Tag Archives: Jamaica

General Interest

Blog Anniversary

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It is just over a year since I began weekly postings on this blog.

I set up the website while I was working on the research for what eventually became the book  A Parcel of Ribbons, because at that stage I did not know if it ever would become a book, and I felt it would be a pity if the research existed only in an electronic archive that no-one else could see or make use of.

During the year I have been contacted by a number of readers who share my interest in the history of the 18th century, and in particular of the connections between Britain and Jamaica. It has been a rewarding relationship and often readers have provided further information on topics I have written about. Sometimes I have been able to help with research others are engaged in.

I am now reviewing where to go to next. I shall be promoting my book when I can, and I have two projects in mind that have arisen from the research into the Lee Family. One concerns the elopement of Matthew Allen Lee and what happened next. The other relates to William Perrin, his estates in Jamaica and the family of his wife in England who intersected with the Lee family in London. Whether there will be another book or two in all this remains to be seen, but I hope there will still be interesting finds to share here. I also have a fair few Wills relating to Jamaica that I have yet to transcribe, when I do they’ll be uploaded here.

 

 

Biographies, General Interest, London Life

First Catch Your Hare

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The title page from the facsimile first edition, Prospect Books 2012[1]

‘First Catch Your Hare’ is one of those apocryphal quotations that was in fact never written, in spite of being repeatedly attributed to Hannah Glasse.

Hannah Glasse was the author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy first published in 1747, and although she is less well remembered than Isabella Beaton she pioneered the method of writing recipes in a systematic fashion that could be understood by anyone who could read.

That her book sold so well gives the lie to the notion that all but the richest eighteenth century women were illiterate. In fact she was at the leading edge of the rise of the self-help book, something which would really take off in the following century with the introduction of steam-powered printing.

Hannah was the illegitimate daughter of Isaac Allgood (of Brandon White House and Nunwick, Northumberland) and Mrs Hannah Reynolds. Her parents’ relationship ended after the birth of three children. Perhaps surprisingly Hannah then lived, not with her mother, whom she called a ‘wicked wretch’, but with her father and his wife, and she grew up close to her legitimate half-brother Lancelot Allgood.

In 1724 her stepmother died suddenly and her father was in very poor health so she moved in with her grandmother Ryecroft in Greville Street, Hatton Garden. It was from here that she left in secret, aged just sixteen, to marry John Glasse at Leyton in Essex on the 5th of August 1724. A month later when her grandmother found out and threw her out, she and John Glasse moved to rooms above a chemist’s shop in the Haymarket.

Over the next fifteen years Hannah bore eleven live children and suffered at least one miscarriage of twins. She corresponded with members of her father’s family in Northumberland and those letters provide most of the evidence for her life with John Glasse, who seems to have been largely without visible means of support and who died in 1747.

By this time Hannah had already indulged in several money-making ventures including selling Daffy’s Elixir, writing her cookery book, and setting up a ‘habit warehouse’, a high class clothes shop in Tavistock Street. Quite how she managed it is unclear but among her clients were royalty, including the Prince and Princess of Wales. It was perhaps her bad luck that ‘poor Fred’ the Prince of Wales died suddenly, and possibly poor management or the unpaid bills of the aristocracy that led to Hannah’s bankruptcy in 1755. This resulted in the sale of the copyright of her book The Art of Cookery, in a story sadly very similar to the sale of the copyright in Mrs Beaton’s books a century or so later.

Hannah went on to write The Compleat Confectioner and the Servant’s Directory but neither had the success of her first book.

As with Isabella Beaton, Hannah Glasse did not invent her recipes, rather she plundered a variety of sources. It seems likely that although she had not had to earn her living as a cook and came from the gentry classes, that she actually enjoyed cooking. Although she took her recipes from other sources the main change she made was to provide precise measurements of quantities where none were given in the originals. She also gave very clear instructions and simplified much of the language that had been used in earlier recipes, for example changing ‘two right oranges’ to ‘two large oranges’, and instead of ‘lard them with small Lardoons’ she has ‘lard them with little bits of Bacon’. Where Hannah was not so systematic is in her arrangement of the recipes, there was no index in the first edition, nor are all recipes for similar ingredients grouped together.

One fascinating aspect of her work is that it makes clear to us that many 18th century ingredients were a little different from now, for example eggs were generally much smaller, so if instructed to take a piece of dough the size of a hen’s egg it is well to remember this. Poultry too were smaller, but teaspoons appear to have been larger and she is probably referring to the caddy spoon used for measuring out tea rather than the smaller spoon for stirring a cup of tea. The Prospect Books facsimile of her book includes not only background to her family, but also detailed discussion of her sources, ingredients and methods of cooking.

Here is a sample recipe chosen at random. I hope to post some more in future. It should be remembered that oysters in 18th century London were still commonplace and cheap. Whether the paper used over the breast was used dry or wet I am not sure.

