Detail from John Thomson’s Atlas of Scotland (1832), showing the location of Newmore. National Library of Scotland, EMS.s.712(25).

I often joke to colleagues that William Macintosh is the most significant eighteenth-century imperial careerist and travel writer for whom there is no Wikipedia entry.  At some point I would like to remedy that omission, but only once I feel sure I know some of the basics with certainty (like when he was born and when he died).

Macintosh is listed (under the heading “Eminent Men”) in the entry for the Parish of Rosskeen in The Second (New) Statistical Account of Scotland (1834–45), written by the parish minister, David Carment in October 1838. Carment (who assumed his role in the parish in 1822) notes that Macintosh was “born at Newmore, in this parish, in the year 1738”. Carment further notes, however, that registers of births in the parish date only from 1781. It is, therefore, uncertain how much faith can be placed in the 1738 date.

Baptismal records in nearby areas list a number of potential candidates: a William Mcintosh was baptised in Nairn on 14 March 1736; another (son of James) in Dores (near Inverness) on 31 March 1737; and another (son of William and Issobell [sic]) in Petty (near Inverness) on 8 October 1738.

Whether any of these is my William Macintosh is, at the moment, difficult to say. Would Macintosh’s family have taken him the 60-mile round-trip between Newmore and Petty to be baptised when (presumably) it could have been done closer to home? Should I just give up on my attempts at triangulation and accept Carment’s date as read?

Macintosh’s date of death is, of course, a whole different question.

Joseph Price’s characterisation of Macintosh from his “A third letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke” (1782).

The publication of Macintosh’s Travels in 1782 sparked a pamphlet war. Supporters of Warren Hastings, who took against Macintosh’s criticism of him, offered a robust counter-attack. One of the most vociferous in this respect was Joseph Price—an “avid supporter of Warren Hastings” and a leading merchant in Bengal (Nechtman, 2010, p. 133). Like may of Hastings’ supporters, Price considered Macintosh simply to be a mouthpiece for Hastings’ principal antagonist, Philip Francis. As Price noted in his 1782 A third letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Esq; on the subject of the evidence in the reports of the Select Committee of the House of Commons,

[Macintosh] had engaged at Bengal, to weave into his two volumes of his travels, all the infamous stories which Mr. Francis had collected from all the informers in India, for the space of six years preceding; and so intent was he on his subject, that in seventy-two letters which he has obtruded on the world, not one of them is free from some scandalous lying story on the character of some individual (p. 59).

Price’s deconstruction of Macintosh’s motive and veracity is almost comically venomous and drips with sarcasm. In his third letter to Edmund Burke, Price engaged in a moment of counterfactual rhetoric, imagining how the Council General in Bengal would function were it to be populated with Hastings’ incompetent opponents, including “my parboiled friend, Sawney Monsieur Cousin Mackintosh” (p. 29).

Price’s insult, here, is interesting. We might infer that his use of “parboiled” was to indicate the undercooked, half-baked nature of Macintosh’s thinking. “Sawney”, the standard eighteenth-century nickname for a Scotsman, was deployed, we might assume, as a marker of Macintosh’s difference and the honorific “Monsieur” as an indicator, perhaps, of his suspected status as a Jacobin. Equally, of course, “Monsieur Cousin” could refer to an individual I am currently unaware of. As ever, there is more digging to be done.

Nechtman, Tillman W. Nabobs: empire and identity in eighteenth-century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

One of the more mysterious periods of Macintosh’s life is that which he spent in Eisenach during the first decade of the nineteenth century. There is some suggestion that Macintosh was imprisoned there by Napoleon on the grounds that he was in active correspondence with the exiled Louis XVIII. I have recently discovered reference to Macintosh’s time in Eisenach in the journal of the somewhat-disgraced US Vice President Aaron Burr (1756–1836).

Aaron Burr (1756–1836).

Burr’s diary records the following encounters with Macintosh:

14 January 1810

Thence to Massovices’s, and he and I went together, as invited, to breakfast à la forchette with Steickler. Met there Mr. M’Intosh, a Scotchman, who has been many years in North America, and in Asia and Africa. Had an immense fortune, which he lost by the French revolution. A very intelligent, amusing man.

15 January 1810

Mr. M’Intosh came in this morning and sat an hour. I admire his constancy and his loyalty. He is a prisoner on parole, as being a British subject. Has corresponded with Washington. One of the letters now in the museum at Weimar.

Although these are only snippets, Burr’s journal entries are nevertheless helpful in clarifying the chronology of Macintosh’s life and further indicating the social and political circles in which he moved.

Plan of the island of Dominica (1776). John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Cabinet Es776 ByJ (2).

I have written before about William Macintosh’s business relationship with William Johnstone (later William Pulteney), with whom he co-owned a plantation on Dominica. I had been unaware, however, about the specific details of their holding. The above map, digitised by the John Carter Brown Library, was published in 1776 following an eight-year survey of the Windward Islands undertaken by the Commission for the Sale of Lands in the Ceded Islands following the end of the Seven Years’ War.

