Warning: This file is large. It will be a slow download, but worth it.
[Previous page The Duncan Campbell Letterbooks ] [You are now on a page filed as (http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/blackheath/jamaica.htm] [Next page The William Bligh problem ]

Contact via the convenient (and virus-free): e-mail form

News in July 2006: The history websites on this domain now have a companion website, and an updating website as well, on a new domain, at Merchant Networks Project, produced by Dan Byrnes and Ken Cozens (of London).

This new website (it is hoped) will become a major exercise in economic and maritime history, with much attention to London/British Empire and some attention to Sydney, Australia.

The sprawling story of...
The First Campbells on Jamaica

Look for this Home Page navigation button as you travel. This page updated 29 January 2010

www.danbyrnes.com.au

The story of the first Campbells on Jamaica is tortuous, fretted still by lack of detail, while the certainty exists that they were closely inter-related. Till recently, their descendants have taken too-little notice of them. They compete for attention with "other Campbells on other Caribbean islands". And historians, working with different sorts of history, have strangely missed their connections with a notorious eighteenth century Campbell, the conspicuous Duncan (1726-1803), from 1776 the overseer of the Thames Prison hulks. Duncan's name by now is indelibly written in penal or criminological history in the English-speaking world - because of the transportation of convicts to Australia.

Advertisement

If you value the information posted here, and the projects of these websites in general, you may like to consider making a donation to help reduce our production costs? It would be greatly appreciated. Options include: paying via PayPal which this website uses - Ed

The IGI is little help, as are many websites, still. The IGI notes the name Campbell on Barbados from 1653, chiefly women marrying non-Scottish men, but other information on Barbados before 1680 indicates the Barbados Campbells did not become moneyed or influential. Also rather mysteriously, the IGI (1988 computer version) lists no Campbells on Jamaica before about 1720.
See also, Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969. London, Andre Deutsch, 1970., variously. On slavery on Jamaica: Orlando Patterson, Sociology, earlier cited. The Africa Company charter was recalled in 1821 and the remaining possessions on the West African coast were given to Sierra Leone. On the anti-slavery movement, see Roger Anstey (Ed.), The African Slave Trade and Abolition. Vol. 2. Liverpool, Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1976; James Pope-Hennessy, A Study of the Atlantic Slave Traders, 1441-1807. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963. James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery. London, Harper Collins, 1992.

What of Hon. Colonel John Campbell (died 1740), who owned the sugar plantation, Black River of south-western Jamaica? He is taken to be the "first Campbell on Jamaica", settling there in 1700, and he is taken also to have encouraged his nephews to come out as planters to benefit from his initiatives.
I am grateful here for assistance with genealogical information here to the following people: Rev. Borthwick (Perth, Western Australia), the Campbell genealogist, Dr Lorne Campbell of London, who provided much information here. (See Wodrow, Analecta, Vol. IV, 69.) Miss Marion Campbell of Kilberry, (FSA Soct. (Hon)., Druim a'Bhuinne, Kilberry, by Tarbet Lochfyne, Argyll PA29 6YD, Scotland - Marion Campbell, article, Journal of Clan Campbell, USA, No. 17, 3, nd., pp. 36ff. Colin Campbell of Sefton, Sydney, (then an official with a Clan Campbell society, now deceased); Diarmid Campbell, then editor of a Clan Campbell journal in US, Alastair Campbell, formerly of Inverary Castle, Henry de Mauriac.

Perhaps surprisingly, the story can begin well outside of Scotland, in English commercial and colonisation history. Robert Brenner is an English historian producing a masterly work on English commercial history to the 1650s. Brenner emphasises that the colonising English had a certain Puritan "fire in the belly", plus a fiercely anti-Spanish prejudice that served them well for their often-piratical endeavours. Brenner also emphasises the strategic role (in the geopolitics of the day), of the area about the present site of the Panama Canal, which I'll here call "Darien". Darien, the narrow isthmus linking north and south America that Scots in the 1690s aimed to capture - unsuccessfully.
See Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

But first, the Kent Island project, as discussed by Brenner, an ill-fated English project of about 1631, to settle an island near the coasts of colonial Virginia and Maryland, and engage in a variety of commercial activity, including the gathering of furs from the Canadian north. One of the notables associated with backing this project was a too-little-known English commercial promoter, Maurice Thomson (born 1604), governor of the East India Company in 1658, who often acted as a general manager for Robert Rich, the second Earl of Warwick (1587-1658), a Puritan-minded aristocrat who was fiercely anti-Spanish, and who is also under-rated as a promoter of expansionist English business life.

A lesser name associated with the Kent Island project was William Claiborne (1587-1677), a name however destined to loom larger in colonial Virginia.

About 28 May 1631, William Claiborne "took command" of his Kent Island venture and sailed from England on the ship Africa (hired from William Tucker, who had married a sister of Maurice Thomson) with servants and supplies. Brenner has it that in 1631, Maurice Thomson and one William Cloberry were associated with with Kent Island Project (but all the interconnections, which do not involve Scots, are too complicated to delve into here).
Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, 1993., variously for all concerned here.

Advertisement

Colonel Leonard Claiborne (died 1693/1694) of the Virginian Claibornes married Martha (otherwise unknown) and produced two daughters; Elizabeth, who remains untraced, and Catherine (1681-1715), who in 1700 married Colonel John Campbell (died 1740) of Black River on Jamaica. Although how the two might have met is so far impossible to know.
This Catherine Claiborne was descended from Thomas Claiborne (died c.1598/1600) of King's Lynn, husband of Grace Bellingham; father of London hosier Thomas Claiborne and his brother, a colonist of Kent Island, William Claiborne (b.1587;d.1677), whose first wife was Jane Butler. This Jane Butler was mother of William Claiborne (husband of Elizabeth Wilkes); this William being the brother of Colonel Leonard Claiborne (c.1681;d.1694) and his spouse Martha Notknown, the mother of Elizabeth (untraced) and Catherine Claiborne (b.1681;d.1715), spouse of Colonel John Campbell (b.1673;d.29 Jan 1740), of Auchenbrok, Scotland, and plantation Black River of Jamaica. I am indebted to Virginian genealogist John Dorman for information here on the Claiborne family. (John Frederick Dorman, CG, FASG, 175 Hulls Chapel Road, Fredericksburg, Virginia. 22406-5218. USA.) Mr. Dorman informs that Leonard Claiborne, son of Colonel William Claiborne of Virginia, settled in Jamaica where he was a colonel in the militia of St Elizabeth's, and was killed in a repulse of the French in 1694 at Carlisle Bay. By his wife Martha he is supposed to have had two daughters, Katherine and Elizabeth. Elizabeth remains unknown. Catherine married Capt John Campbell of Inverary, Agyleshire, who went to Darien and on his return to Jamaica was one of the custos of St. Elizabeth's. He died 29 January 1740/01, and Katherine died in 1715 aged 34. The published sources available to Dorman did not indicate if Katherine Claiborne/Campbell had children.