To marinate Fowls

Take a fine large Fowl or Turky, raise the Skin from the Breast Bone with your Finger, then take a Veal Sweetbread and cut it small, a few Oysters, a few Mushrooms, an Anchovy, some Pepper, a little Nutmeg, some Lemon-peel, and a little Thyme; chop all together small and mix with the Yolk of an Egg, stuff it between the Skin and the Flesh, but take great Care you don’t break the Skin, and then stuff what Oysters you please into the Body of the Fowl. You may lard the Breast of the Fowl with Bacon, if you chuse it. Paper the Breast, and roast it. Make good Gravy, and garnish with Lemon. You may add a few Mushrooms to the Sauce.

And if it seems as if Hannah Glasse’s story has an exclusively London bias, there is a curious postscript. For a document preserved at Nunwick Hall lists some of her surviving children, as of about 1767. Hannah the eldest was alive and unmarried, Catherine was twice widowed and had one son then living, Isaac Allgood Glasse was in Bombay, George who had joined the Royal Navy was lost at sea in 1761, and Margaret (chief partner in the habit making business) had died unmarried in Jamaica.

This raises intriguing questions about why she was there. Clearly a good living could be made in London if her mother’s client list were exploited, so had she gone to Jamaica alone or with a brother? I have not been able to find a burial record for her, nor any other trace of the Glasse family, except perhaps an Edward Glasse who was in Port Royal, and who buried a daughter called Margaret there in 1741. Was he perhaps an uncle?


[1] First Catch Your Hare…The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, by a Lady (Hannah Glasse), a facsimile of the first edition supplemented by the recipes which the author added up to the fifth edition and furnished with a Preface, Introductory Essays by Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain, a Glossary by Alan Davidson, Notes and an Index. Prospect Books, Totnes, 2012. ISBN 978-1-903018-88-0.

 

 

 

 

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

A Parcel of Ribbons – The Book – Now available

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Support independent publishing

Available in perfect bound paperback 6″ x 9″ – 374 pages with illustrations.

ISBN: 9781105809743

Also available via Amazon

When I set up this website it was with the aim of sharing material I had come across during research into my family history. In particular I was looking for the origin of the story that in my mother’s family there had been an ‘Indian Princess’.

It may seem a long way from an Indian Princess to Jamaica but the trail that led me there was illuminated by the discovery of a wonderful collection of family letters.

I can now share these and the story of the remarkable Lee family with you. I do hope you enjoy their story as much as I have enjoyed writing about it.

Biographies, General Interest, London Life

Murder or Manslaughter – The Trial of Daniel Macginnis

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A Trial at the Old Bailey by Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

We would probably never have heard of Daniel Macginnis (sometimes written Macgenise) if he had not had the misfortune to be tried for murder at the Old Bailey in January 1793. What makes his case interesting for me is the number of highly distinguished men with connections to Jamaica who were prepared to testify in his defence.

Daniel was a doctor, aged nearly sixty, and lodging in London at the house of one John Hardy, a Hatter and Hosier of Newgate Street .

On the 28th of December 1782 Hardy and his wife and their maidservant were having tea in a downstairs extension at the back of the house, built out into the yard and with a skylight. When ‘water’ fell upon the glass Hardy rushed upstairs to confront Daniel Macginnis who had emptied his chamberpot out of his window as the maid had failed to collect it earlier. Hardy ranted at Macginnis telling him he wanted him out of the house and had started off back downstairs when Macginnis answered him back. According to Macginnis, Hardy then rushed back upstairs, forced his way into the room, pushed Macginnis to the floor and began to drag him out by his hair.

In the struggle, and fearing for his life, Macginnis drew a bayonet out of his pocket and stabbed his landlord through the heart. Hardy fell backwards down the stairs coming to rest on the landing. Macginnis, who had probably called out of his window for help during the attack, locked himself in his room until he could be certain that he would be taken up by an officer of the law and not murdered by the mob. He then gave himself up and handed over the murder weapon.

There was never any doubt that Daniel had killed John Hardy, although the maid, and another one who arrived back just as the commotion was in progress, disagreed on some of the details. What is remarkable is the legal team that represented Daniel and the number of extremely influential character witnesses who were called.

Those who have watched the BBC series Garrow’s Law will recall a barrister called Silvester. The TV series was only loosely based on fact and on a number of real life legal cases, but John Silvester really existed and was a friend of William Garrow and witness at his marriage in 1793.

John Silvester and Thomas Erskine appeared for the defence in Daniel Macginnis’s trial. Thomas Erskine was also a very distinguished barrister who famously had defended Lord George Gordon after the Gordon riots in 1780, and later Thomas Paine. He eventually became Lord Chancellor. Neither lawyer would have been cheap. As Daniel was effectively penniless someone wealthy must have paid for his defence. The first Jamaican connection mentioned comes in Daniel’s own statement in which he mentions General Sir John Dalling who had just completed a tour as Governor of Jamaica, and was shortly to be posted to Madras.

