I have written before about the press speculation that followed the shocking and widely publicised suicide of Macintosh’s son, William, in December 1784. Amid the various causes on which the London press speculated, one that had escaped my attention until this week was the possibility that William had been spurned by a lover. According to a report in the London Chronicle (30 December 1784–1 January 1785), William had—on his return from India, where he had acquired a sum of money—”entered into all the fashionable vices of the times”. “During his race of folly,” the Chronicle continued, William “formed a connexion with a Miss Robertson, of the Cyprian order, who no sooner found his circumstances were in the wane, than she bid him adieu for one who was more likely to support her in style”. “This infidelity of his mistress,” the Chronicle concluded, “in great measure led him to commit this rash act; young and inexperienced, he had set his affections upon her, and foolishly concluded he should have a continuance of pleasure and happiness in the arms of a prostitute”.

Framed here as a gendered morality tale, William’s sad fate is seen to be the combined outcome of naivety and deception. It is a story, in the Chronicle‘s telling, that seems to combine the characteristic elements of a morality play: temptation, in the form of alcohol, gambling, and the company of women; a fall, in the form of debt and betrayal; and redemption, of a sort, in the form of a final “fatal act [designed] to save himself from shame, remorse, and upbraidings”. Accurate or not, it was an account that sought to give some logic to what otherwise seemed a tragic and illogical event.

The Miss Robertson, whom the Chronicle casts as the femme fatale in its account, would doubtless have been familiar to contemporary readers of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a catalogue or directory of London’s female sex workers, published annually in the second half of the eighteenth century. Given its ephemeral nature, not all editions of the List have survived, although new copies continue to come to light. Neither the 1784 nor 1785 editions of the List exist in publicly accessible collections, so I may never be able to learn more about the Miss Robertson on whom William “fixed his love, and lavished his fortune”. At the time of his death, the 1785 edition of the List was readying for publication on New Year’s day. Indeed, the day before William was buried at St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, the Morning Herald carried an advertisement for the new List, copies of which could be had at no. 9 Little Bridges Street, a two-minute walk away on the other side of the piazza.

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.

An ever-present challenge in a long-term project like writing a book is how best to sustain momentum when other priorities demand your time and attention. Although I approached the new academic year this September in the hopeful expectation that I might be able to set aside some regular time for writing the book, this failed to materialise (quelle surprise). As is often the case, the academic term brought unexpected challenges that—on top of the task of writing a significant number of new lectures—meant that the book has been in a state of hibernation, and will likely remain so until the new year.

Frustrating and a little anxiety-inducing as this lack of progress is, I did manage to carve out space this term to apply for a research fellowship that, if awarded, would give me the opportunity to bring the book to its conclusion. At the same time, I feel more optimistic that I will be able to dedicate regular days to book writing from January, largely because I am teaching existing material and won’t be on the energy-sapping treadmill of producing new lectures each week. I do hope this won’t be a case of famous last words!

2024 will also see a new editor taking over responsibility for my book at McGill-Queen’s University Press. My current editor, Richard Baggaley (who has been a supportive and enthusiastic advocate for the book since we first discussed it in 2019) will be moving on to a freelance role. Although changes of acquisitions editor for an academic book are par for the course, especially when the writing of one extends over many years(!), I am aware that I will need to re-pitch the book to whomever inherits Richard’s portfolio. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course; being prompted to reconsider the case for one’s book can only be to its ultimate benefit.

Memorial to Joseph Price (1726–1796) in the Priory Church of St Mary the Virgin in Monmouth

To mark the end of another summer of work on my book, I recently made a pilgrimage of sorts to the Priory Church in Monmouth to see the memorial to Joseph Price, the East India Company captain and prolific pamphleteer with whom Macintosh clashed in the London press in 1781 and 1782 over the reputation of Warren Hastings.

Price was deeply significant in shaping Macintosh’s experience in (and of) India and his published criticisms—including the allegation that Macintosh was mixed race—have shaped the subsequent historiography in important, albeit distorted, ways. The relationship between Price and Macintosh, one based on claim and counter claim, does make it difficult to separate truth from fiction in writing about Macintosh’s time in India, but it’s also a useful reminder about the partiality of all historical sources and the necessity of verifying and triangulating truth claims.

