After a gap of five-or-so months, I had the opportunity last week to return to the book. Although I had anticipated that a busy term of new teaching in the autumn would eat up a lot of time—and had done my best to leave the book in a state that would make returning to it easier—it was still a daunting prospect to get back into the swing of things, and to pick up the various threads of the story. In the end, it was not as bad as I had feared and I was able to get the narrative moving again. I am hopeful, but perhaps not optimistic, that I will be able to keep a day, or half a day, aside each week to maintain the momentum of research and writing. In preparation for this, I have enacted all the usual best-practice advice, having blocked out my calendar and cleared my diary for the days in question, but know from experience that it is hard to guard writing time in the face of short-term priorities, like marking, which tend to win out when time is limited.

My focus remains, for the foreseeable future, on Macintosh’s time in Calcutta. This was a pivotal moment in his life when he forged a political friendship with Philip Francis and first articulated the criticisms of Warren Hastings that would characterised his later travel narrative. Those political alliances and oppositions developed against a more practical context: how was Macintosh going to find his way back to Britain and what was he going to do to make sure that his journey to India had not been a waste of time? Macintosh’s archive reveals that these logistical-cum-financial concerns were ever present during the closing months of 1779. His first idea, and certainly his most outlandish, was to raise funds to buy a ship (of 600 to 800 tons), fill it with saleable goods (muslin and silk, coffee and saltpetre), and sail it under Danish flag to France. It was a plan that ultimately went nowhere, but illustrates how keen Macintosh was to make good on the failure of his earlier experiment in importing goods from France to India.

When that idea fell from view, Macintosh pivoted his ambitions and secured permission from the Bengal Council to return to Britain, via Suez, on an East India Company packet, the Swallow (shown above in triple portrait). The Swallow was an attractive option; it was to be captained by Stephen Macleane, the cousin of Macintosh’s friend and patron Lauchlin Macleane; it would give Macintosh the opportunity to visit Cairo, which he ached to do; and it would provide him with a welcome source of income, since he had been promised 2,000 rupees to take charge of Company dispatches during the overland portion of the journey. Like the Danish scheme, however, Macintosh’s plan to return on the Swallow proved ill-fated. Stephen Macleane died unexpectedly and there were repeated delays in finding someone to replace him. Hastings asked Macintosh’s emerging nemesis, Joseph Price, to take on the role, but Price declined; he did not like the look of the Swallow‘s crew and would only considered the role if he were to be given a military commission and thereby carry the necessary authority to discipline the crew effectively. Although Macintosh subsequently intervened, writing to the Council to recommend the Bengal mariner William Tomkins for the role, it ultimately came to naught. Macintosh was eventually forced to take a longer and less-profitable journey home on the Ganges, via the Cape of Good Hope.

As much as Macintosh’s anxieties over his route home are small beer when set against his evolution, during the same period, as a political thinker and commentator on Indian affairs, they provide an important context to his developing views. Macintosh came to see the delays over the Swallow as deliberately calculated to frustrate his ambitions, and laid blame for that at the door of Hastings. His opposition to Hastings was not simply an abstract intellectual exercise emerging from an evaluation of claims and counterclaims over his abilities, but emerged also from increasingly tense personal interactions in Calcutta during the last months of 1779.

For now, though, it feels good to be back on the trail, however briefly or intermittently, and I look forward ultimately to seeing Macintosh safely back to Britain where the next chapter of the book will follow the authorship, publication, and reception of his best-selling travel narrative.