My circumstances never were affluent, but of late I have had assurances from those in power to be preferred to the rank of physician to the army, in an expedition that was then in contemplation, to be sent out under General Dalling , who was always my friend.

Daniel Sheen (or Shiel, the newspapers have a different spelling from the court transcript) a West India Merchant, testified to having known Daniel in Jamaica and told how Daniel had tried more than once to persuade him to buy goods from John Harvey in order to further his business.

He was followed by Lord Viscount Barrington who was a former Treasurer of the Navy and former Post Master General. He said that he knew Daniel as a very mild mannered man and that, had he been in the country, he was sure Lord Hillsborough who knew him even better would have testified for him.

Next up was Thomas Howard, Earl Effingham, whose mother Elizabeth Beckford was a daughter of Peter Beckford and sister to William Beckford, hugely wealthy Jamaican landowner and sometime Lord Mayor of London. Effingham would later be a Governor of Jamaica.

Major General Murray, an uncle of the Duke of Athol, appeared next and testified that Daniel

had at different times, while he had the care of sick men, divested himself of fresh provisions and given to those sick men, that he had likewise at times laid on the boards to give his bed to the sick men.

Murray was followed by Edmund Burke who said that

He was recommended to me originally as a man very knowing in his profession, very innocent, and rather helpless and unable to forward his own interest: as far as I have had an opportunity of knowing him, and I have known persons that knew much more of him than I could, I have heard that his knowledge is very extensive, I have always heard from every body that knew him, that he was a man of remarkable good nature, and it interested me so much in his favour, that I endeavoured to serve him in several little pursuits that he had, in which I thought he had very ill fortune to say no worse of it: from that opinion of him, I confess I feel much in seeing him in this situation.

Next came a Major Fleming who previously, wanting to give Macginnis work,

called him in, and in the course of a few days I found he had not only given strict attendance, but that much the greater part of his fee was given back to these poor people, to the very wretches whom he attended, given to buy wine and rice and sago, and other things that they wanted; this I mention as one instance of his humanity.

Further testimony was given by Alderman John Sawbridge, MP for London and former Lord Mayor; and finally John Nugent, the Lt.-Governor of Tortola.

Erskine then offered to call further character witnesses but was told it would not be necessary.

Even the prosecuting counsel seemed sympathetic towards Daniel, but despite strong evidence that Daniel had acted in self defence, and a very sympathetic summing up by the judge Mr Justice Willes,  the jury found him guilty of wilful murder and he was sentenced to hang. However the carrying out of the sentence was held over for two weeks during which time much work obviously went on  behind the scenes on his behalf  and a Royal Pardon was obtained on the 14th of February, while nevertheless requiring that he should serve two years in Newgate Prison.

What happened to Daniel thereafter is unclear. Did he survive his imprisonment? It is to be hoped that his influential friends were able to ensure that his time in jail was not too uncomfortable. It was then possible to pay for a ‘better class’ of cell, and to have fuel, food, candles, clothes and blankets delivered to make life more bearable.

What had been Daniel’s past history that so many wealthy and influential men with West Indian connections wanted to help him? Apart from a reference in the correspondence of Robert Cooper Lee that led me to the trial, and the trial transcript itself, I have seen no other contemporary references, and yet Daniel was clearly very well known among the West India lobby in London.

Daniel’s kindness, humanity and innocent goodness shine through the testimony of those who spoke for him at his trial. I do hope he lived out a comfortable old age.

 

General Interest

Jubilees, Longevity and connecting with the past

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Source: history1800s.about.com

This last week has seen the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II both here in the UK and around the world. The Queen is not yet Britain’s longest reigning monarch. George III lived to be nearly eighty-two and reigned for just short of sixty years. Queen Victoria reigned for sixty-three years and seven months, so our present Queen has only to reign for a further three and a half years to become the longest reigning British Monarch.

Queen Victoria celebrated two Jubilees, following a period of relative unpopularity after the death of Prince Albert in 1861 when she went into deep mourning and relative seclusion.  Her Golden Jubilee was celebrated in 1887 and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

In 1977 when the present Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee after twenty-five years on the throne, my four year old daughter peered through rain and gloom, similar to that experienced across Britain last Sunday, to see a distant Jubilee Beacon. By her side was my grandmother who in 1887 at the same age had watched the beacon for Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

This got me to thinking about those historical links that excite the imagination and allow us to jump backwards into history. When my mother was about twelve in the 1920s, and had been ill, she was taken to the seaside to recover. Staying in the same hotel was an old lady whose father as a young boy had fought at the battle of Waterloo.

In 1991 I read the obituary of Alexandra Stewart, the last speaker of Perthshire Gaelic. As a young girl she had met Lizzie Lothian, who died in 1911 aged 93, and who remembered her grandfather John Lothian’s  tales of escaping from the battle of Culloden in 1745.