As the new academic year comes into view, and I prepare to deliver new teaching, progress on the book will inevitably slow, settling into the term-time rhythm of writing snatched in half-day chunks here and there. Although the fits-and-starts approach to writing that the academic calendar (or my endurance) demands, having time to pause and reflect is helpful, not just frustrating, giving me an opportunity to look up from the empirical detail to the wider story and the book’s trajectory as a whole. Onward, ever onward.

The long and ignominious personal conflict between Philip Francis and Warren Hastings is well known to historians of the East India Company, but the parallel proxy war that played out between perhaps their closest adherents—William Macintosh and Captain Joseph Price—is much less familiar. Although Macintosh and Price did not fight a literal duel, as Francis and Hastings did in 1780, they nevertheless engaged in a vociferous exchange of “paper bullets” throughout 1781 and ’82 in the London press, as each pressed the case of their ally.

The first salvo in this “inky warfare” (as the Monthly Review described a similar print conflict in which Macintosh was involved) came in a series of pseudonymous letters published in The London Courant between March and May 1781. The first of these—from Junius Asiaticus, a pseudonym that had appeared nearly a decade earlier in the Public Advertiser in letters critical of Robert Clive—set out a score of charges illustrative of Warren Hastings’ alleged corruption and mismanagement. For weeks thereafter, a near-daily stream of letters appeared attacking or supporting the original criticisms, from various noms de plume including “No BLACKLEGGS,” “Philo-Junius Asiaticus,” “CONSISTENCY,” “SIMPLICITY,” “No Party Man,” and “NAUTICUS.”

Joseph Price was in no doubt that Macintosh was Junius Asiaticus (and the other likeminded aliases) because the original letter had contained a term that Price believed bore Macintosh’s fingerprint: “Musquitto fleet”. The reference here was to a commission Price had received from Hastings in 1778 to fit out two merchant vessels, the Resolution and the Royal Charlotte, as 40-gun warships to use in a planned assault on Pondicherry. The commission was widely criticised at the time by Francis who called it “a most infamous job” and lambasted its inflated costs. As chance would have it, Macintosh secured a passage on the Royal Charlotte during its return voyage to Calcutta in 1779 and came to know Price during the journey. At least in Price’s recollection, the pair came instantly to dislike one another; Macintosh struck Price as bookish and arrogant while Price struck Macintosh as uncritical and besotted with Hastings. Price later alleged that when Macintosh arrived in Calcutta, he immediately started to refer to Price’s ships as the “Musquitto fleet”—a disparaging name intended to undermine the pride Price took in his role as commodore.

Although the pseudonymous nature of the letters means that there is always some room for uncertainty over their authorship, it is likely—perhaps even probable—that the letters were co-authored by Macintosh and Philip Francis’s cousin, Major Philip Baggs. Baggs had left India at the same time as Macintosh, carrying a bundle of documents from Francis and the advice that “Facts cannot be made too Public”.

Price was sufficiently certain of Macintosh’s role that he felt confident in satirising him in one letter, signed “Mac, the Historian“. Here, Price posed as a penniless Macintosh keen to earn a crust as a writer-for-hire to Junius Asiaticus:

If you will but send me three half crowns to No. 8, Fumigating-ally, just to raise my spirits, and buy materials to begin with, I will soon silence No Blackleggs [a pro-Hastings letter writer] for you.

Really Sir, I have great funds of knowledge in manuscript; I have five and twenty times crossed the Atlantic Ocean, to study West-Indian and American politics. Lord North and other Lords have felt the weight of my hand a thousand times—but mum for that. I am now very poor. My last excursion was to the East-Indies. If you will but use your influence with the editor of this paper, to give me some small matters, he shall have the history of my voyage to Bengal—a very good thing, I do assure you.

The London Courant, 23 April 1781.

The print conflict between Price and Macintosh accelerated when Macintosh published a long pamphlet, The origin and authentic narrative of the present Marratta War (1781), and his two-volume Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1782). The pair were also locked in a real-world cat-and-mouse game as Price tried to confront Macintosh in London. Having presented himself at the Piccadilly bookshop of Almon and Debret (issuers of Macintosh’s pamphlet), Price obtained an address for Macintosh—an apartment above a grocer’s shop on Queen Anne Street East—but found him gone to Bath. The publication of Travels ultimately triggered Price’s most vigorous counterblast: an excoriating pamphlet, Some observations and remarks on a late publication (1782), that exposed Macintosh’s identity and sought to undermine his credibility by portraying him as a mixed-race blowhard and Price’s puppet.