According to Marion Campbell of Kilberry, a noted Scottish genealogist, who is a descendant of Colin, the brother of Colonel John Campbell (died 1740), Colonel John became a senior member of the military establishment of the ill-fated Scots Darien Company of the 1790s. Colonel John had probably been lucky to survive the diseases which killed so many of the Scots of the three major Darien Company expeditions.
See W. A. Feurtado, Official and Other Personages of Jamaica from 1655 to 1790. Kingston, Jamaica, 1896., giving Col. James Campbell, died Orange Bay Estate, 1744, aged 47 years. One James Campbell, Member of Assembly, Westmoreland for 1706, 1718, was noted at St Elizabeth, 1721. See H. Campbell, Notes and Queries, CLVIII, 1930. pp. 462-463. Dr. Lorne Campbell thought John of Black River died 26 January, 1740. Rev. Borthwick reports, the Will of Colonel John was dated 29 August, 1739. In his Will, Colonel John referred to Principal Neil Campbell as his nephew, and Neil's sister, Jean, as his niece. Dr Lorne Campbell has noted that Colonel John [1673-1740] mentioned in his will, his niece Jean, sister of his nephew, Neil, principal of the College of Glasgow.

The genealogy of Colonel John Campbell (died 1740) seems acceptable, but the story of his nephew Neil is not yet complete. Information on the career of Neil's son, Duncan (died 1803), gives a decided sprawl to the family history overall.

The best evidence seems to be a headstone on Jamaica regarding: Col. John Campbell, Member of Assembly Westmoreland 1711, MC 1722, died 1740 aged 66 years. Interred in St Elizabeth... the inscription reading,
"Here lies the Hon. John Campbell, born at Inverary, Argyllshire, North Britain, and descended of the Ancient family of Auchenbrock, when a youth he served several campaigns in Flanders. He went as Captain of the Troops sent to Darien and on his return to this Island, in 1700, he married the daughter of Col. Claiborne by whom he had several children (three, it appears). In 1718 John Black River married Elizabeth (now alive) relict of Col. ?Garnes. He was for many years Member of the Assembly, Colonel and Custos of St Elizabeth. In 1722 he was made one of the Privy Council. He was the first Campbell who settled in this Island, and thro' his extream generosity and assistance, many are now possessed of opulent fortunes. His temperance and great humanity have always been very remarkable. He died January 29, 1740. Aged 66 years. Universally lamented."
W. A. Feurtado, Official and Other Personages of Jamaica from 1655 to 1790. Kingston, Jamaica, 1896.

The Scottish Darien Company:

As descendant Marion Campbell of Kilberry has put it, Colonel John "served in the Scots force intended to protect the Darien Settlement."
See John Prebble, The Darien Disaster. London, Secker and Warburg, 1988. Heraldry of the Campbells, pp. 20ff; Vicary Gibbs, (Ed., real name, Cockayne), The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. [Extinct, extant or dormant]. London, St. Catherine's Press, 1910., for Argyll, pp. 209ff; Moray, p. 189; Home, p. 558; Lothian, pp. 146ff. Also, George Pratt, (Ed.), Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1696-1707. Edinburgh, Scottish Historical Society, 1924.

As a commercial project, the Scottish Darien Company was preceded by the first Scottish Guinea Company, consisting of four courtiers of Charles 1, including Patrick Maule, first Earl Panmure; and Henry, (the son of William Alexander, first Earl Stirling), secretary of state for Scotland interested in colonising Nova Scotia. It was almost inevitable that this Guinea Company at times dealt with merchants connected with Maurice Thompson, such as William Cloberry and Samuel Vassall, plus Thomas Crispe, the "founder" of the English stronghold on the African coast, Kormantin. (This was Samuel Vassal (1586-1667), said by some to be the owner of the famed pilgrim ship to America, Mayflower, Capt. Peter Andrews, where Andrews had married Samuel's sister, Rachel, as indicated in Brenner, Merchants and Revolution.)
On William Alexander (1576-1639/40), first Earl Stirling. See Robin Law, 'The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634-1639', The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. LXXVI, No. 202, Oct 1997, pp. 185-202. The third Earl Stirling with three others from 1634 had a right for 31 years to export Scottish goods to Africa, a monopoly. that is, to 1667. He was given a Lordship of Canada and all territory of Nova Scotia. (He died insolvent.) Gibbs, The Complete Peerage, Mount-Alexander, p. 305; Stirling, pp. 277ff. One of the Earls Stirling also had an interest in the Kent Island Project.

In brief, the 1790s Darien Company expeditions and initiatives of the Scots were imitative of earlier English colonising endeavours, but they lacked both the maritime expertise and the Puritan "fire in the belly" the English had benefited by. Some historians go so far as to suggest that the human and financial costs of the failed Darien Company propelled Scotland to its 1707 Union with Britain.
Robin Law, `The First Scottish Guinea Company, 1634-1639', The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. LXXVI, No. 202, October 1997., pp. 185-202.

Little help is offered by the chaotic state of the records of the Scots Darien Company. A long search remains - there is no easy way to explain how or why John Campbell of Black River became the first Campbell settling on Jamaica. How, for example, did he find the capital to become a planter, since he would have needed capital to buy his slave workforce?