Making such lengthy connections for Jamaica’s early history is much harder since so many of the colonists died young.  John Favell, whose Will was dated 1720, and who was probably born about 1649, is most unusual in mentioning a great-grandchild – Susanna Bernard, daughter of his grand-daughter Mary Bernard. He left her £150 in plate. Susanna must have been an infant when John Favell died and so unlikely to remember him.

The only other Jamaica Will I know of that mentions great grandchildren is that of Mary Dehany (born Mary Gregory in Jamaica) who died in London in 1813 aged ninety.  Her grandmother Jane Gallimore had also lived to be ninety and had lived through the reigns of six British Monarchs – seven if you count William and Mary as two! Good genes in that family.

You can play a game similar to ‘six degrees of separation’ by thinking of the longest backward links you can make into our past through someone you have met. So I can get to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 in two moves through my mother. Do you have anything similar in your family?

Like skimming pebbles on a pond the ripples of our memories fade out into the past.

 

Biographies, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Jamaica and the Founding of the British Museum

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Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753)

It is perhaps surprising, but the British Museum might be said to have had its origins in Jamaica.

In September 1687 a young Anglo-Irish doctor, who had trained in London and France, accompanied his patron the Duke of Albemarle on a voyage to Jamaica. Hans Sloane was to spend a relatively short time there as the Duke died the year after their arrival, but during that time he practised medicine and studied the island’s plants, later producing the great Natural History of Jamaica. He was already an accomplished botanist and had been made a member of the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-five.

In Jamaica Sloane met fellow doctor Fulke Rose, and together they treated the retired pirate and ex-Governor of Jamaica Henry Morgan for the effects of too much drink and socialising, administering millipedes and oil of scorpions! Unsurprisingly this treatment seems to have had no beneficial effect and Morgan died not long afterwards. Treatment of many of his other patients was more successful, perhaps owing to his foresight in taking with him to Jamaica a large quantity of Peruvian Bark – the source of quinine used in treating malaria.

While in Jamaica Sloane was introduced to cocoa taken with water which he found unpalatable. However he later mixed it with milk and prescribed it medicinally. Our modern drinking chocolate had been born.

Sloane returned to London with his collection of Jamaican specimens and drawings, and set up a fashionable medical practice, living for the first six years in the household of the widowed Duchess of Albemarle.  His practice was characterised by a common sense approach to treatment, if not to any great advances in medical science, including simple diet and exercise.

He kept in regular contact with various correspondents in Jamaica, and following the devastating earth quake of 1692 he published some of their letters in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. One correspondent wrote to Sloane on the 23rd of September, “We have had a very great Mortality since the great Earthquake (for we have little ones daily) almost half the people that escap’d upon Port-Royal are since dead of a Malignant Fever, from Change of Air, want of dry Houses, warm lodging, proper Medicines, and other conveniences.” Another wrote “The Weather was much hotter after the Earthquake than before; and such an innumerable quantity of Muskitoes, that the like was never seen since the inhabiting of the Island.”[1] Sloane had commented on the use of ‘gause’, that is bed nets, against insects but of course did not know of the connection between mosquitoes and malaria.

Following the earthquake Fulke Rose returned to London to plead the islanders’ case and died there in 1694. His last child Philippa was born posthumously, and the following year Fulke’s widow Elizabeth married Hans Sloane. She had already had eleven children and went on to have four more with Sloane. Four of her daughters with Fulke Rose, and two of Sloane’s daughters, lived to grow up and Hans Sloane was a kindly stepfather and guardian.

Sloane’s medical practice and his good connections led to him attending various members of the royal family and also to promoting the use of inoculation against smallpox. Following the near death of a daughter of the Princess of Wales he conducted experimental inoculation on five prisoners whose lives had been spared for the purpose. The success of the inoculation was then tested by having one of the men nurse, and lie in bed with, a victim of a particularly virulent epidemic in Hertford. The benefits of inoculation would later be taken to Jamaica by British doctors, although in fact the practice was already known in Africa and some cargoes of slaves were inoculated before being sold.

However, I have wandered a long way from the British Museum.

Hans Sloane outlived his wife by more than a quarter of a century, living to be ninety-two and dying in January 1753. At the time of his death his house at Chelsea, where his name is remembered in Sloane Square, was filled with a vast accumulation of books and artefacts collected over his long life, often by buying up the collections of others. His legacy included 42,000 books, a room full of dried plant specimens, cases full of ancient Greek and Roman statues, gold and silver medals, diamonds, jewels and other precious stones. A large panel of Trustees was set up under Sloane’s Will to supervise the disposal of his collection, and the most valuable items were immediately removed to the Bank of England for safety.

In June 1753 an Act of Parliament was passed for the creation of the British Museum. It would house Sloane’s collection (purchased from the Trustees for £20,000, well below its market value), the King George II and Cotton libraries, the books and manuscripts of Arthur Edwards and the Harleian Manuscripts. A lottery was held and raised £95,000 for the purchase of the collections and the purchase and repair of Montagu House in Bloomsbury on the site of the present museum. There was money left over to purchase government stock for the on-going maintenance of it all.

