Today is the 300th (and final) working day of my Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. Although I can’t quite escape the thought that I have only just got going with the book, I find to my surprise that I have actually accumulated 108,450 words (including notes and bibliography). The nature of academia is, of course, always to lament the fact that more could have been done and that anything less than total completion of a project reflects some kind of failure. Anticipating that feeling, I began my Fellowship by creating a diary, in which I listed what I had done each day, whether that was reading, writing, editing, researching, or dealing with administrative tasks. I certainly found it a helpful routine in combatting existential crises over productivity!

I have progressed the book, roughly speaking, to the spring/summer of 1777—the period just before the narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa begins. Understanding Macintosh’s transition from Caribbean planter to traveller in India has proved taxing given the fragmentary, contradictory, and often deliberately clandestine nature of the surviving evidence, but I finally feel I am beginning to get to grips with it. Without question the most difficult part of the project is writing without the benefit of a foundation of existing scholarship—there is no empirically detailed but acritical Victorian hagiography of Macintosh for me to draw on, and every “fact” of Macintosh’s life has to be wrestled from primary sources. The consequence of this is that it’s difficult to know what twists and turns the narrative of his life will take next. It’s a little like driving towards a distant city in thick fog—the bright lights of the destination are just about visible, but you can’t see what’s coming next.

Having covered the first 40 years of Macintosh’s life, I have 36 to go. There is a vast amount of research and writing ahead, and still 21 months until the book needs to go to the publisher, but—in this moment at least—I feel hopeful that I’ll get there.