore was based on a less amiable truth; the Highlanders and Islanders of Scotland were enthusiastic wreckers. Legends and rumours seeded themselves with suspicious frequency; the local minister on the Isle of Sanday was reputed to pray devotedly every Sunday for those in peril on the sea, to ask God politely if he intended to sink any ships soon and, if so, whether He couldn’t organise it so they were wrecked on Sanday. When Robert Stevenson started work on the island in 1806, he noted that wrecks were so frequent in the area that the islanders fenced their fields with ship-timbers instead of stone. Wrecking also produced another curious inequality; rents on the sides of the island that produced most wrecks were higher than on the more hospitable side. Living in a wreck zone had kept the northerners rich, and the southerners poor. Robert was also astonished to discover ‘a park paled round, chiefly with cedar wood and mahogany from the wreck of a Honduras built ship; and in one island, after the wreck of a ship laden with wine, the inhabitants have been known to take claret to their barley meal porridge, instead of their usual beverage.’ Thomas – and Robert in his turn – had a hard task in selling their lights to the islanders before they had even begun to build them.