The British Museum opened to ‘all studious and curious persons’  in January 1759, the first free national public museum in the world.

How many of today’s visitors know of the connection of its most illustrious founder to Jamaica?

 

 

[1] Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1694, 18, pp.78-100.

 

 

General Interest, Jamaican Life

Guinea Grass and Captain Bligh

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Guinea Grass is now grown throughout the world

 

When the first English settlers arrived in Jamaica in 1655 they found large numbers of cattle roaming wild. They had been introduced by the Spanish who had found the herds multiplied and were profitable on native grasslands. The English soldiers of the Penn and Venables expedition, having largely trashed the existing settlements when they could not find treasure, then faced starvation – which you have to say rather served them right!

The ill-disciplined expedition nearly failed there and then especially as those who ventured outside Spanish Town were frequently picked off by escaped slaves and the remains of the local Taino Indian population. However the reservoir of cattle on the island provided a buffer against disease and starvation and gradually the toe-hold won by Penn and Venables became an British colony.

As agriculture became established the colonists began to grow some of their own food, although Jamaica would remain heavily dependent on imports throughout the eighteenth century. Initially the cattle were simply hunted and killed with their hides forming the basis of a profitable leather industry, but gradually the cattle too began to be farmed. The areas given over to raising stock and food crops were known as penns, and names of some survive today as in the town of May Pen, on land that once belonged to the Rector of Kingston William May.

On to the scene came Guinea grass.  In one of those little accidents of history it arrived from Guinea in Africa together with some exotic birds brought in 1744 to George Ellis Chief Justice of Jamaica by the captain of a slave ship. The seed was intended as bird food, but the birds died and the story goes that the seed was simply thrown out, whereupon it thrived and grew seven feet tall in the ideal conditions of tropical Jamaica.

It was discovered to be excellent for grazing, it made good hay and it grew on land that could not be used for sugar. Altogether it was in many ways as valuable as sugar, for to cultivate that crop large quantities of animals were needed – oxen and mules as draught animals and cattle to feed the local population (although slaves were mostly fed on salt fish). Slaves walking home from a day in the fields were expected to bring back a bundle of the grass with them to feed the animals. Guinea grass spread across the world for pasture, silage, hay and it is also used for mulching land in dry areas prior to establishing a crop and planted to stabilise land to help control soil erosion.

Human beings however could not live off grass, and the planters ever looking for cheaper ways of feeding their slaves heard that the breadfruit of Otaheite (now Tahiti) might provide the answer.

Breadfruit

Enter the much maligned Captain Bligh. I say much maligned because he seems to have been considerably less  brutal than other naval captains of his day, a fact supported by the number of his crew who in 1789 opted to go with Bligh rather than join the mutineers.

Bligh attempted a landing on the small island of Tofua where one crewman was stoned to death by the islanders. Then by a feat of incredible seamanship and with only a quadrant, a pocket watch and a memory of charts he had seen, Bligh navigated the 23 foot open boat across 3,618 miles of the Pacific to Timor and did not lose a single man. It took them forty-seven days and they had been given only enough food for a week.

Four years later following a second attempt Bligh finally delivered another cargo of breadfruit plants to the Bath Botanical Gardens in Jamaica, where it became established as a staple food. The town of Bath, named for its English counterpart because of the spa and springs there, today holds an annual Jamaican Breadfruit Festival.

 

Guinea grass: Photograph from http://www.fao.org/ag

Breadfruit: Photograph from http://www.soniatasteshawaii.com/

 

Genealogy, General Interest

Scots in Jamaica

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Robert Burns, the most famous Scot who never went to Jamaica!

 

Family commitments over Easter mean this week’s piece will be a short one, but as I am half Scots I have a particular interest in the role of Scots in eighteenth century Jamaica.

It is sometimes said that most of the planters in Jamaica were English in origin whereas the Scots supplied the bookkeepers and overseers on the estates.  Like all generalisations this is only partly true.  There were Scots such as Hercules Ross, James Wedderburn, Colin McKenzie and others who were highly successful planters and merchants, just as there were English bookkeepers and overseers.  There were also many Scots doctors in Jamaica some of whom, in addition to providing medical services, were also planters.

The events that drove Scots to seek a future in Jamaica were however rather different from those motivating the English.  Deportations of Scots to Jamaica by Cromwell, and following the failed Monmouth rebellion in the 17th century, were augmented by three huge historical events that resulted in the young Scots arriving in Jamaica.

The first of these was the Darien disaster, a “noble undertaking” of Scots empire building that envisaged a New Caledonia linking the Pacific and the Atlantic in Central America.  Vast sums of money were raised in Scotland, and a large fleet fitted out.  When the whole affair ended in disaster and enormous financial losses to the backers in Scotland a handful of survivors ended up in Jamaica.  If you are interested in reading more, The Darien Disaster by John Prebble[1] provides an excellent account.

