Title page of Caribbeana, volume 1.

In 1909 a new quarterly periodical focussing on Caribbean genealogy was launched by the wonderfully named genealogist Vere Langford Oliver (1861–1942). Oliver’s journal—Caribbeana—ceased publication only ten years later in 1919 after six volumes and three supplements. Caribbeana has been digitised as part of the Digital Library of the Caribbean and is an important work of reference for scholars working on the history of the Caribbean. Macintosh makes a few, small appearances in the pages of Caribbeana.

Under the heading “A List of West Indian Deeds on the Close Rolls”, volume 1 of the journal records the following, for example: “George Johnston, John Rae by William Macintosh, Ann his wife. Grenada [1764], 14-12-13”. Read out of context, and in this abstract form, the information is not obviously revelatory. This snippet is interesting, however, because it dates Macintosh’s acquisition of land in Grenada and records the name of his wife (the first source I have seen which does so).

It is not immediately clear where these deeds are now stored. I assume they were Public Record Office documents originally, but it will take a bit of detective work to determine how they are now classified and where they are located.

In response to an earlier post on the hard-to-verify date and location of William Macintosh’s birth, I received a helpful email recently from Deirdre Grieve, a descendant of Macintosh whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year. Based upon her own genealogical research (and her mother’s 1970s correspondence with another Macintosh descendant), Deirdre has pointed me in the direction of William’s sister, Mary Macintosh (d. 1827). Mary is recorded as having married Alexander Falconer (1730–1802), a minister at Eddrachillis in Sutherland, in 1764. Together they had 12 children—William’s nephews and nieces. In order of birth they were Helen, Fairly, Barbara, Joanna, Mary, Anne, John, James, Alexander, James, George, and Lachlan.

Detail of A new plan of the island of Grenada (1780). John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Cabinet Es780 Pi.

Whilst there is a certain liberality of sentiment in Macintosh’s political philosophy, particularly as it concerned individual rights, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that Macintosh was both a slave owner and a tool of imperial control and repression in Grenada. Although the Maroons of Grenada (i.e., those slaves who had escaped from subjugation and who lived in isolated communities in rural areas) were never considered by British colonial administrators to be quite the threat that their counterparts in Jamaica were, Grenadian Maroons became a particular source of concern during the late 1760s as their numbers increased.

The late Grenadian politician George Brizan, in his 1984 volume Grenada: island of conflict, demonstrates that Macintosh had a particular role in the repression of Grenada’s Maroons during this period. Brizan (p. 97) notes that

As more and more runaway slaves joined their ranks the numbers of Maroons increased, and their sporadic acts of depredation [i.e., cattle theft] continued. In the latter part of 1769 these were the cause of great alarm in St Andrew’s. By 13 December 1770, the situation was  such that [Robert] Melville had to despatch an officer of the militia with 20 men to assist the inhabitants of St Andrew’s, whom the Governor instructed to form groups and patrol the area in an attempt to suppress these “internal enemies”. The Justice of the Peace in the St Andrew’s area, William McIntosh [sic], featured prominently in the organisation of these activities.

Determining what, precisely, Macintosh’s role was, will require some unpicking. Brizan’s supporting endnote for this information is unhelpful, listing only “Letter Book 1765-66“. The bibliography is not any more helpful, referring only to “Letter Books; 1763-1895. Selected Volumes: 1763-71, 1771-99, 1815-95” under the subheading “Grenada”. In his acknowledgements, Brizan does thank the librarian of the Grenada Public Library, so it is possible that this is where the letter books were held. The library is now the Grenada National Archives, but the their collections were badly damaged by a 2004 hurricane. Sadly, the letter book covering the early 1770s does not appear to have been digitised as part of the the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. Once again, William Macintosh resists straightforward investigation.

“Travels into Print” at the publisher’s stand.

My interest in William Macintosh began in 2008 as part of an AHRC-funded research project investigating the publication of travel texts by the London firm John Murray (from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century). Macintosh’s book was, in the context of that project, but one of approximately 240 texts of extra-European travel which fell under our consideration. The findings of that research project were published today by the University of Chicago Press under the title Travels into print: exploration, writing, and publishing with John Murray, 1773–1859.