The map was accompanied by an explanatory pamphlet—References to the Plan of the Island of Dominica, as Surveyed from the Year 1765 to 1773 (1777)—which indicates that, by the year of the survey’s completion, Macintosh owned the freehold of three lots in the parish of St David (one of which he had previously co-owned with Pulteney, or Poultney as he is rendered here).

Extract from References to the Plan of the Island of Dominica, as Surveyed from the Year 1765 to 1773 (1777).

Macintosh’s lots—51, 52, and 53, bordered to the south by the French River—can be seen in the detailed enlargement of the map below.

Detail of Plan of the island of Dominica (1776). John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Cabinet Es776 ByJ (2).

Two years after the map’s publication, Dominica was invaded by French forces eager to regain their lost territory.

Frontispiece and title page of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).

In my efforts to piece together, from secondary fragments, the trajectory of William Macintosh’s life, I am sometimes surprised by the strange coincidences and unexpected moments of encounter which are revealed. One such is contained in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789).

Equiano’s significance, as a freed slave, to the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement is well documented, but I had been unaware that he and Macintosh had encountered one another in Grenada in 1771. Macintosh was, at that point, justice of the peace for the parish of St Andrew’s and Equiano came to him to seek redress (unsuccessfully) over an unpaid debt. Equiano records the incident in his autobiography thus:

In April 1771 I shipped myself as a steward with Capt. Wm. Robertson of the ship Grenada Planter, once more to [end p. 95] try my fortune in the West Indies; and we sailed from London for Madeira, Barbadoes, and the Grenades. When we were at this last place, having some goods to sell, I met once more with my former kind of West India customers. A white man, an islander, bought some goods of me to the amount of some pounds, and made me many fair promises as usual, but without any intention of paying me. He had likewise bought goods from some more of our people, whom he intended to serve in the same manner; but he still amused us with promises. However, when our ship was loaded, and near sailing, this honest buyer discovered no intention or sign of paying for any thing he had bought of us; but on the contrary, when I asked him for my money he threatened me and another black man he had bought goods of, so that we found we were like to get more blows [end p. 96] than payment. On this we went to complain to one Mr. M’Intosh, a justice of the peace; we told his worship of the man’s villainous tricks, and begged that he would be kind enough to see us redressed: but being negroes, although free, we could not get any remedy; and our ship being then just upon the point of sailing, we knew not how to help ourselves, though we thought it hard to lose our property in this manner. Luckily for us however, this man was also indebted to three white sailors, who could not get a farthing from him; they therefore readily joined us, and we all went together in search of him. When we found where he was, I took him out of a house and threatened him with vengeance; on which, finding he was likely to be handled roughly, the rogue offered each of us some small allowance, but nothing near our demands. This [end p. 97] exasperated us much more; and some were for cutting his ears off; but he begged hard for mercy, which was at last granted him, after we had entirely stripped him. We then let him go, for which he thanked us, glad to get off so easily, and ran into the bushes, after having wished us a good voyage. We then repaired on board, and shortly after set sail for England (vol. 2, 95–98).

In the late summer of 2014, Robert Darnton launched an open-access website collecting together primary materials (and well as Darnton’s own published work) relating to the French book trade between 1769 and 1789. Represented among this fantastic collection is Darnton’s long-standing interest in Jacques Pierre Brissot (who undertook the French translation of Macintosh’s Travels) and the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN) who distributed it (at least in part).

Brissot’s correspondence with the STN had previously been made available via the Voltaire Foundation’s website, but has usefully been brought together on Darnton’s site (and richly supplemented by additional materials). These letters show that Brissot first wrote to the STN over Macintosh’s book on 23 June 1784, identifying it as one of “deux ouvrages qu’on désirerait vendre à la feuille afin de n’avoir aucune difficulté”. Brissot’s letter wrongly transliterates the book’s title as Voyages en Amérique, en Afrique, en Asie (rather than Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique, as it would later appear). To whet the appetite of the STN, Brissot noted that Voyages was “entièrement neuf et non encore traduit”. In a later missive, dated 22 October 1784, Brissot referred to the book as Nouveaux Voyages de Mackintosh en Asie—an inconsistency which points to the fact that he had yet to settle on a fixed title for his translation.

Something of the complexity of identifying reference to Macintosh and his work across different linguistic context is exemplified in these letters. The Anglophone Macintosh is the Francophone Mackintosh; the Anglophone Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa is, variously, Voyages en Amérique…, Voyages en Europe…, and Nouveaux Voyages de Mackintosh…. In any event, Robert Darnton and his research assistants are to be congratulated for putting together such an interesting and useful open-access resource.

Of the various reviews of Macintosh’s Travels in the months following its publication in 1782, that which appeared in the newly established European Magazine is unusual in one specific respect: it contains a detailed biographical sketch of the book’s supposedly anonymous author.