Scots also suffered from the failure of two Jacobite rebellions, in 1715 and 1745, both of which resulted in migrations to Jamaica.  James Wedderburn, already mentioned, left for Jamaica after watching his father hanged, drawn and quartered in 1746 following the defeat at Culloden Moor. The family estates were confiscated and sixteen year old Wedderburn was left to make his own way, something he did with conspicuous success, returning to Scotland a very wealthy man.

In this he was far from alone.  Edward Long in his “History of Jamaica” in 1774 wrote that:

Jamaica, indeed, is greatly indebted to North Britain, as very nearly one third of the inhabitants are either natives of that country, or descendants from those who were….. To say the truth, they are so clever and prudent in general, as, by an obliging behaviour, good sense, and zealous services to gain esteem, and make their way through every obstacle.

According to T.M.  Devine, in his book Scotland’s Empire 1600 to 1815[2], in the period 1771-1775 Scots accounted for nearly 45% of all probate inventories valued above £1000, and about 40% of personal property inventories were those of Scots.

Another book that tells the story of Scots in the Caribbean in the latter part of the 18th-century is Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1752-1820[3] by Douglas J Hamilton.

If you are searching for Scottish ancestors who may have been in Jamaica, you will find David Dobson’s book Scots in Jamaica 1655-1855[4] a very useful reference work.  It is an alphabetical listing with brief references to the sources of information on each individual, together with two pages of details of some of the ships that sailed between Scotland and Jamaica.

Oh, and in case you did not already know, Robert Burns was nearly lost to Scotland and poetry when he planned to migrate to work as a bookkeeper for Dr Patrick Douglas. Fate intervened, delaying the ship he should have sailed on in August 1786, until after the birth of his twin children and the sudden success of the ‘Kilmarnock Edition’ of his poems.


[1] The Darien Disaster, John Prebble, Pimlico, New edition,2002. ISBN-10: 0712668535, ISBN-13: 978-0712668538

[2] Scotland’s Empire 1600-1815, T.M.Devine, Penguin, 2004. ISBN-10: 0140296875, ISBN-13: 978-0140296877

[3] Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World 1752-1820, Douglas J.Hamilton,Manchester University Press, 2010. ISBN-10: 0719071836, ISBN-13: 978-0719071836

[4] Scots in Jamaica 1655-1855, David Dobson, Clearfield, Baltimore, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8063-5540-5

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, Jamaican Life, London Life

Augier or Hosier – name transformations

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When I was transcribing the 1754 census of Spanish Town I came across three people listed as “free Mulattoes or Descendants from them admitted to the privileges of white people by Acts of the Legislature”.  Two of them I knew already – Mary Johnston Rose and her son Thomas Wynter who each lived in the house that they owned. Then there was Susanna Hosier who was recorded as a sugar planter and who owned a house worth £60 that was un-tenanted.  I was surprised that I did not know who she was and could not find any reference to her, since as a mixed race woman she seemed to be unusually wealthy.

Sometime later I was working on the family of Susanna Augier and realised that the name was sometimes written as Augier and sometimes as Hosier.  Once you pronounce Augier as ‘O-gee-er’ with a soft G you realise how it could come to be written as Hosier.  It was also occasionally mis-transcribed as Augire, Angier and Augine.   I often use dictation software when transcribing Wills and writing these blog pieces, and the software delivers ‘osier’ for ‘Augier’ !  It is the kind of name transformation that makes the work of the genealogist both frustrating and fascinating.

Having resolved the name puzzle I was able to build the story of Susanna Augier and her extended family.  She was a quite exceptional woman and well known to the Jamaican Plantocracy. Her case was used to support the argument in the construction of the 1761 act preventing “Devizes to Negroes”, limiting the inheritance of black, mixed race, and illegitimate Jamaicans to £2000. The size of her inheritance seems to have been exceptional, but it provided useful ammunition for those wanting to restrict the size of legacies.

Susanna was the daughter of John Augier, a planter who died in 1722.  He seems to have had little connection to his origins and a fondness and care for his Jamaican family.  Under his Will he freed his daughters Susanna, Mary, Jenny, Frances and Jane.  Subsequent references to his family show that there was a further daughter called Elizabeth and a son called Jacob, and probably a daughter Sarah who died young.  Susanna, who was probably born about 1707, seems to have been particularly favoured and in due course became the mother of four children with a planter called Peter Caillard or Calliard.  Mary, Peter, Frances and Susanna Caillard were born between 1725 and 1728. [But see Postscript below].

Peter Caillard died about 1728 leaving Susanna hugely wealthy. In addition to her inheritance from her father she now had a life interest in several properties in Kingston and Spanish Town and an estate including a Penn in St Catherine and a Mountain at Way Water, all valued for probate at £26,150 8s 1d, and entailed for her children Mary and Peter.  By 1753 Susanna owned 950 acres of mainly good land in the parish of St Andrew (including 40 acres under coffee, 100 acres of provision ground and 800 acres of woodland) with eighty negroes, one white servant and forty-two head of cattle. Like many other free mixed race Jamaicans Susanna owned slaves – for example John Augier ‘a negro man belonging to Susanna Augier’ was baptised in Kingston on the 4th of March 1740. Few women in eighteenth century Jamaica owned estates (most who did were planters widows), fewer still managed them themselves as Susanna appears to have done.