All of this excitement is, in the narrative of my monograph, still to come. I have just begun work on a new chapter of the book: the one that will detail Macintosh’s experiences in Calcutta, including, crucially, the emergence of his friendship with Francis and how that laid the foundation for the print and pamphlet war of 1781–82. Quite how much of that I will manage to write this summer is, of course, an open question. If I can find a spare day, however, one thing I would like to do is to visit the parish church in Monmouth where Price is buried and where his command of the “Musquitto fleet” is commemorated. It is the same church were, in 1763, two Black slaves belonging to Price—Andrew Davis and Joseph Monmouth—were baptised.

Of all the friendships that William Macintosh cultivated on his arrival in India, that with the sometime governor of Madras, John Whitehill, was perhaps the most unlikely. An archetypal nabob, Whitehill embodied many of the traits that Macintosh would go on to criticise in his 1782 book. The pair were also temperamentally different; the phlegmatic Macintosh contrasting with the classically choleric Whitehill. For all their apparent differences, however, the pair developed a friendship that eventually spanned Madras, London, and Paris, and endured parliamentary efforts in the early 1780s to prosecute Whitehill for his actions, or inactions, whilst governor.

For much of the last month I have been researching and reflecting on the nature of this unlikely friendship, the unexpected factors that encouraged and sustained it, and the influence it ultimately had on Macintosh as he made his third major geographical pivot, from the East Indies to France, in the 1780s. At the same time, I have been curious about Whitehill’s life after his friendship with Macintosh had ended, and his uncertain fate in post-Revolutionary France. Part of my interest reflects a basic curiosity about what happened in the end, but also stems from the coincidental fact that the personal archives of Whitehill and Macintosh both have their origin in revolutionary seizures.

While Macintosh’s archive was never considered strategically important by the revolutionary authorities, Whitehill’s papers and maps were—given his former role in the governing structures of the East India Company—seen as vital geopolitical resources, and special instructions were issued for their seizure in Chantilly and onward transport to Paris, where they remain today in the Archives nationales as the “Papiers de John Whitchill [sic], ancien gouverneur de Madras“. These papers have been examined by the UCL historian Simon Macdonald in researching his eagerly awaited (by me, among others) book, Enemies of the Republic: Policing the British in Revolutionary Paris. Simon has been kind enough to share with me material from the collection that concerns Whitehill’s personal, political, and financial relationship with Macintosh.

What Whitehill’s papers don’t reveal, of course, is what happened to him after their seizure, and the details of his subsequent life are rather obscure as a result. There are some clues, however, in the secondary literature. Writing in 1807, for example, Frederick Lynch—a prominent critic of Whitehill’s former confidant, John Sullivan—noted that Whitehill had by then “died in exile in France.” Three years later, however, Lewis Goldsmith, chronicler of Napoleonic France, framed Whitehill as a still-living but penniless octogenarian, supported in his Chantilly home by an annual annuity from Catherine Grand, Princesse de Bénévent. It is difficult to know how much stock to place in either account; Whitehill would not, for instance, have reached his 80th birthday until 1815.

Recent research in Chantilly by Patrice Valfré, a scholar of ancient ceramics, has revealed more about Whitehill’s family connections to the city. Valfré shows that Whitehill’s daughter (or stepdaughter), Sophie, was married there at the age of 20 (in 1799 or 1800) to the wonderfully, not to say improbably, named Orledge White Penny, the 25-year-old son of a British merchant at Calais, Christophe Penny. Although this information does not resolve the issue of Whitehill’s uncertain terminus, it does show that the family continued to live in Chantilly after the Revolution. Given the fact, moreover, that Whitehill never reclaimed his seized papers—something that became possible following the Treaties of Paris (1814–15)—it would seem likely that he had died beforehand.

Doubtless the answer to the puzzle is out there somewhere amid the vast civil registers of post-Revolutionary France and their corresponding genealogical websites. As with Macintosh, however, Whitehill’s surname was rendered in a variety of distinctive ways—including “Whitil”, “Witchill”, and “Whittal”—that make searching and finding that bit more tricky. For now, however, I leave the story unresolved and hope that the clues here might eventually lead someone even more curious than I am to the answer.

