{"id":1171,"date":"2022-11-09T16:56:52","date_gmt":"2022-11-09T16:56:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=1171"},"modified":"2023-03-09T13:31:51","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T13:31:51","slug":"messy-methodologies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=1171","title":{"rendered":"Messy methodologies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The element of historical inquiry that always fascinates me the most is the one that tends to be glossed over\u2014sometimes out of embarrassment\u2014in published work and presentations: the actual, messy, and occasionally haphazard doing of research. As Keith Thomas noted in a brilliant essay<\/a> published a dozen years ago in the London Review of Books<\/em>, our collective reluctance to share the details of our working methods comes, in part, because to do so is to “dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own working method is one that owes as much to happy coincidence as it does to the rigorous application of a systematic and all-encompassing approach, or at least it sometimes feels like that. Flitting between different sources\u2014manuscripts, texts, and digital representations\u2014and between different ways of working\u2014slow and careful reading, and repeated, rapid-fire googling\u2014often leaves me reeling, as my desk fills with books and papers and scribbled notes and my browser buckles under the weight of dozens of open tabs. It is an approach that, at least most of the time, seems to work and is quite well suited for researching an individual whose historical traces are more often than not fragmentary and dispersed. In what follows, I describe the approach I took today to contextualising a single document from Macintosh’s archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
David Anstruther to William Macintosh, 12 May 1778. Archives d\u00e9partementales de Vaucluse, 2 E Titres de famille 85.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The item in question is a letter sent to Macintosh on 12 May 1778 from David Anstruther, who was then en route to India to take up a military role in Bengal. Anstruther was hoping to buy some items\u2014including “4 Boxes of Fruits in Brandy”\u2014that Macintosh had with him aboard the French merchant vessel, Brisson<\/em>, on which he was travelling. The reason this letter interested me is that it bore the same date as a letter Macintosh supposedly sent to the prime minister, Lord North.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Macintosh’s letter to Lord North, dated “At Sea, 12th May 1778; by the way of St. Helena”.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wondered whether the coincidence of dates was meaningful. Elsewhere, Travels<\/em> tells us that Macintosh’s letter to North was dispatched under separate cover to his friend in London, John Townson, and sent via another ship, the Queen<\/em>, which was bound for St. Helena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Macintosh’s letter to John Townson, sent aboard the Queen<\/em> to St Helena.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Curious to know whether or not I could find any information about the Queen<\/em> (which might help me by providing independent confirmation of the chronology of the letters that make up Macintosh’s book), I resorted to a speculative search of Google Books to see if anything obvious came up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The ever-indispensable Google Books.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A simple search for “queen 1778 st helena” immediately brought up two relevant sources, the second of which proved to be particularly significant because it contained an extract from a letter written by the captain of the Queen<\/em>, Peter Douglas, to East India House in London recording his meeting with Macintosh’s ship, the Brisson<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
An extract from a letter from the captain of the Queen<\/em> as it appeared in Appendix to the Sixth Report from the Committee of Secrecy, Appointed to Enquire into the Causes of the War in the Carnatic, and of the Condition of the British Possessions in those Parts<\/em> (1782).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The extract of Douglas’s letter is interesting because it mentions the exchange of intelligence between the two ships concerning the supposed threat of two American privateers headed for the Mozambique Channel. The letter also mentions the Nassau<\/em>, from where David Anstruther had sent his letter, and alongside which the Queen<\/em> had been sailing. Here, I had found the connection! Keen to see if I could find more, however, I did a follow-up Google search on “‘peter douglas’ queen 1778”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
A simple Google search of key terms likely to be relevant.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sixth search result pointed me towards a (digitised) manuscript of Douglas’s letter (or at least a contemporary manuscript extract of it), from the India Office Records and hosted now by the Qatar Digital Library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Qatar Digital Library version of IOR\/R\/15\/1\/4, ff 19-20<\/a>, containing a contemporary extract of Douglas’s letter recording his meeting with the Brisson<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a relatively short period of time, I had found information and connections that at the beginning of my working day I had no idea existed. Now I knew that the Nassau<\/em> and the Queen<\/em> had travelled in convoy, that both ships had had dealings with the Brisson<\/em> in the waters south of St Helena, that the Brisson<\/em> (almost certainly in the form of Macintosh) had passed sensitive information to the Queen<\/em>‘s captain, and that that warning had made its way to London before being sent on by East India House to Company representatives in Basra in modern-day Iraq. Such research trails, followed between the offline and online worlds, retain the capacity for surprise which, in sustaining the momentum of a long-term project like this, is a valuable commodity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The element of historical inquiry that always fascinates me the most is the one that tends to be glossed over\u2014sometimes out of embarrassment\u2014in published work and presentations: the actual, messy, and occasionally haphazard doing of research. As Keith Thomas noted in a brilliant essay published a dozen years ago in the London Review of Books, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1171"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1245,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171\/revisions\/1245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}