Peter and Susanna Caillard both died young, but in 1738 Susanna applied for the rights of whites for herself and her children Mary and Frances Caillard. A Private Act of the Jamaica Assembly dated 19th of July 1738 granted them the legal status of whites.

Mary Caillard travelled to England, perhaps to meet her father’s family in Bristol, and on the 19th of April 1748 at Henbury, Gloucestershire she married Gilbert Ford who would in due course become Jamaican Attorney General.  It was an unusual marriage for a mixed race Jamaican, even more so for a young English Lawyer.  Ford came from a well-to-do family – his brother James became Physician Extraordinary to Queen Charlotte, Physician Extraordinary to the Westminster Lying-in hospital, and Consulting Man-Midwife to the Westminster General dispensary.  Sadly there were no children of the marriage and Mary died in May 1754 at Clifton, Bristol[1].  It seems to have been after her death that Gilbert Ford went to Jamaica where he married for a second time to Elizabeth Aikenhead.

Within about a year of Caillard’s death Susanna was living with Gibson Dalzell  with whom she had two further children, Frances and Robert, and on his death in about 1755 she inherited a life interest in his estate worth £6854 1s 3d.  Dalzell made full provision for Frances and Robert who by then were living with him in London.

Robert Dalzell was sent to his father’s college, Christ Church Oxford in 1761. In 1762 aged just twenty he married Miss Jane Dodd, ‘an agreeable young lady of large fortune, and with every other accomplishment necessary to adorn the marriage state.’ [2]  There were three children of his marriage who lived into the nineteenth century and had descendants, owning the manors of Tidworth and Mackney in Berkshire.

Frances Dalzell married the Honourable George Duff, son of the first Earl of Fife, on the 7th of April 1757 and moved into the ranks of the aristocracy.  Tragically her first child was  ‘a lunatic from birth’[3] perhaps severely mentally handicapped, or born with Down’s syndrome.  Her son George and her two daughters died unmarried.

Susanna herself died in February 1757 and was buried on the 12th in Kingston.

 

All of this would be remarkable enough until you take into account the rest of Susanna Augier’s siblings.  In 1747 two Private Acts of the Jamaican Assembly were passed.  The first gave the rights of whites to Jane Augier and her children Edward James, Thomas, Peter and Dorothy.  The second on behalf of Mary Augier gave ‘the same rights and privileges with English Subjects, born of white parents’ to Mary’s children William, Elizabeth, Jane and Eleanor; to her brother and sister Jacob and Elizabeth and to Elizabeth’s son John.  Even this does not tell the whole story.

Of John Augier’s daughters it must be assumed that Jenny and Frances had probably died before 1747 and so were not included in the family’s bid to acquire full white status.  Jenny had a daughter called Sharlott, born in 1729 and dead just under two years later, whose father was the choleric Theophilus Blechynden.

Around the time of his daughter Sharlott’s death he married Florence Fulton the widow of Dean Poyntz who had left his wife an annuity of £200 a year.  Poyntz was in partnership with Mathias Philp and years later Blechynden and his wife sued the estate of Philp’s other partner William Perrin for £10,000 of back payments of her annuity.  The case dragged on for years and was only finally settled by Blechynden’s son when almost all the other parties were dead!

A not untypical example of Jamaican litigation.

Frances Augier had two sons William and John Muir, and a daughter Hannah Spencer born in 1736. Frances probably died in Kingston in February  1738.  Elizabeth whose son John was granted the rights of whites in 1747 had also had a daughter called Elizabeth who died at the age of four, both were the children of Richard Asheton.  Elizabeth was buried in Kingston on the 16th of January 1749/50. Jacob Augier also died in Kingston and was buried on the 18th of September 1751, I have found no record that he had any children.

Mary and Jane Augier both had large families.  Jane had six children with John DeCumming, of whom two died before she could apply for their rights.  It is the children of Mary who have descendants that we know the most about.  Mary had at least seven children with William Tyndall a Kingston merchant, and her daughter Elizabeth (born in 1726) had nine children with the wealthy Kingston merchant John Morse.  Morse also had a daughter called Frances, probably born before he began his relationship with Elizabeth, who was brought up by his sister Sarah Vanheelen in Holland, and who died, unmarried, in London about 1818.  Several of his children died before their father, but his three youngest daughters all married and had descendants.

John Morse had returned to London before his death – he was buried at St Mary Aldermanbury on the 2nd of April 1781. His family may have travelled with him, or may already have been educated in England. Catherine Morse married a young lawyer called Edmund Green at St Mary Aldermanbury in 1777 – the witnesses at the wedding included her uncle by marriage Joseph Royall.