Advertisement

Earlier, how did Colonel John Black River become engaged by the Darien Company? We know, that Archibald Campbell (died 28 September, 1703, the tenth Earl of Argyll, also the first Duke of Argyll), before 1700 was a heavy investor in the Darien Company. He subscribed £1500, his brother James invested £700. Some 22 gentlemen and merchants of allegiance to this Earl of Argyll contributed a total of £9400. There is little other useful information available.
Prebble, Darien, pp. 59ff. More Campbell-Argyll supporters of the Darien scheme are listed, p. 101. John Campbell, the second Duke of Argyll, (Born 10 October, 1678 at Petersham Surrey England, died 4 October, 1743 at Petersham), commander of British forces in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, suppressing it with very little bloodshed. The second duke was a Scottish general, he entered the army at 16 and in 1703 became colonel of the Scottish House Guards. An ardent supporter of the Union of England and Scotland he was in 1705 created Earl of Greenwich. He fought in Spain prior to 1711, rising to commander-in-chief. Back in Scotland he actively supported the accession of Geo I. Following his suppression of the Jacobites in 1715, he was made Duke of Greenwich in 1719. He was "ambitious, but tactless and too forthright, and his later career was uneven."

***************

The twisted tale of the Scottish Darien Company:

As noted, Colonel John Campbell "put out a call to kin" to come settle on Jamaica. The reasons he did this are tangled in the chaotic history of the Scottish Darien Company. The Darien Company had wished to settle a Scots colony named Caledonia in an area close to the present Panama Canal - an area I shall refer to only as "Darien". Before 1700, the Darien Company had very little practical chance of succeeding, but strategic logic was at work. If British interests had been able to control the "Darien" area strategically, a base could have been created which overlooked the Caribbean, by sea and on nearby land, and out into the Pacific. (If ever sailing into the Pacific, British ships might one day have blown south of the Philippines, they might have bumped into eastern Australia, or New Zealand, decades before the time Capt James Cook?) It also remains ironic that a long-distance strategic problem such as the failure of "Darien" should have helped stimulate, as many say, the Union in 1707 of the crowns of Scotland and England.

We find that Colonel John of Black River was a soldier-uncle, in the normal sense of the word uncle, of one Principal Neil Campbell of the College of Glasgow. It is evident that other Campbells related to both Colonel John and Principal Neil settled on Jamaica. The heeding Colonel John's advice to try Jamaica included: Colonel James Campbell (1693-1744) of Orange Bay, who married Henrietta Campbell of Knockbuy; one John II Campbell (died 1808) of Orange Bay who married Grisel Campbell of Knockbuy. Also Colin Campbell, planter of New Hope who married Mary Tomlin (died 1760). Also Peter Campbell of Fish River. And notably, Dugald Campbell of Saltspring in Hanover Parish.

This Dugald was son of Colin Campbell and Bessie Campbell (sister of Colonel John of Black River. Bessie and Colin had seven children including Dugald of Saltspring. Dugald, who died 27 June, 1744, had one son John (of Saltspring, who died 2 November, 1782 in his 53rd year) and eight or nine daughters, including Rebecca.
Parish Register, Hanover, Jamaica.

This Rebecca Campbell at Saltspring on 11 March, 1753 married one Duncan Campbell of London, a son of Colonel's John's nephew, Principal Neil of the College of Glasgow.

We have then to deal with stories on the disastrous adventures of the Darien Company, and sugar planting and slavery on Jamaica. The first Campbells on Jamaica settled mostly in western, and especially south-western Jamaica. Locations they came to know well were Black River, Lucea, Green Island. Encyclopedia Britannica indicates that on western Jamaica are rolling limestone hills and plateaus, to the south are flat alluvial plains. The Black River is 44 miles long, and the longest, most important river, navigable by boat for 25 miles from its mouth. Winter is December to March, with cold winds. There is rain in October and May. Lucea is on the north-west tip of the island, Savanna-La-Mar at the north, and Bluefields Bay is on the south-west extremity. Green Island is west of Lucea at the extreme north-west of the island. Colonel John may well have anticipated some usefulness for the area about Black River as a rendezvous point for shipping, which would provide some regular ship-refreshment business for him in the future - the area became s standard rendezvous point for British ships about Jamaica. But to think that, he would probably have also had to have given up all hope that anything would come of the Scottish Darien Company.
George Pratt, (Ed.), Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1696-1707. Edinburgh, Scottish History Society, 1924; John Prebble, The Darien Disaster. London, Secker and Warburg, 1988. Spate also treats the Darien Company in his trilogy, Oskar H. K. Spate, The Pacific Since Magellan. Canberra, Australian National University Press, 1979.

In England, ideas had arisen in Whig circles to form the New or English East India Company, which was granted its charter in September 1698 (about the time the Darien Company scheme was being developed). Many ideas were getting about. One of the planners behind the Scottish Darien Company was William Paterson (1658-1719). Paterson's main claim to fame is impressive enough - he helped found the Bank of England. Paterson had spent years earlier in the West Indies. It was during this "silent period" of his life there, he may have met William Dampier, buccaneer and illegal wood cutter in Spanish territory on the Caribbean, Prebble suggests.
See H. R. Fox Bourne, English Merchants: Memoirs, p. 253. John Prebble, The Darien Disaster. London, Secker and Warburg, 1988., pp. 11-15. George Pratt, (Ed.), Papers Relating to the Ships and Voyages of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1696-1707. Edinburgh, Scottish Historical Soc., 1924., p. b, pp. 48-50ff..

"Darien" lay on the Atlantic Coast, 150 miles nearer to South America than the point where the Panama Canal now joins the oceans, present-day Puerto Bello. One of the world's treasure highways ran nearby. The Spanish had for generations carried Peruvian silver across the mountains to Puerto Bello. Everyone knew about buccaneers. Paterson et al ought to have known that those days were over - for England then was conducting delicate negotiations with Spain.

Paterson had first developed ideas of "a Darien scheme" in 1684, apparently influenced by the freebooting exploits of Drake and later pirates. Paterson took his ideas to James II, promoting a port being opened for operations against Spain from Darien, to secure an emporium (staffed by Scotsmen?) for England in the West Indies and the west of North and South America, to forge a means of enabling trade to distant India and Asia. (The Carolina colony was originally to be a refuge for Scots but became a haven for disgruntled Barbadians).

The proposed Darien colony was to be near the Spanish possessions of Cartagena and Porto Bello, that is, near the major slave markets. When he found James II too troubled to listen to his ideas, Paterson went abroad, in 1688 to Amsterdam, then to Hamburg. He had a brief interlude with the New River Company, which attempted to get fresh water into London. Then he became a speaker on the collection and arrangement of public loans.