Today marks the eleventh birthday of On the archival trail of William Macintosh. If I had known when I began the blog in 2012 that, more than a decade later, I would still be deeply engaged in the same research project, I might never have started it. The logics of the neoliberal academy tend not to encourage or reward long-term activity, particularly so when the ultimate output—a book that might have taken fifteen years to write—will, in the great REF balance, equate to two journal articles at most. At the same time, I have been supremely fortunate to have been able to pursue this project without ever having come under institutional pressure to do otherwise; the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway has, in this respect, been an infinitely patient and encouraging home for this work. Increasing casualisation and precarity across the sector does mean, however, that the opportunity to pursue long-term and slow scholarship has become a privilege, rather than the necessary condition of deep and insightful inquiry.

The anniversary of the blog does, also, prompt me to reflect on my goals for the next twelve months and the pace of my writing. As far as the narrative chronology of the book goes, I am now dealing with perhaps the most interesting and consequential period of Macintosh’s life: the nine-or-so months that he spent in India between 1779 and 1780. Macintosh arrived in India after an incredibly convoluted journey from France that had taken nearly a year and a half and which had seen him held as a prisoner of war. His initial intention to establish himself as a private trader had failed when he lost his cargo of tradable goods during the siege of Pondicherry in 1778. When he finally arrived in India in July 1779, he had lost everything and found that his two on-the-ground contacts—Lauchlin Macleane and Alexander Elliot—were dead. Although a despondent Macintosh tried initially to arrange for an immediate return to Europe, he quickly developed new friendships in Madras and Calcutta, particularly so with Philip Francis, whose combative relationship with Warren Hastings had a significant influence on Macintosh’s political analysis of British India.

One of the first things Macintosh did on arrival in India, however, was to write a long and heartfelt letter to his son, William, setting out a series of life lessons and maxims that he had been unable to impart in person due to their long separation. Inspired by Lord Chesterfield’s recently published book of letters to his own son, Macintosh’s letter to William set out his views on what William should be reading, what he should be eating, which sports and activities he should be pursuing, and how, more generally, he should be conducting himself in society. William would have then been 14 years old when the letter was written and it is difficult to read it without thinking about how little time William would have had to put any of this advice into practice; within five short years, his life would end tragically in a lonely hotel room in Covent Garden.

As things currently stand, my plan for the spring and summer is to advance the book to the point at which Macintosh returns to Britain from India and begins to publish his findings. Although his views on British India were most fully articulated in his 1782 travel narrative, he actually published two earlier pamphlets in London, neither of which has previously been attributed to him. At the same time as he was working up his narrative—a task largely completed by the Grub Street writer for hire William Thomson—Macintosh was busily engaged in London and Paris dealing with the personal-cum-financial concerns of Thomas Lewin and John Whitehill—friends he had acquired in India in 1779, whose complex and disputatious affairs consumed much of Macintosh’s attention in the months following his return to Britain.

I also hope to put in an application this summer for a recently launched grant scheme from the Royal Historical Society, that would potentially provide funding for a one-day workshop in 2024 focusing on the draft book manuscript. The scheme is an interesting one in that it is aimed at mid-career scholars who might otherwise rely only on informal peer networks for support in the writing of a book. The scheme acts to formalise and recognise those informal support structures by providing funds to cover participants’ expenses and a small honorarium. The reason the scheme appeals to me—notwithstanding the slightly terrifying thought of a day-long critique from up to six expert readers—is the benefit of having the perspective of area specialists. Following Macintosh’s global life has necessarily meant following him through and between what are often geographically distinct areas of historiographical specialism, such as the Caribbean, British India, and Europe during the French Revolution. Being able to feel confident about the contribution that I am making to each of these fields, whilst drawing appropriate connections between them, would be a real boon. More prosaically, the workshop would act as a helpful spur to the completion of the next two chapters of the book; it would be a hard deadline that I could not miss!

At the end of January I had the pleasure of meeting the Bath-based author Paul Jackson, who, in collaboration with Michael Rowe, is currently working on a fascinating-sounding two-volume biography of Macintosh’s onetime business partner, William Pulteney. Meeting Paul offered a welcome opportunity to revisit some of my earlier work on the partnership between Macintosh and Pulteney and an excuse to put some of it together here. Although some elements of the short-live partnership remain mysterious, its broad outlines are preserved in Macintosh’s correspondence and in some contemporary manuscript and printed sources. In what follows, I offer a brief thumbnail sketch of the partnership’s history.

