It is not unusual for scholars to become obsessed in their quest to understand their subject. Often, at least in my experience, this obsession is enhanced when the task of pinning down a basic detail—like a date, a place, or a name—turns out to be more challenging than was expected. This was certainly true for the late nineteenth-century chronicler of British India, Henry E. Busteed. His particular monomania centred, for a time, on identifying the Dutch vessel on which Catherine Grand, the future wife of Charles Talleyrand, had travelled from the Cape of Good Hope in the company of a young East India Company servant, Thomas Lewin.

Busteed went to extraordinary lengths (as described above) to locate a passenger list that might identify the ship on which Grand and Lewin travelled. Despite extensive searching, he was never able to resolve the mystery. Indeed, to this day—as far as I can tell—the identity of the Dutch ship has remained unresolved. A recent (and engagingly written) historical novel-cum-biography based on Grand’s life, The Mistress from Chandernagore: The Child Bride who Achieved Eminence in Napoleon’s Empire (2022), fills the gap with an invented name, the Zeeuw or Zeeland. Although I do not share Busteed’s level of obsession, I do take some satisfaction in disappearing down archival rabbit holes in order to be able to fully flesh out a footnote. Both Grand and Lewin are part of the sprawling cast of characters that occupy my book, having formed the context for much of Macintosh’s activities in London and Paris in 1781 and 1782. As I have noted before, Macintosh took a direct role in establishing Grand as an independent woman in Paris, and his friendship with Lewin was, for a time, consequential and financially beneficial.

In an attempt to complete Busteed’s unfinished task, I was able to turn today to GLOBALISE, an incredible new project that is transcribing the digitised archives of the Dutch East India Company. Although the project is not yet complete, it is possible to search automated transcriptions of the digitised sources using a temporary search platform. What we can see from a quick search is that Lewin (and a fellow Briton, Michael Topping) were granted permission to travel on the Vrouwe Anthoinetta Koenrardina, which left the Cape of Good Hope on 31 January 1781, eventually reaching Cadiz on 27 April. Although I have not been able to find specific mention of Grand’s name, it may be because she joined the ship earlier, in India, and was not, therefore, mentioned in dispatches between the Cape and Amsterdam. That’s another mystery to solve; these footnotes won’t write themselves!