Thomas Stevenson died in Edinburgh, Scotland, in May 1887. That event precipitated the chain of events that would see his 36-year-old son, Robert Louis Stevenson, and his family getting stuck in Saranac Lake for the winter of 1887-88.

A portion of the time in between had been devoted by RLS to memorializing his father in “Thomas Stevenson — Civil Engineer,” the essay, a portion of which claims that “few men were more beloved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange, humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him up friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of London … he remained unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the world, guiding the mariner.”

Lighthouses — how to build them and make their lights shine brighter — was the obsession of Thomas Stevenson, engineer, inventor, pioneer meteorologist and father of one scrawny boy he had nicknamed “Smout” after the small fry of salmon. The family that would come to be known as the Lighthouse Stevensons began in the West Indies when Alan Stevenson died there from fever in 1774. He had left behind a widow in Scotland, Jean Lillie, and a little boy, Robert. After moving to Edinburgh, Jean met Thomas Smith at church, a widower twice over with three of his own kids. The marriage was in June 1787, and the young Stevenson liked doing things with his stepfather who had set up his own business on Bristo Street as an ironsmith, providing grates, lamps and trinkets for the wealthy in their “New Town” part of town.

This was the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when traditional norms were going out the window while new challenges were incoming. Suddenly a new breed, entrepreneurs, were springing up everywhere to meet the needs of a growing population heading into the Industrial Revolution. The step-grandfather of RLS, Thomas Smith, was like that. More people meant more ships, and that meant more shipwrecks all around the rocky coasts of Great Britain until it became unsustainable. The terrible storms in the winter of 1782 became the tipping point. The Northern Lighthouse Board was then established, and the board of trustees sent out a call for anyone interested in trying something brand-new, like building lighthouses. The NLB had the money but not the know-how. Thomas Smith got the contract, but he didn’t know, either. Nobody knew. With his stepson for assistant, Thomas Smith began inventing his way into lighting up the Scottish coast from his little shop on Bristo Street. If you want to read a good book about man and the challenge, get a copy of “The Lighthouse Stevensons” by Bella Bathurst.

By 1799, Robert was 28 and had succeeded Thomas Smith as chief engineer of the NLB. In August of 1807, he began work on his signature lighthouse, way out in the North Sea on the infamous Bell Rock, a quarter-mile-long reef that was 14 feet underwater at high tide … and it was still the age of sail. It took a certain type to work on a job like that, and that is where Robert Stevenson first encountered the man called Soutar. At the time, he was first mate aboard an NLB vessel. Stevenson’s grandfather kept a journal, in which he recorded his admiration of Soutar’s boat-handling skills, how he had landed “the small stores and nine casks of oil with all the skill of a smuggler.”

In his unfinished family biography, “Records of a Family of Engineers,” RLS wrote that “Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the (an NLB cutter). He was active, admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear. Once, in London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men. … They plied him with drink — a hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed cards and Soutar would not play. At last one of them, regarding him with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened? ‘I’m not very easy fleyed,’ replied the captain,” not the least bit intimidated.

Absence of fear is a hallmark of Long John Silver. So is the slippery side of Soutar.

RLS wrote that Soutar had achieved “a stronghold in my grandfather’s estimation” on account of “so many perils shared … and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please him with much hypocritical skill.” Today we call that the art of sucking up. Most of us get to know people like this but few of them are fearless. Of Soutar, Louis goes on to say that “He usually dined on Sundays in the cabin. He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or whiskey … and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a blunt and seamanlike demeanor. My father and uncles, with the devilish penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived, and my father indeed was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken.”

And here is the true-life experience of the boy apprentice, Thomas Stevenson, by which he enabled his son to advance the plot of “The Sea Cook” as it unfolded day by day in the little cottage at Braemar. Everyone who’s ever seen a movie of “Treasure Island,” or even read the book, remembers the apple barrel scene. RLS was hard up to find a way for young Jim Hawkins to learn about the plot by the pirates, led by Long John Silver, to throw an all-out mutiny aboard the brig Hispaniola at landfall. Thomas had a way, and his son wrote it down like this:

“He had crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel on deck, and from this place of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins. The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian.”

There it is. Another example of art imitating life, courtesy of Thomas Stevenson, civil engineer, specializing in lighthouses.