The circumstances under which Macintosh and Pulteney first became acquainted are not recorded, but it is likely that they were introduced via Pulteney’s brother, Colonel Alexander Johnstone—a friend of Macintosh and a fellow Grenada planter—when all three were in London in 1769 or 1770. Pulteney went on to become guarantor for Macintosh’s Dutch loan, a financial agreement that marked the beginning of their business partnership—one based upon the purchase of lands in Tobago and Dominica. It was, for various reasons, a partnership that did not survive long, lasting barely four years. Its messy financial consequences rumbled on for many years, however, and left the former partners enduringly suspicious and mistrustful of one another.

The partnership’s initial purchases were focused on Tobago. Macintosh had bought lot 24 (85 acres) in his own name in May 1769 (see below). As yet, I have been unable to identify the precise dates on which lots 17, 18, and 19 were added to the partnership, but they are likely to have been in 1769 or 1770. Lots 17 and 18 (400 and 100 acres respectively) had originally been purchased by William Alexander and lot 19 (200 acres) by Andrew Allon in March 1767. This, at least, is the account given by John Fowler in his 1774 book A Summary Account of the Present Flourishing State of the Respectable Colony of Tobago. Other, albeit slightly later, sources indicate that lots 17, 18, and 19 were, in fact, purchased by Alexander John Alexander.

Lot 4, Bushy Park, and lots 5 and 6, Richmond, were owned at this time by Gedney Clarke. Macintosh had met Clarke in Barbados in September 1770 and was assured—as he later told Pulteney—of Clarke’s “assistance & good Neighbourhood as may greatly falicitate [i.e., facilitate] the improvement of our Tobago concerns in his Neighbourhood.” A year later, in September 1771, Macintosh wrote to Clarke to ask if he would consider ceding “110 or 165 Acres” of his Bushy Park estate in order to allow Macintosh to establish a water mill on “the upper part of Bushy Park between two lofty Hills.” The price Clarke proposed—“Thirty Pound Sterling P Acre,” “half down, & half within the year”—was one that Macintosh did not accept.

In the summer of 1771, an advert was placed in the Public Advertiser for the sale of certain unspecified lots of undeveloped land in Tobago. Although no specifics were provided in the advert, there is reason to suspect that this was an early attempt by the partnership to test the waters to see whether or not they might be able to turn a quick profit on their recent acquisition. The reason to suspect this advert relates to partnership business is that Pulteney used John Irving to coordinate the dissolution of the partnership in 1773/74.

In November 1771, Macintosh wrote to inform Pulteney that he had provisionally negotiated a sale of 300 acres of the partnership lands, at £20 per acre, to the London lawyer Francis Eyre (represented in the West Indies by a Mr. [John?] Colby). As Macintosh then noted, “The Sale of that parcel would enable us to settle another Estate without drawing purses.” This deal seems to have gone nowhere. Around the same time, however, an advertisement appeared in the London Evening-Post for the sale of 800 acres of land in the Great River division of Tobago. This was, perhaps, evidence of the partnership seeking to establish the market value of their holdings. The advert also sought a loan of £12,000—a private request on Macintosh’s behalf that was intended to allow him to extend his own private landholdings.

In April 1772 a survey of Tobago detailed the composition of the partnership’s landholding: an estate now called “Poultney Hill” (see TNA, CO 101/16, ff. 126r–130v). In addition two white overseers—John Leadbeatter (or Leadbetter), Macintosh’s sometime manager in Grenada, and Peter White (whom I have not been able to identify)—there were 53 enslaved workers on the estate: one who could “be trusted with Arms” and 52 who could not. Of the estate’s combined 785 acres, only 60 areas had been cleared by that date, and of those only 6 planted with sugarcane.

By September 1772, Macintosh was proposing that he and Pulteney sell at least half, if not more, of their Tobago lands due to the damage being caused on the island by leaf blast (a disease affecting sugarcane): “in the present Circumstances it will be best to Sell at Tobago even so low as 15 Guineas p Acre,” he wrote. In preparation, on 8 September 1772, Macintosh obtained certificates from George Gibb, Register, to confirm that lots 17, 18, 19, and 24 were free of any “Conveyance, Mortgage or other Incumbrance whatever,” other than the existing deed of lease and release, which had transferred one moiety to Pulteney. Selling would generate £19,000 to invest in their new Dominica concern.