William Paterson first became of note in 1693 when he appeared before a committee of the House of Commons on behalf of a mercantile group promoting a scheme for credit being made available on Parliamentary Security. The Bank of England was formed from 27 July, 1694 on that basis. A restless-minded entrepreneur, Paterson resigned from the Bank in 1695, to become entangled for a time with the City of London orphan's fund. Soon the Darien scheme resurfaced in his mind. Somehow he obtained a manuscript copy of surgeon Lionel Wafer's journal of travels on the Isthmus of Darien. This was Wafer, the compatriot of William Dampier.
On Dampier's advice to the Darien Co., see Pratt, Darien, p. 50. John Prebble treats William Dampier's advice on freebooting against the Spanish in the Caribbean in his Darien, p. 106.

William Dampier early in his career was employed on a Jamaican plantation. He disliked the situation, and so went buccaneering in the Caribbean. Out of this experience he was able in the mid-1690s to advise London agents of the new Scots Darien Company on conditions in "the Caribbean".
See Clennel Wilkinson, William Dampier. London, John Lane, 1929., pp. 68, 85-87, mentioning Lionel Wafer p. 89. The Darien Indians hated the Spanish, but warmed to the British due to kindness.

Dampier's associate, Lionel Wafer, once went to Scotland to talk further with agents of the Darien Company. (Some writers think that during the "silent period in his career", Paterson may have met Dampier in the Caribbean.)

There was an atmosphere... The melodrama of Scots history between the time of the whigamore raids from the Lowlands to the Highlands, the turbulence of the careers of the earls of Argyll, the 1692 massacre at Glencoe, the disasters of the Darien Company to 1701, to the Union of 1707, the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, nostalgia about the Stuart kings. Such matters have made Scots historians introspective. They have therefore failed to consider certain extroversions in the history, by way of Scots involvement in British ventures in colonisation. The Darien Company in this sense was failed extroversion. Scots Enterprise after 1707 did become increasingly extroverted in the sense it engaged with British colonialism, in Jamaica, in the North American colonies.
John Prebble, Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre. London, Penguin Books, 1968.

Pratt writing on the Darien Company (p. 138) mentions a ledger on the supply of Darien ship(s). The 1699 ledger mentions perhaps only one merchant of Glasgow named Campbell, but mentions goods per John Sumervil and John Munro, Glasgow merchants Thomas Calder. Many merchants are mentioned, but, strangely, almost no Campbells.

At Whitehall on 30 June, 1697 was held a meeting of HM Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, regarding a "Scotch East India Company". It was ordered that Mr [William] Dampier "who hath lately printed a book of his voyages" attend regarding queries on the Isthmus of Darien. Dampier and Wafer attended again on 2 July, 1697, answering queries about the Spaniards at Panama, east to the River of Chipelo, and an island named Chipelo. Wafer in London saw Dampier, and they both met in a London coffee house with agents of the Darien directors. Then Wafer went to Scotland to be interviewed by directors there.

Paterson, who must have been a persuasive man, enlisted support for the Darien project from, among others, Sir Robert Christie the Lord Provost of Edinburgh and Lord Belhaven. The vast enterprises envisaged were as earlier described to the king in London. On 26 June, 1695 in the Scots Parliament, an Act for a Company trading to Africa and the Indies was made. London directors discussed fitting out a Scottish ship for East Indies trade, but the East India Company in London fought this plan so fiercely that the Darien Company retreated to Edinburgh.

From 26 June, 1695, William Paterson became associated with a permission from the Scottish Parliament for the Darien Company, an Act for a Company trading to Africa and Indies, constituting the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. The Darien Company gained a capital at £600,000 sterling, half subscribed in London, half in Scotland. After conflict with London's City interests over plans for East Indies trade, the Darien Company retreated to Edinburgh. At the time, the stock of the East India Company was dropping, and as was natural, the East India Company had wanted to protect its monopoly. Difficulties for the Darien scheme set in for a variety of reasons; but the English subscribers dropped the entire plan. In retrospect, they were extremely wise.

The first Darien Company had 20 directors, with some ten in London, seven of them Scots. There was a "great need for privacy", and secrecy, due to fear of views held by the East India Company on its charter. Scottish interests tried vainly to prop up the company, promising £400,00 and raising £200,000 from over 1300 people. Some Glasgow merchants involved were Walter and Patrick Buchanan, presumably from the broad family of merchants Buchanan later to be so influential in the British-American tobacco trade.

By 1695 some Darien connections included Honble (Lt. Col.) John Erskin, son of Lord Cardross the Governor of Stirling Castle; John Haldan, Baron of Gleneagles; Messrs William Paterson and James Smyth, directors. Arrangements were made also with Scots at Hamburg (Sir Paul Ricaut) and Rhode Island. Trumbull was an early company secretary. Prebble lists other Darien principals including: Capt Robert Alliston, a buccaneer and a friend of William Paterson, who had spent some time in the Caribbean in the "mystery phase" of Paterson's career; the 10th Earl of Argyll, and Colonel Alexander Campbell of Fonabb. Campbell Fonabb (sic) was one of the Darien link men proposing a colony to be named Caledonia "on the American continent", that is, on the Isthmus of Darien.
Pratt, Darien, p. 1, p. 57, p. 188, p. 226. In Amsterdam, one Darien contact was Martin Gregory; his brother was Jonas Gregory. Pratt mentions Dr Hill Bunton's Darien Papers; a Dr John Munro was contacted; also contacted was William Dunlop, who was, in turn, an: "eminent scholar, accomplished antiquary, shrewd merchant, brave soldier, able politician, zealous divine and an amiable man". In 1698, other investors were Lord Ruthven, one John Campbell of Woodsyde, one Dinwidie, and a new director was John the Marquess of Tweeddale. See Pratt, Darien, pp. 62-64, p. 89, pp. 113ff, p. 166. Spate, Vol. 2, p. 173.

In 1696, some London merchant agents for the Darien Co were appointed, Messrs James Smith and James Campbell of London, also directors of the Co. Plus Alexander Stevenson in Edinburgh and James Gibson in Glasgow. (It is not known precisely when Campbells first began locating in London - nor is it known if they moved to London due to the influence of the Earl of Argyll - names arose only incidentally, hence no patterns can be drawn).

By 1697 the Darien promoters had £400,000 subscribed, and they intended to build ships at Edinburgh and Leith, and to occupy company offices at Milne Square, Edinburgh. By 30 June, 1697 the secretary of the Darien Co. was Roderick Mackenzie. Soon, Paterson went off to get stores at Hamburg and Amsterdam, having left money with the London merchant, James Smith.

