with a more reckless spirit. For while David is a country lad Alan is an outlaw, one of survivors of the 1745 Rebellion, which sided with Bonnie Prince Charlie in an attempt to regain the Scottish crown from England (the two countries had united in 1603 under King James VI of Scotland and I of England). Kidnapped is set six years later, in 1751, and Alan Breck is attempting to return to France after his annual clandestine trip to Scotland, where he risks life and liberty to collect rents from his exiled laird’s tenants. His belt is full of guineas and it is this gold that effectively brings Alan and David together. When the youth overhears the crew planning to rob Alan he throws his lot in with the Jacobite and the two begin a short siege in the round-house of the ship. The ensuing battle between the crew and the new allies is a mixture of adventure-story bravado and heightened realism that rivals the tower scene. David acquits himself remarkably well for a boy who has never seen action before, killing two men and wounding another, but his fear of the fray and hesitation to take a life carries the fighting beyond the cartoon brutality of video games and action movies. This is violence with consequences against protagonists whose weaknesses and qualities have already been identified; indeed, like young Jim in Treasure Island, David has grown quite fond of his jailors.
Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues, they were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty.19
But it is more than his acquaintance with the crew that initially stays David’s trigger finger. When he grabs a sailor, who has dropped through the roof of the round-house he finds that,
At the touch of him (and him alive) my whole flesh mis-gave me, and I could no more pull the trigger than I could have flown.20
This hesitation puts the reader momentarily in David’s boots. We can imagine ourselves into the midst of the action, but we know what the touch of another human being feels like. The gap between imagining and knowing which Stevenson bridges enables the reader to be in the moment with David. Though we might not acquit ourselves so well in battle most of us would hesitate before shooting a person we were embracing. The realism of the moment heightens the gore of the round-house and makes David’s post-action tears all the more understandable and effective.
Alan Breck has of course killed many men. His reaction to the victory is straightforwardly triumphant.
“I love you like a brother. And O, man,” he cried in a kind of ecstasy, “am I no a bonny fighter?”21
The generosity, vanity and reckless joie de vivre of this sentence encapsulate Alan Breck’s character. He is willing to lay down his life for his cause and will shelter a brother in arms from the law, but he is also a dandy whose fine French clothes are a source of pride and constant anxiety as he traverses wild seas, inclement weather and rough terrain. Alan Breck is his own best audience. If he lived in the modern age he might have ambitions towards a bio-pic, but in the mid-eighteenth century he has to be content with writing a ballad extolling his own bravery in the battle, a ballad from which David, despite his daring, is absent.
The Covenant is eventually wrecked on the Torran reef near the Ross of Mull. Had the crew been sailing by a hundred years later, they would have been saved this fate by a light on Dhu Heartach from the lighthouse that Thomas Stevenson was engaged in constructing during Louis’s apprenticeship. But as things are, the wreck leaves David alone and stranded on the islet of Earraid, which the Stevenson lighthouse company had used as a base during the building. Recounting the awfulness of his situation David makes an almost direct reference to Robinson Crusoe.
In all the books I have read of people cast away, they had either their pockets full of tools, or a chest of things would be thrown upon the beach along with them, as if on purpose. My case was very different.22
Of course David is a character in a book cast away on an island, but once again a sense of realism elevates the novel beyond mere adventure yarn. David’s brief and miserable shipwreck on Earraid, a prison that he could have escaped quickly and easily had he only known how, is also a prelude to the next portion of the book and a signal that David is now entering a world that is unfamiliar to him, of whose rules, history and language he is dangerously ignorant – the Highlands.
Stevenson himself was a Lowlander. He was unable to understand the accents of his father’s Highland workmen and wrote to his mother with a rueful vanity reminiscent of Alan Breck,
What is still worse, I find the people hereabout – that is to say the Highlanders … don’t understand me.23
Despite his lack of Gaelic he had been planning a History of the Highlands (destined never to be written) since the end of 1880. This interest (and the prospect of a stipend for a position he mistakenly thought would take up little time) led him to apply for the post of chair of Constitutional History at Edinburgh University in 1881. It was a position for which he was sublimely unqualified. For all his intelligence and reading Stevenson was no academic. He had been forced to study engineering and law, subjects that he had little aptitude for or interest in, and as a consequence had been an exceedingly recalcitrant student. On receiving an application for a certificate of attendance for Stevenson’s first year at Edinburgh University, Professor Fleeming Jenkin had replied,
It is quite useless for you to come to me, Mr Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases; there is no doubt about yours. You have simply not attended my class.24
His poor academic record, combined with “the difficulty of my never having done anything in history, strictly speaking”,25 makes it no surprise that Stevenson’s suit was rejected. But though he might not have had the makings of a chair of history, his historical approach is perfect for a novelist. He relates history in terms of narratives, a dangerous thing for academic historians, whose priority must be facts, proof and provenance, but a gift for a writer of fiction. Stevenson makes history serve the tale, and is willing to change the facts to suit the story. He was also able to catch glimpses of the past in the events of his own time. The poet Edmund Gosse sailed on the Clansman around the Hebrides in 1870, the year of Stevenson’s third engineering placement.
As I leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, and he explained to me that we had come up this loch to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants driven from their homes in the interests of deer-forest. As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from them a wild keening and wailing, reverberated by the cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour infinitely poignant.26
The event appears in Kidnapped in the form of a group of Highlanders forcibly cleared onto an emigrant ship bound for America:
the chief singer in our boat struck into a melancholy air, which was presently taken up both by the emigrants and their friends upon the beach, so that it sounded from all sides like a lament for the dying. I saw the tears run down the cheeks of the men and women in the boat, even as they bent their oars; and the circumstances, and the music of the song (which is one called “Lochaber no more”) were highly affecting even to myself.27
The clearing of the Highlanders from their homelands