From May 1771, the partnership had expanded its landholdings by purchasing additional lots in Dominica, at a location much more amenable than in Tobago, since it offered direct access to the coast. How much of this activity Pulteney had agreed to in advance is unclear, but by May Macintosh had written to alert him that he had bought 450 acres at £6 per acre and “now render it to be included in our Copartnership, if not disposed of within the said time.” This was probably lot 51.

Lot 51 had previously belonged to a syndicate coordinated by Lauchlin Macleane and Macintosh was one of three attorneys appointed by Macleane’s associates to manage the disposal of the lands. He may have been able to negotiate a favourable deal as a consequence. When in Dominica, Macintosh had toured the land “under the guidance of an Indian & free Negro,” and found that “the Quality situation & other natural Advantages of our Land made me soon forget the pains of the most fatiguing Journey I ever underwent.” Macintosh estimated the land at “not be less than 500 Acres.” The total purchase price was put at £2,784. Macintosh proposed to Pulteney that they secure a loan for £6,000 in order to purchase slaves (at 50 slaves per year for three years) to properly transform the new estate. It was at this point that Macintosh also decided to buy the partnership a sloop, Fanny, for £300. By Boxing Day 1771, Macintosh—bolstered by a feeling of success—was able to boast to one correspondent that “M^r. Pulteney of Bath house & myself…[are] now settling two considerable Plantations in Dominica & Tobago.” In January 1772, Macintosh reckoned these joint concerns were worth £25,300 (see below).

By February 1772, Macintosh was beginning “my Dominica Settlement”—which he was then calling “my Conanary or Richmond Estate”—with “23 able Slaves,” overseen by Mr. James Buck Roberts. Around the same time, Macintosh learned that Joseph Senhouse had purchased the neighbouring estate (lot 50). Buck Roberts later killed another man “in a drunken quarrel,” and was quickly replaced in his role. Later in 1772, as noted above, Macintosh authorised Pulteney to “mortgage my Moiety to secure any Sum [ideally “10 or 12.000 £ Stg.”] we may borrow on our joint Accounts.” This would, however, have come to nothing following the 1772 financial crisis.

In May 1772, Macintosh wrote to Pulteney to tell him that he had impulsively purchased yet more land to expand the Richmond estate: “I could not resist the temptation of preserving the two Rivers to ourselves and securing up almost to their Sources, & therefore I got 200 Acres put up in two several Lots, and the Inhabitants were so Complaisant to me as to let the one fall into my hands at £3..1.. & the other at £3..5..St^g P Acre.” This was likely lots 52 and 53. In June 1772, Macintosh computed the Richmond estate at “30 £ Stg p Acre.” In relation to the Tobago estate, however, Macintosh had changed his mind by this point. Although Pulteney was now “desirous of Selling it,” Macintosh was prevaricating, signalling “both Concurrence & Reluctance.”

In July 1772, Macintosh wrote to Pulteney to transmit “the several Grants” relating to their Tobago and Dominica purchases, namely a “Grant from the Crown of 450 Acres being our first purchase in Dominica & two Grants for 700 Acres being our first purchase at Tobago.” These documents showed that the 450 acres in Dominica—lot 51—had been purchased at £12 per acre for cleared land (12 acres) and £6 per acre for uncleared land (138 acres): £972 in total.

By the middle of 1772, it is evident that tensions between Macintosh and Pulteney over costs and strategy were beginning to sour their relationship. Distance made it difficult to communicate and the decisions that Macintosh was forced to take alone, on the basis of his own local knowledge and on his own initiative, were not ones that could be shared with Pulteney in advance. Although Macintosh was able to estimate the partnership’s holdings on 1 November 1772 at “1600 Acres of Land with 90 Good Slaves & several valuable improvements”—“worth at a moderate Computation £35,000 Stg.”—the social bonds of mutual trust on which the partnership depended were beginning to fail. By the end of 1773, following an unsuccessful attempt by the pair to repair their relationship in Britain, the partnership was at an end and was formally dissolved in January 1774.