Unfortunately, some £8000 went missing, probably due to Smith. Paterson took the blame on himself and obtained references from an Edinburgh merchant, Robert Blackwood, and William Dunlop, the Principal of Glasgow College (and therefore a predecessor there of Principal Neil Campbell). Dunlop by early 1698 was asked to recommend a minister to go out to "Darien". Or, Caledonia.

Paterson was deposed as a Darien manager by July 1698 and then the real Darien madness took firm control. The original documents of the Darien Company literally ooze news that the scheme's promoters had no idea what they were doing. Paterson tried to correct bad management, but failed. There followed three disastrous Darien expeditions.

It was proposed the Darien colony be settled with 2500 people, and a better stock of provisions was made than was provided for Botany Bay in 1788. Some 1200 people sailed for Darien on 14 July, 1698, in ships including St Andrew (which landed? in Jamaica?). Later, Caledonia and Unicorn reached New York with Thomas Drummond, losing 275 men on the way. The leadership had been uncommonly callous.

The first Darien expedition sailed in July 1698, five ships with some 1200 men and provisions, to land on "a watery morass". The Darien men reckoned they had found a harbour "capable of containing 10,000 sail of Shipps". (There is an echo here, for in January 1788 when he had sailed into Sydney Harbour, Governor Phillip made a similar remark about the sight before him. It is precisely the sort of thing a naval man says when he finds an excellent harbour!)

But within six months about two-thirds of the expedition were dead. The ships included Caledonia Capt Robert Drummond, who was a brother of Thomas Drummond of the Glencoe massacre. Other ships were Unicorn and St Andrew.

As part of the debacle, the Darien ships Speedy Return and Content got to Madagascar, at a time when New York was a haven for pirates and their plunder. (The pirate Capt Kidd is mentioned in that context). The idea of making a settlement was abandoned. Paterson was so devastated by the disaster of the first expedition he sank into a kind of second childhood, or early dotage, but recovered.
H. R. Fox Bourne, English Merchants: Memoirs, p. 271. Pratt, Darien, p. 77, p. 97, p. 107, p. 138, p. 271. Spate, Vol. 2, p. 178.

Meanwhile, one Mr Alexander Hamilton was a link man for Darien Company interests in the American colonies. And about this time is mentioned a voyage of Capt Richard Long, at the time Sir William Beeston was Lt-Gov of Jamaica, in December 1698 - while the Long family were well-known as Jamaican planters.

Sailing with one of the Darien expeditions had been Dr James Wallace, who later gave an almost-official record to The Royal Society, of Capt Pennycook's voyage. (The Royal Society printed the record in 1700-1701 as part of its transactions.) Spate suggests, the Spanish reaction to Caledonia on Darien was "almost hysterical", also that the final monument of Darien became "part of the 1707 Union" of Scotland and England.

As the ships of the second Darien expedition were outfitted, a ledger was kept at Glasgow by Peter Murdoch. The ledger mentions perhaps only one merchant of Glasgow named Campbell. Otherwise it mentions goods obtained in 1699 from John Sumervil, and John Munro, Glasgow merchants including Thomas Calder. By 20 October, 1699, costs had been incurred by William Arbuckle merchant of Glasgow, who outlaid for Speedy Return Capt John Baillie, for Caledonia on Darien. Arbuckle had laid out goods worth £1415/14/9 and one-third pennies by 23 December, 1699. (The name Sumervil may indicate Duncan Campbell's later relatives, Somervilles, when his nephews Somerville were sailing for him?
Pratt, Darien, p. 55, p. 182, p. 193.

For the second Darien expedition, two ships including Rising Sun Capt James Gibson, and 300 people arrived at a deserted place. One Mr Cragg was interested in making salt. One James Cragg was "a cunning lackey" of 1685, finding considerable money.
He was later an agent of the party which helped ruin James and held office in William III's cabinet. Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, Vol. 6, p. 188.

Other connections included Mr Paterson, Mrs Woodrop and Mr Robert Blackwood. Another Darien ship was named Dolphin, but it is not possible using information on ship movements to backtrack usefully on other matters. Amid still-confusing tales, Don Juan Pimienta, the Governor of Cartegena, attacked and won the second Darien colony by land and sea. One date suggests that Rising Sun had been sent by February 1700. And here, the Scots Caledonia on Darien was saved by the arrival of Campbell of Fonabb, who went straight to a fight with the Spanish. Rising Sun and her consort later sailed to Charleston in South Carolina, to be overwhelmed there by a hurricane. Of 1300 people, 950 died.

At a time which remains difficult to specify, other Darien Company ships, Speedy Return and Caledonian were sent out. Capt Robert Drummond was later commander of Speedy Return on an African voyage for the Darien Company, and he sailed with his brother Thomas. These ships came to grief. Later, Capt Thomas Green of a ship, Worcester, was charged in Scotland with piracy against the Darien Company's ship, Speedy Return, and the murder of the Drummonds. Green was hanged on Leith Sands amid controversy and accusations of "a squalid judicial murder". Pratt in this midst of reporting these insanities has also claimed that the tensions all assisted the union in 1707 of the crowns of Scotland and England!
Prebble, Darien Disaster, p. 323, and pp. 1-3ff, on the hanging of Capt Green of the Worcester. Spate has also been mystified by the Darien Company and at one point mentions a "mysterious affair" and speaks of the Speedy Return, Annandale and Worcester as "too complex to be treated here", citing G. P. Insh, The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. London, 1932.; and F. R. Hart, The Disaster of Darien. London?, 1929.; T. B. Macaulay, History of England. London, 1872; and R. C. Temple, New light on the Mysterious Tragedy of the Worcester. London, 1930.

Worcester was managed by one Capt Bowery (died 1713). About 1698, ex-East India Company, Thomas Bowrey came ashore with a few thousand pounds which he invested in a china shop and a small group of ships he managed. About 1700 he put his ships in the temporarily free East India trade, such as Rising Sun (probably the ship of the second Darien expedition), Mary Galley, Macclesfield, Trumball Galley, Horsham, Prosperous, and Rochester. Bowery is one of the few shipowners identifiable as chartering to the Darien Company.

Bad news it is said comes in threes. The third Darien expedition also had to evacuate. Not one ship returned to Scotland. However, yet another ship, Africa Merchant, returned from the west African Coast with a profit of £3800 sterling. The total loss was horrendous - little return against the original paid-up capital, hundreds of lives, and deep humiliation. The Scots were enraged, though they had tricked themselves.