My co-authors—Charles W. J. Withers and Bill Bell—and I submitted the proposal for Travels on 22 January 2010 (exactly 5 years and 3 months ago). Having lived with the book’s writing, editing, and publication for more than half a decade, it was a real thrill to see the printed artefact today in the exhibition hall at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago. Conference delegates are able to pick up a copy of the book at a specially discounted rate of $36.

Spine of “Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa”, with false raised bands.

When I was in New York at the end of March, I received an unexpected email from a stranger—an Illinois-based book collector, Jeff Armstrong. Jeff was, he told me, “getting on a bit” and currently in the process of selling off and passing on his collection of books, amassed over a quarter of a century. Among Jeff’s collection was an original 1782 edition of the second volume of Macintosh’s Travels. Having seen this blog, and knowing of my interest in Macintosh, Jeff was kind enough to gift me the book, which arrived, neatly wrapped, in my pigeon hole this morning.

The book had, Jeff explained, been “obtained at a sale by a local music professor… [who] loved the hunt for antiques as much as I did”. Jeff had tried, without success, for about twenty years to find a corresponding copy of the first volume of Travels—a task which I shall now happily assume.

Title page of “Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa”.

I am extraordinarily grateful to Jeff for his generosity.

The New York Society Library.

For the past week I have been in New York City with approximately 50 of our second-year human geography students who have been engaged in a range of individual research projects across the city. Having successfully installed my group in the archives at the New York Public Library, I paid a visit to the wonderful New York Society Library on East 79th Street. In addition to being the oldest library in New York (it was established in 1754) it also functioned as the de facto Library of Congress during the period in the late eighteenth century when Congress met in New York. A number of the eighteenth-century politicians who read or corresponded with Macintosh were members of the library (including George Washington and Aaron Burr).

The library has a copy of one of the Dublin editions of Macintosh’s book, which I consulted in the hope that it might contain some interesting marginal annotations or revealing details of provenance (sadly, neither proved to be the case). The book has been in the library since at least 1813 (it is listed in A catalogue of the books belonging to the New-York Society Library published in that year). An entry for Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa does appear in the 1793 catalogue but the author is (wrongly, perhaps) identified as M’Donald. In any event, the book does not appear in the library’s first circulation ledger, covering the period 1789 to 1792.

“Readers Make Their Mark” exhibition.

Interesting marginalia was, however, much in evidence at the library’s excellent Readers Make Their Mark exhibition. The reading habits of a number of the library’s former members, including the intriguing Chinese-American artist Mai-mai Sze, were wonderfully showcased.

Grund Riss der Herzoglich Wirtembergischen Haupt und Ersten Residenz Stadt Stuttgardt, 1794. Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Schef.gr.fol.7759.

Of all the shadowy and poorly understood periods of Macintosh’s life, the years he spent in what is now Germany are the most mysterious. I have written before on Macintosh’s residence in Eisenach, where he may have died (he certainly wrote his will there) at some point after 1810. The precise means and chronology of Macintosh’s relocation from Avignon (in the 1790s) to Eisenach (in the 1800s) have still to be sketched out, but there is some indication that he spent time in Stuttgart in the interim.

This fragment of information is contained in a letter sent from Berlin by Thomas Grenville (1755–1846) to his brother, William Grenville (1759–1834), on 4 March 1799. Tomas and William were sons of the late Whig prime minister George Grenville (1712–1770). Thomas, a member of parliament and privy councillor, had in 1799 been appointed ambassador to Berlin in order to broker an alliance against France as part of the War of the Second Coalition. In his letter to William, Thomas notes that

I was scarcely arrived here when I received a communication from Stutgard [sic], signed W. M’Intosh, and claiming to be known to you and to Mr. [George] Canning, which expresses the greatest apprehensions at the progress of the French principles in the duchy of Wirtemberg [sic] under the active directors of Citoyen Mengaud and Citoyen Trouvè, who are so good as to employ themselves with great zeal and success for that purpose [1]

It seems unlikely (to say the least) that Thomas’s correspondent was anyone other than William Macintosh. This fragment offers a useful further indication of Macintosh’s network of correspondents, but also opens up new lines of enquiry regarding Macintosh’s time in Stuttgart.

1. Historical Manuscripts Commission (1904) Report on the manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue, Esq., preserved at Dropmore. Vol. IV, p. 485.

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.