Even after more than a dozen years on the archival trail of William Macintosh, there are still moments where I find myself astonished by a new fact or revelation about his life and that of his immediate family. In recent days, I have returned to the task of tracing the life of Macintosh’s son, William, and his unexpected and tragic fate—one that I encountered for the first time yesterday—has caused me, once again, to see the narrative that I am writing in an entirely new light.

My prompt for returning to William (junior) was a long and rather regretful letter that Macintosh sent from Madras in July 1779. At more than 7,000 words in length, the letter was an attempt to atone for the damage that long separation—geographical and temporal—had done to their relationship and, more pragmatically, to communicate some important life lessons and maxims. William would have been 14 at the time he received Macintosh’s letter and was a pupil at a “virtuous seminary,” probably on the Continent. This was the third school William had attended since 1771; none of which had seemed to suit him. William had started formal education rather late. When he enrolled at a school in Abingdon in November 1771, his contemporaries were already starting to learn Latin grammar but poor William had not yet mastered the English alphabet.

By 1781, William had entered a new school—his fourth in ten years—and the invoice for his board and tuition (above) is the last reference to him that I can find in Macintosh’s archive. I had long suspected that William had predeceased his parents (he is not mentioned in either of their wills, for example), but my investigations over the years had come to naught. Yesterday, however, I finally found out the truth: that in December 1784 William committed suicide in his room at the New Hummums coffee house and hotel in Covent Garden.

Almost at once, a coroner’s inquest was arranged to investigate William’s death (above). Depositions were taken from the hotel’s owner, Thomas Harrison; George Hopwood, the hotel’s porter; and John Cosens, landlord to William’s mother and sisters. Testimony from the deponents tells a story of a young man in distress who, in the days leading up to his death, had been behaving in strange and erratic ways. The day before he died, William had presented himself at his mother’s lodgings, hoping to see his youngest sister, Polly, and to retrieve clothes and other items he said were worth £50. He had a pistol in his pocket and, according to Cosens, his behaviour “was very rude and extraordinary.” Denied the opportunity of speaking to his mother or sisters, he left.

The following day—in an evident state of distress—William told the hotel’s owner that “his mother had no Affection for him since he was four years old.” Later that evening, Hopwood found William sitting despondently in front of the fire in his room, his hair untied and hanging loose about his face, a pistol in his right hand. He spoke in a low voice only to tell Hopwood that he didn’t require anything. Minutes later Hopwood and Harrison heard a shot. When Hopwood arrived in the upstairs room it was to find William lying in a pool of blood, fragments of skull and brain matter across the walls.

While the inquest established the cause of death, it did little to inquire into the factors that had led to it, returning a verdict only of insanity. For want of explanation, the newspaper press was filled in the days after the event with lurid speculation. Some sources claimed that William had fallen victim to card sharps, who had left him penniless and hopeless. Others claimed that a lack of maternal affection had driven him to distraction. Still others claimed that William and his family, having been abandoned by Macintosh, were in such a state of penury that William found it intolerable and that he had intended to kill both himself and his younger sister, Polly, to relieve their suffering. What all sources agreed on, however, was that William had been a strapping and handsome young man, standing more than six feet tall. He was just 19 when he died.

Given the contradictions of the contemporary press reporting, it will be difficult to separate truth from fiction as I delve deeper into this sad story. Although almost 230 years separate me from the tragic end of William’s life, I cannot help but feel a sense of shock and sadness. Polly would doubtless have remembered this tragedy right up to her own death in old age in 1853, but after her, who would have remembered William?

Writing the life of William Macintosh is, at least to my mind, a question of geometry. There is the vertical axis, which describes the chronological sequence of his life, and there is a horizontal axis, which contextualises that life by situating it in relation to places, people, and events. The vertical axis is what provides a sense of a connected narrative to the book I am writing, while the horizontal axis provides the book’s wider intellectual contribution. Both, when in the right balance, make the book worth reading. Finding that balance is, however, the tricky thing, and it is sometimes difficult to know how far it is sensible to go in the pursuit either of contextual or chronological detail. Sometimes, however, it is impossible to resist the allure of curiosity. This was the case, recently, when I found myself trying to make sense of a short but crucial phase of Macintosh’s convoluted journey to India.