There also later sailed into never-never-land the Darien ships Speedwell, owned by Robert Blackwood Jnr a merchant of Edinburgh, Capt John Campbell and supercargo Robert Innes, to Macao. Speedwell left Batavia in July 1701 for Macao. (The chief mate was once put ashore for insubordination - before she was wrecked... an incident reminiscent of the case of Alexander Selkirk, William Dampier, Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe. Defoe may well have melded all these stories?.)

In Scotland arose a plan to send yet another ship, the Annandale, which was seized by English revenue men. Another Company ship was Content, Capt Stewart to India. Speedy Return also once went across the Indian Ocean, her crew destined for grievous adventures. Content and Speedy Return went to the bottom of the Indian Ocean - it is all a very confused story. About then, the Darien Company was trying for Surat; and a link man for American dealings was Martin Gregory in Amsterdam.
Pratt, Darien, p. xxiii, p. 221.

And finally by 1700, William Paterson's reputation recovered; disasters seemed to have vindicated his earlier judgements. By 1701 he was proposing a kind of Scottish Council of Trade.

It must have been that Paterson greatly raised the enterprise-aspirations of Scotland considerably, for it is said that the disaster of the Darien Company had useful impact on talk of uniting the Scottish and English crowns. Paterson was to express many ideas when in Edinburgh as a Commissioner of the English government, by 1706. The last Scottish Parliament of all commended Paterson to the English monarch. Paterson died in 1720, in January, just as the fiasco of the South Sea Bubble was giving his Bank of England a severe baptism of fire. (Daniel Defoe, legendarily a one-time spy for England in Scotland, thought Paterson "a worthy patriot" of his country).

As Watson notes, the Union of 1707 delivered Scotland from poverty. Investment in the Darien Company had been a disaster - later some £2.4 million was given to Scotland for debt repayments and other purposes relating to money lost by the Darien Company.
Watson, The Scot of the C18th, pp. 5-10.

As well, the "Union [was] no doubt carried by corruption [of] Scots peers - "not the first time... in the pay of England, the commissioners signing the Treaty risked being mobbed, they repaired to the garden of Moray's House, to sign, 'in most unworthy circumstances' from the Kirk's point of view." Watson says, the Union of 1707 was detested at the time, both in England and Scotland, but this later forgotten and the risings of 1715 and 1745 were due more to highland restlessness than devotion to the Stuart cause. Jacobitism was merely "one symptom of the dying of feudalism". The Darien Company was dissolved by the terms of the Union of 1707. Scots from then would express themselves economically, in the military, and provide great energy for England's colonial expansions.

Given the chaos of the records on the 1697-1700 Darien expeditions, it is difficult to distinguish shipping movements between "Darien" and Jamaica or other West Indian Islands. If between 1697-1700, John Campbell, Black River, aged about 27, was captain to some Darien military squad, he may have been flitting back and forth between "Darien" and Jamaica on ships - possibly also developing a relationship with the woman he married on Jamaica? It is unknown if his wife's father was already a Jamaica settler, or not, or, if the father of this wife was a Darienite who also later went to Jamaica?

It is not known if, say, by 1696, Colonel John of Black River had already been stationed militarily on Jamaica in the ordinary course of events, and that he then became involved with "Darien". But with all the chaos and death of the Darien expeditions, he was lucky enough to get out alive and settle on Jamaica as he did.

With all the above, perhaps the most useful clues are:
(a) John Campbell of Black River, born in 1673, was the first Campbell on Jamaica, therefore highly conspicuous;
(b) As a military man he had been with the Darien Company and he married into a military circle on Jamaica about 1700;
(c) He became a plantation man, in which case he needed a supply of slaves. Therefore he had to link to existing firms selling slaves, which would probably mean he remained in debt to such a firm(s);
(d) Where did this military son of an obscure Campbell find the patrons, credit or capital to buy and fit out a plantation?

Colonel John Campbell also had a sister of the full blood, Bessie, who on 3 January, 1689 married Colin Campbell of Atichuan, her father's cousin. They were also cousins to Patrick Campbell of Kilduskland (who may have been the guardian of Principal Neil Campbell?). Bessie and Colin at Atichuan had seven children including Dugald of Saltspring, Hanover Parish.

In Scotland, meantime, on 17 June, 1706, Neil Campbell was appointed to a Synod of his Church. Later he was at Roseneath. By 25 September, 1713 Neil had received a charter of confirmation of his tenure of the lands of Auchindrain and Clenary, a charter granted by John, Duke of Argyll on 22 February, 1710. Neil is referred to as Minister of Roseneath. Neil had been licensed by 21 June 1701 by the Presbytery of Argyll; ordained to Kilmallie in the Presbytery of Abertarff on 9 September 1702; called to Rosneath in the Presbytery of Dunbarton on 13 June 1709 and translated and admitted thereto on 15 July 1709; presented by King George I to Renfrew in Presbytery of Paisley, 15 November 1715; called thereto 26 April 1716; translated from Rosneath and admitted 18 July 1716, demitted an appointment as Principal of Glasgow University on 17 January 1728; held office as Principal until his death.

Neil married (possibly on 7 June, 1705?), Henrietta, the second daughter of Patrick Campbell of Kilduskland; Henrietta died December 1764. (Neil died 1761).

***************

The Claibornes of Virginia:

Now, if Colonel John had been part of the military establishment of the ill-fated Scottish Darien Company, how did he meet Catherine? Black River, Jamaica, was a rendezvous for Darien ships to and from Scotland, and later it became a generally-used rendezvous for British naval shipping about Jamaica. (I suspect Colonel John was on the first Darien expedition - but have no proof for this.) John settled there about 1700, then married Catherine. He may well have met her on one or two Darien Company voyages to Virginia for stores?
The promoters of the Scottish Darien Company may have been aware, for example, that Maurice Thomson in 1638 had become interested in a proposed silver mine project in "the Bay of Darien". . See Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, p. 82, p. 188.

Family lore is that Colonel John refused to return to Britain, or Scotland, "after the English and Dutch East India companies had destroyed the Darien Scheme". He anyway refused to live in a country planning Union with England; he remained outraged.