The European Magazine had been established at the beginning of 1782 by the Scottish journalist James Perry (1756–1821) as a competitor to the more venerable Gentleman’s Magazine. Given that other contemporary reviews of Travels speculated at some length as to its unknown author, quite how the European Magazine knew who Macintosh was (and, indeed, knew so much about him) is uncertain.

James Perry (1756–1821). National Portrait Gallery, D5511.

The “Anecdotes of the Author” which follows the review could only have come directly, we might assume, from Macintosh himself or from John Murray, so rich is that sketch in terms of biographical detail. It is possible that Macintosh and Perry were acquaintances (although a first glance indicates that Macintosh’s book was not in Perry’s personal library). In any event, it is perhaps more interesting to speculate about why Macintosh or Murray would wish to subvert the anonymity of Travels by revealing its authorship in this way.

Whatever its origin or intended purpose, the sketch was a flattering one and positioned Macintosh as a reliable and truthful witness. It concludes: “Mr. Macintosh is a person of very genteel appearance, and polite address, and his heart is warm and susceptible of friendship”.

Whilst my interest in Macintosh’s Travels centres primarily on its contemporary significance and reading, the status of the book as a commodity points to no-less-interesting questions to do with its afterlife (that is to say, with what happened to the book—and to Macintosh’s ideas—when they had lost their contemporary currency). That a market for Travels continued to exist after Macintosh’s death is evidenced not only by its current status as a rare and collectable book, but by its circulation in the nineteenth century.

Advertisement in The Publishers’ Circular (1850).

A classified advertisement placed in the “Books Wanted to Purchase” section of The Publishers’ Circular (1 June 1850) by the London firm Taylor, Walton, and Maberly indicates, for example, that nearly three-quarters of a century after the original publication of Travels, there was a market for it (albeit a market that was somewhat uncertain with regard to the book’s bibliographical specifics). Given that Taylor, Walton, and Maberly was official bookseller and publisher to University College, London, it is possible that the firm had been commissioned in its search for Travels by an academic member of staff at the college. Whatever motivation lay behind the search for Travels in this case, it is yet another suggestive fragment of evidence which helps to illuminate something of the book’s afterlife.

The auction catalogues of library sales are (as I have previously noted) often a useful source in reconstructing the ownership (and inferring the readership) of a particular text. One of the many nineteenth-century auction catalogues in which Macintosh’s Travels was listed for sale was that drawn up in 1823 to dispose of the enormous (20,000-volume) library which William Beckford (1760–1844) had assembled in his equally enormous Fonthill Abbey.

William Beckford (1760–1844).

Beckford’s collection, listed in The valuable library of books in Fonthill Abbey (1823) and sold by the London auctioneer Harry Phillips, included a 1782 first edition of Macintosh’s Travels and a copy of Joseph Price’s critical response.

Whilst it is possible that Beckford purchased these texts at the time of their publication, it seems more probable that these were originally part of the private library of Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)—parliamentarian and author of The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88)—which was sold to Beckford following Gibbon’s death.

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794).

There are a number of interesting connections between Gibbon and Warren Hastings. Both were alumni of Westminster School and Gibbon was present at Hastings’ parliamentary trial—an event he described as a ‘persecution’, motivated by party politics. Whether or not Gibbon’s sympathy for Hastings was motivated by their shared educational background is unclear. It would clearly be interesting to know, however, what Gibbon thought of Macintosh’s criticism of Hastings (assuming Gibbon was the original owner of the copy of Travels auctioned off in London in 1823).

Lot 2716. A first edition of Macintosh’s “Travels” (1782).

A recent spell of hot weather in London has made it difficult to sleep at night—particularly so last Thursday when the temperature in my attic flat was still 30°C at midnight. Whilst I lay searching for sleep, I wondered quite how Macintosh, raised in the bracing climate of the highlands of Scotland, adapted to life in the tropical warmth of Grenada. Attempting to put my insomnia to profitable purpose, I made a periodic check of rare-book auction sites in an effort to track down a copy of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782) that might fall within my modest budget. Prices for bound copies of the 1782 first edition from John Murray usually run from £500 to £1,000, way beyond what I could afford. I was, therefore, thrilled when at 1:30 a.m. on Friday morning I spotted a listing at Lawrences for an auction of travel and exploration texts which included a somewhat rough and ready first edition of Travels (lot 2716, estimated at £100–£150).

From the accompanying photograph, it was clear the book was not in the best shape. Presented in its original boards (to which most 18th-century buyers would have added a bespoke binding to match the other texts in their private libraries) it was described in the listing as “a little shaken”. Whether it was the excitement of discovery (or the overwhelming heat of the night) I placed a bid by commission (a handy process that can be done on-line up to an hour before the auction begins). Encouraged by the estimate, I decided to go all out and bid £250 (plus buyer’s premium and eventual postage and packaging) in the hope that this might be enough to secure it. Sadly, however, it sold for £280; I missed out by £30. Although I had bid at the top end of my budget, I suspect that had I been in the auction room itself, the romance and bidding frenzy might have got to me. So, for now, the late-night searching continues.