In January 1779, whilst he was a prisoner of war aboard a French ship in waters to the south west of the Cape of Good Hope, Macintosh managed to transfer to a Danish vessel, that took him on to Cape Town. The neutrality of the Danish ship, and the fact that Macintosh was a prisoner of war, should have made such a transfer impossible and, indeed, the apparent sensitivity of the event is reflected in the way it is described in Macintosh’s book, Travels. Nowhere in Travels is the Danish ship named; the reader is told only that it was a snow, that its supercargo and co-proprietor was a “Mr. B—d”, that it had reached Cape Town by 22 January 1779, and that the supercargo and captain were British, possibly Scottish.

In the hope that I might be able to identify the vessel somehow, I performed various internet searches that led me to a paper in the Scandinavian Economic History Review that listed Danish Asiatic Company voyages to and from India and China for the period 1772–1792. The paper included a table with the dates of departure and return of various vessels from and to Copenhagen, together with details of where they had stopped en route. Based on its return date, and the fact it had stopped at the Cape of Good Hope, the Rigernes Ønske looked like a good bet.

A second table in the paper provided a more detailed breakdown of the various phases of each ship’s journey. Using those data, it was possible to determine that the Rigernes Ønske had arrived at the Cape (during its return journey) 395 days after leaving Copenhagen on 21 December 1779, putting its arrival there at 20 January 1779.

Despite a two-day discrepancy between the date of Macintosh’s arrival at the Cape and that of the Rigernes Ønske, I was fairly confident that this might be the right vessel, knowing that there remains some uncertainty over the precision of the dates recorded in Travels. Further internet searching led me to the logbook of the Rigernes Ønske, which is among a vast collection of digitised materials held by the Rigsarkivet—the Danish National Archives.

Although I was able to access the relevant sections of the logbook, I really needed someone able to read eighteenth-century Danish to help me make sense of what I was looking at. I posted a call for assistance on Twitter and was utterly floored by the number of suggestions and offers of assistance I received, one of which came from a scholar based in Norway, Thomas Gerhardsen Moine, who specialises in foreign warships and privateers in Norway in the period between 1793 and 1815.

Thomas was very quickly able to confirm that there was no mention of Macintosh in the Rigernes Ønske‘s logbook, but that the ship had sighted another Danish vessel at the Cape—a merchant snow that it identified as the Fransiskus, owned by a merchant named “Bøyte”. As this was the only Danish vessel the Rigernes Ønske saw at the Cape, this seemed to be a good contender for the ship that had taken Macintosh there and I was inclined to leave things there, having sufficient evidence for an adequate contextual footnote. Like me, however, Thomas was overtaken by curiosity and, by reading further back into the logbook, was able to gain more information about the Fransiskus. He was eventually able to discover that the supercargo was, in fact, a Scottish free merchant, David Boyd (the “Mr. B—d” from Travels) operating from the Danish fortified settlement at Tranquebar. Having identified Boyd, it was then possible, using digitised Danish Asiatic Company records and the registers from the Zion Church in Tranquebar, to learn all sorts of fascinating things about his life, family, and trading activities, and the ship (ordinarily the Francis or Franciscus, not Fransiskus) that Macintosh had joined in January 1779.

Thomas’s discoveries in the archives of the Danish Asiatic Company have allowed me to add empirical rigour to my discussion of Macintosh’s brief journey on the Francis, but their value lies more particularly in their contribution to the horizontal axis of my book. The story of Macintosh’s transfer at sea is an interesting one because it put international treaty in tension with maritime custom. In the end, Macintosh’s status as a fellow Scot is what most likely persuaded Boyd to allow him to join the ship. Although they spent only five or so days in each other’s company, Boyd made a significant impression on Macintosh. He found Boyd to be “very sensible and liberal” but also, undoubtedly, looked on him with a degree of envy. Boyd embodied what Macintosh strived to achieve—success as a private merchant in the India trade. That Boyd appeared to have done so without sacrificing his family life (his wife, Maria, and daughters, Matilda and Veronica, were with him on the Francis) would have given Macintosh pause. Macintosh, for his part, had sacrificed his relationship with his wife, Ann, and had not seen his children for more than two years.

As I look ahead to another year in the company of Macintosh, tacking back and forth between the horizontal and the vertical, it is with the usual combination of excitement and apprehension—curiosity over finding out what happens next is mixed with the fear that the story, in all its infinite complexity, will overwhelm my ability to tell it. Onwards, onwards!