Catherine had eight children, among whom her daughter Frances Ann married William Farington from the Isle of Wight who became an Admiral in the Royal Navy.  Edmund’s training as a lawyer was called into play during a lengthy Chancery suit[4] on behalf of John Morse’s children against the Morse family who were unhappy at the legacies left to his mixed race illegitimate offspring.  In this he may have had help from Robert Cooper Lee who had himself secured his children’s future via a Private Act of the Assembly passed in 1776. Frances Lee, his daughter, left legacies to her friend Catherine Green and her daughter Frances Ann Farington.

As the boom days of Jamaica were coming to an end so the focus of empire switched to India. Catherine’s sisters Ann Frances and Sarah went to India with their brother Robert and both married there in 1780. Ann Frances married Nathaniel Middleton and had ten children born variously in India and England. The Morse/Middleton fortune passed down the generations and  in 1898, at the death of Hastings Nathaniel Middleton, was worth £84,100 15s 7d.

Sarah married William Cator in Calcutta and their daughter Ann Frances became the wife of Colonel Edward Baynes who as Adjutant General to the British forces in North America was sent to negotiate the armistice with the US government in July 1812. After service in North America they settled happily to retirement in Devon, their investments managed by Robert Cooper Lee’s son Richard. Their son William Craig Baynes migrated to Canada taking charge of the extensive estates acquired while his father was serving in Quebec.

Edmund Green eventually won the Chancery case on behalf of his wife and her siblings.

By the early nineteenth century the descendants of the Augier sisters had blended seamlessly into the highest levels of British society, their Jamaican slave roots conveniently air-brushed from history.

————————————-

POSTSCRIPT : 2nd August 2012

I have been looking again at the children of Susanna Augier and I think a confusion has arisen over her children with Peter Caillard. I now think that her children with Peter Caillard were Mary, Peter and Susanna and that there is only one child called Frances – the daughter of Gibson Dalzell.

 

 

 

 

[1] I have a reader of this website to thank for this information. “Last week died at Clifton near Bristol, after a lingering illness, the Lady of Gilbert Ford of the Middle-Temple, Esq.” London Evening Post (London, England), May 7, 1754 – May 9, 1754

[2] ‘Parishes: Tidmarsh’, A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 3 (1923), pp. 433-437. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk

[4] For more detail on the Morse sisters and the Chancery case see Daniel Livesay (2018) Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family 1733-1833. Williamsburg, VA.:Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture and Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

 

Genealogy, General Interest

Jamaican Ancestry by Madeleine E. Mitchell – Book Review

Comment

 

Madeleine Mitchell’s really useful book on researching Jamaican ancestors first came out in 1998 and a revised edition was published in 2008.

In the Preface to the first edition she described herself as a family historian who had been working on her own Jamaican ancestry for more than a decade, that experience now stretches to quarter of a century and more, and some of the useful online links she has discovered over the years can be found on the Rootsweb site that she maintains.

She begins the book with the golden rule of genealogy – to work backwards from what you know to the unknown.  In the Jamaican context she stresses the importance of oral history and of knowing the parish with which your family were or are connected, and to help with this the book includes three maps showing the early parishes, the 19th-century parishes, and the modern boundaries in Jamaica.  There is also a list of critical events in the history of Jamaica.

The topics covered in the book include finding your way among the records for civil registration, church records, monumental inscriptions, maps and land records, records relating to immigration and naturalisation as well as emigration.  There is information about military records; schools, Colleges, and Universities; printed sources of information which may include relevant records such as handbooks, directories, court records and newspapers.  There is also a short but useful section on occupations, and a diagram showing the hierarchy of occupations underneath the owner, and the planting attorney who managed an estate.

Although the various sections act as pointers towards original sources, both online and manuscript or published, there is a huge amount of useful background information as for example in relation to the immigration of Scots to Jamaica covering the Darien disaster in the late 17th century whose remaining colonists fetched up in Jamaica.

Twenty-five years ago most sources for genealogy research were only available in physical form, with the arrival of the internet all that has changed. In addition to references to online sources throughout the main text, a section at the end of the book lists a range of web based resources, and a topic and full name index completes the book.

Madeleine Mitchell was born in Browns Town, Saint Ann, Jamaica and went to school in Browns Town and Kingston, later studying in Canada at McGill University.  She now lives in Florida.  Among her other work on Jamaican genealogy is an index to early Wills of Jamaica.

For anyone interested in researching their own Jamaican ancestry, this is an essential handbook and for anyone with but a passing interest it is full of fascinating background to Jamaica and its colonial past.

Madeleine E Mitchell, Jamaican Ancestry How to Find Out More (revised edition), Heritage Books Inc.,  Westminster, Maryland, USA, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0788442827.

 

 

And as a quick footnote – Can I remind you that the page called ‘Latest Additions’ on the left hand menu will take you to a list of – latest additions to the site!

This week I have added several Wills relating to the families of the Aikenhead sisters, daughters of Archibald Aikenhead of Stirling Castle, Jamaica.