On the island of Earraid (Illustration by N.C. Wyeth for “Kidnapped” by R.L. Stevenson)

If the failure of the breakwater at Wick on the North Sea was felt by Thomas Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis Stevenson, to be the low point of his career as a civil engineer, maybe his signature success story balanced out his depression-prone self. One of the essays RLS wrote in Saranac Lake he called “The Education of an Engineer,” which refers to himself and recollections from his late teens when he was in sore conflict between his desire to write above all else while constantly under the pressure of family tradition, incarnate in his father, Thomas, to be like them and to learn to manipulate massive amounts of rock for the benefit of mankind.

Dhu Heartach, “Black and Dismal,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “is an egg-shaped mass of black rock, rising thirty feet above high water mark. The full Atlantic swell beats upon it without hindrance and the tides sweep around it like a millrace. This rock is only the first outpost of a great black brotherhood–the Torran reef … upwards of three miles (ten, actually) of ocean thickly sown with those fatal rocks, the sea breaking white and heavy over some and others showing their dark heads threateningly above the water.”

Louis was only six when his father, in 1857, started giving attention to the infamous Torran reef out of professional curiosity. It was about thirty-three miles southeast of the Skerryvore lighthouse, built by Stevenson’s uncle Alan, both surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, many miles off the west coast of Scotland.

As time passed, the Northern Lighthouse Board of Commissioners became increasingly swamped with petitions from the region’s sea-going interests to do something about it … like put up a light. And so it was Chief Engineer Thomas Stevenson went to work. The conditions and demands facing him would have been familiar to older brother, Alan, at Skerryvore 20 years prior. After years of planning, preparation, red tape, and the building of another on-site barracks on stilts, work on the tower itself finally began in April, 1867. As usual, the weather objected. More time was spent waiting out storms than dragging stone. For the whole summer of 1868, only 25 days were workable.

Building the Dhu Heartach lighthouse was in its fourth season, 1870, when the chief engineer’s son, Louis, the pathetic apprentice, joined the team. Like at Skerryvore, a shore station and little village for the work force had been established, in this case, on the small island of Earraid–pronounced arid–only fourteen miles across open Atlantic from the building site. As RLS saw it:

“Behold! There was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, travelling cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden booths for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was quarried.”

A year before, Louis had first spied Earraid, through the porthole of the Pharos, the government yacht for the NLB, during its inspection tour. The property seemed to beckon him. “My isle,” he called it and his summer of 1870 there was one he would not forget. The following winter he would finish his studies at the university, topped off with reading his paper called “Notice of a New Form of Intermittent Light to the Royal Scottish Society of Arts. It won him a silver medal and suspicion persists to this day that he had help from father.

But in that magical summer of 1870, engineering had been further from his mind than ever before and poetry became a new pastime in-between “sea-bathing and sun burning … clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat … the future summoned me as with trumpet calls … I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish bather on the beach.”

Earraid is not a tourist trap. It is a treeless little hilly island, actually a tidal islet, in a desolate region. But because Robert Louis Stevenson used it to maroon David Balfour, the hero of “Kidnapped,” after the brig Covenant came to its timbers-splitting end somewhere among the black brothers of the Torran reef … because of that there is a steady stream–well, maybe a trickle–of hardcore Stevenson fans who go there just for that reason.

Stevenson had spent his late teens under his father’s hopes and expectations, knowing that outright rebellion was inevitable and it did come, in 1871. But for those three years, Louis had been in a mental prison cell and probably never considered the possibility that a day would come when he could look back and think sympathetically, even write about, so demoralizing a situation. But he did, at Baker’s, in Saranac Lake. There he finished off his essay for Scribner’s Magazine with an overview of the lifestyle of an engineer in the Stevenson family firm of lighthouse builders:

“It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harboursides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if he ever had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so it carries him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining Pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.”