His headstone informs that he had two wives. He was denoted "The Hon" as he was one of the privy council of Jamaica in 1722; and he remained as colonel of a Jamaica Regiment. He was also custos of the parish of St. Elizabeth, Jamaica. He had four children.
See J. Shakespear, John Shakespear of Shadwell and his descendants 1619-1931. Self published. Newcastle. 1931., p. 83, citing Leslie's New History of Jamaica, 1740. Colonel John is called both wealthy and "brave old" in Shakespear, p. 65 and see pp. 25-31, p. 82, p. 93. On Colonel John's headstone, see W. A. Feurtado, Official and Other Personages on Jamaica from 1655 to 1790. Kingston, Jamaica, 1896.

Of Colonel John's own children, we know he had a son William (no other information), a son, Hon. Colin who married Margaret Foster and had a son John, who was later owner of the property, Hodges. This Colin is presumably the Colin Campbell who on 22 August, 1757, from Westmoreland, Jamaica, wrote to his cousin James Campbell of Kaims, re "Cousin John of Black River left Jamaica on 18 April 1756 for N. America... owing to a bad state of health"... and Colin had been left in charge of his affairs. Meantime, nothing could be done with an unnamed ship and Collin's share in it. But evidently, "Cousin Duncan proposes to sell her [the ship] on getting home". Colin also mentioned "Cousin Saltspring" and "Distiller Dugald proposes a trip home. He's now worth very nigh £1,000 Stg. . . . " Colonel John also had a daughter Ann (1700-1783) who married West Indies merchant David Currie (d. 1771) of London.
Here, "Cousin Saltspring" was presumably Dugald (the father of "Cousin Duncan's" wife, Rebecca), the owner of Saltspring plantation. EFB 149. (Or, E. F. Bradford, "MacTavish of Dunardry". Privately published, 1991. ISBN 0 9517125 0 0.) Bradford is a title which includes a number of letters of which the extracts refer to relevant points here regarding Jamaica. Collin's property Hodges later went over to David Shakespear. Hodges was also at one time owned by John Pennant Esq. See John Shakespear of Shadwell and his descendants 1619-1931, p. 83, p. 93, citing John Roby, History of the Parish of St James in Jamaica, published in Jamaica, Part 3, nd, p. 137. Ann the daughter of Colonel John of Black River married (26 December 1720 at Glasgow) London merchant David Currie, producing children John Curie, London merchant Colin Currie and Elizabeth (1726-1807) who married John Shakespear (1718-1775) rope-maker and alderman of London. See J. Shakespear, John Shakespear of Shadwell and his descendants 1619-1931. Newcastle. 1931. Beaven, p. 133 notes Shakespear as a London alderman, Aldgate, died 18 May, 1775.

Colonel John after settling on Jamaica enticed several of his nephews to come to Jamaica as sugar planters. These Campbells - Argyllshire Scots - made their way successfully for the most part into the snakepit of English infights for dominance in the Caribbean - and survived as planters. But when mentioning the unnamed ship above, and "Cousin Duncan", Colin son of Colonel John was referring to Duncan (1726-1803, son of Neil, Principal of the College of Glasgow), lately based in London, who in the history of eighteenth century convict transportation from Britain became the most notable name, notorious; but whose biography had been strangely splintered, as we shall see.

Remaining in Argyllshire, another nephew of Colonel John, although only five years younger than the Colonel, was Neil Campbell (Colonel John being Neil's uncle on Neil's paternal side). Neil (1678-22-June 1761) became a Doctor of Divinity and principal of the College of Glasgow.
Aspects of Neil Campbell's career here are discussed in Rev H. M. B. Reid, The Divinity Professors of the University of Glasgow. Glasgow, Maclehose and Sons, 1923.

But is Colonel John in fact "the first Campbell on Jamaica", and therefore, conspicuous. He had a brother Colin (died 1715) of Knockbuy who married Margaret Graham. Colin and Margaret had five children, of whom two, Colin and Charles, died unmarried on Jamaica or in the West Indies; plus Henrietta who married James Campbell of Orange Bay plantation, Jamaica. Colonel John also had a brother Dugald (of Torblaren, Kilmorey) who married Margaret Maxwell, who also had children going out to Jamaica, Peter or Patrick (died 1739) of Fish River, who married Deborah Lewis; a brother Duncan, a Glasgow merchant, and a sister Bessie who on 3 January 1689 married Colin Campbell of Attichuan; a sister Elizabeth who in 1681 married a sheriff, Colin Campbell (died 1721); and a mysterious sister, notnamed, who became the mother (by a man difficult to identify) of Neil (1678-1761). This Neil became the father of Duncan (1726-1803) referred to above in 1757, about to dispose of a ship, as a (first) cousin of the son Colin of Colonel John of Black River.
Some children of the above siblings of Colonel John of Black River include - and Colonel James (1693-1744) of Orange Bay who married Henrietta Campbell of Knockbuy.

Neil Campbell, principal of the College of Glasgow, married Henrietta Campbell (1685-1764) on 7 June 1705. Their two notable children were Duncan (1726-1803) and Mary/Molly (1723-1767) who married the customs-receiver of the Isle of Man from 1765, Richard Betham (died 1789). Richard and Mary Betham were the parents of Elizabeth Betham, who in 1781 married Capt. William Bligh of HMAV Bounty.
On Betham genealogy, see Burke's Landed Gentry. The siblings of Duncan (born 1726) and Mary/Molly were:
Ann Campbell (b.16 Feb 1712;d.1796) who married the provost of Renfrew/Greenock, John Somerville of Park (m.1729;d.1767); surgeon Patrick Campbell, BA (b.6 Dec 1713;d.16 Nov 1739); . Archibald Campbell (b.5 Jan 1716;d.Sep 1770); Rev. Colin Campbell of Renfrew (b.16 Jul 1718;d.24 Nov 1788) of Renfrew who married Isabella Campbell (b.6 Sep 1717;d.1717) and Elizabeth Montgomerie ; Neil Campbell (b.24 Mar 1721;d.23 Feb 1790) married to Notknown; Mary Campbell (b.2 Jun 1723;d.7 Jan 1767), wife of Richard Betham, LLD, Glasgow, Judge of the Admiralty Court (m.13 Sep 1748;d.1789); Margaret Campbell (b.9 Sep 1727;d.1732); Warburton Campbell (b.1732;d.1735); John Campbell (b.27 Jun 1734;d.7 Jun 1740).

Before 1990, only one historian of Bligh has ever wondered about and raised a single qualm about Bligh's links with Campbell as overseer of convicts, rather than a West India Merchant and rich shipowner - and he was never followed up. This was D. Bonner-Smith, in Some Remarks about the Mutiny of the Bounty. In the 1930s there was a concerted burst of interest in Bligh and the Bounty in England, probably stimulated by publication of Mackaness' biography of Bligh. Bengt Danielsson wrote, but using no respectable historian's evidence, Bligh's "command was really the result of the influence of his wife's uncle Duncan Campbell, a ship-owner who had made a fortune slave-running and who also owned several large sugar plantations and a mercantile house in the West Indies." And it was he ([Campbell] "who had been chiefly instrumental in securing the support of Sir Joseph Banks for the scheme". But like every other writer, Danielsson does not suggest how, or even why, Banks knew Campbell.

No records or even opinions have even been sighted to the effect that Campbell and Banks were acquainted in such a way that led them to meet even irregularly, though Banks and Solander had helped set up a hulks hospital after 1777. Much is unclear and imprecise concerning Banks' promotion of Bligh for the voyage, as it is concerning Campbell's part in proceedings. It is also necessary to consider the not-informal business of retrieving Bligh from the West India mercantile and arranging his re-entry into the navy, whilst Bligh himself was unaware of proceedings.

The intra-family connections re-echoed, so to speak, when Duncan (1726-1803) on 11 March 1753 married Rebecca Campbell (1730-1774) as his first wife. Rebecca was daughter of Jamaican planter Dugald Campbell (1697-1744) and his wife, Anne Launce, who had the plantation Saltspring in Hanover Parish (which ended in Duncan's ownership, managed in the 1790s by Duncan's eldest son Dugald, then inherited by Dugald).
In the present context, the most important child of Bessie (the sister of Colonel John of Black River) was Dugald Campbell (1697-1744), who had Saltspring. Dugald married Anne Launce (whose family history has remained unavailable for almost 30 years to date!)

Dugald (died 1744) had nine daughters and only one son, John (born 1729, died 1782 at New London, Connecticut), who remained a good friend of Rebecca's husband. Dugald (died 1744) was brother of Peter, planter of New Hope on Jamaica, these brothers being sons of Colin Campbell of Attichuan, their mother being Bessie Campbell, as above, sister of the unnamed mother of Neil (died 1764, the father of Duncan) and sister of Colonel John of Black River.
Here, Peter on New Hope, who married Unknown, bequeathed that plantation to his son Peter 2.

Remarkably, given the literary attention given to the Bounty mutiny over centuries now, and to William Bligh's career, these family connections have escaped most writers on Bligh, and also most writers on convict transportation, concerning Duncan. The connections become inescapable, however, for anyone considering the planters on Jamaica who in the 1780s periodically promoted the idea of getting breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for their slaves.
On feeding slaves more cheaply in the West Indies in 1787: Davies, Royal Africa Company, p. 332, notes that in 1684 the Jamaicans were complaining that Gambia slaves were used to eating much flesh meat, (and were expensive), and hence would not like the diet allowed them on Jamaica.

The point is that by 1789, the planters on Jamaica who might have benefited from using breadfruit as slave rations included Campbells descended from "the first Campbells on Jamaica", various relatives of Duncan (1726-1803). Bligh from 1784 sailed various voyages on Duncan's regular ships to Jamaica, though Bligh historians tend to know Duncan only as "an influential West India merchant", which he was; but it is never said how or why he was influential. In effect, Duncan operated as a sort of family-merchant-banker, tiding his relatives over during hard times, sending them necessaries to be paid for from their remittances of sugar cargo.

It is highly probable that in 1775-1776, when he raced his own ruin as a London-based convict contractor and importer of American tobacco, since he could no longer send convicts to Virginia and Maryland, when he took the contracts to become overseer of the Thames prison hulks, Duncan was extremely worried about any effect his worsening situation would have on his relatives on Jamaica. At the time, he had few other commercial options open to him in London. In this sense, unawares in 1776, the Campbells on Jamaica propelled their relative, the hulks overseer, into the notoriety, the dislike, the odium he has always had, with both British and Australia writers on convict transportation and penal history.

Bligh anyway knew many of the Jamaican Campbells well, and one of Bligh's best friends was Dugald, the eldest son of Duncan, when Duncan was always resident in London and/or at Blackheath in Kent. But I have only twice seen some of these breadfruit-promoting Campbells mentioned... . (One mention arose as a Codrington descendant of the Caribbean of today, and the past, emailed it to the present writer some years ago for research purposes - the other mention arises in the minor works of the 1930s biographer of Bligh, Mackaness.)

These breadfruit-promoters have been referred to as follows...
"... the connections with Jamaica to be noted re Bligh [and the first breadfruit voyage] and others go much farther. Initial discussions on promising botanicals as alternate provisioning or cash crops were actively initiated by several cabals of West Indian planters, most notably those hosted by the Wallen Family in Jamaica. Here, names such as Jasper Hall, various Campbells, Wests, Pattersons, Grant, French-Bogle(s) (originally of a Scots/Antiguan lineage) etc., were all familiars and enjoyed the congenial atmosphere of Wallen's botanical garden. Anyway French-Bogles had interests in Jamaica and Antigua.
Per Chris Codrington. See also, Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. London, Jonathan Cape, 1973., p. xvii, p. xv, 47, pp. 264-265, p. 335, pp. 300ff. Oddly, Dunn mentions no planters named Campbell on Jamaica in ways useful to this article. In his otherwise excellent book, Dunn remarks that many Jamaican matters still remain "illusive and mysterious", adding that "It is a shabby task in many ways, yet an illuminating one, to tell what these English sons of Adam did to the Garden of Eden islands they discovered and what the islands did to them..." The same applies of course to Scots in the Caribbean.

Two titles by American historians are especially relevant. That title is Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1730. (London. Jonathan Cape. 1973).
Unfortunately, Dunn does not specifically name any Campbells in his treatment. The other relevant title is Orlando Patterson, The Sociology Of Slavery: An analysis Of The Origins, Development And Structure Of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. (London. Granada. 1967).
Orlando Patterson details considerable cruelty as part of the use of slavery on Jamaica. It is therefore surprising, and touching in its way, to find from Marion Campbell that during the 1980s, one of her young relatives touring Jamaica on a motorbike found... that the Campbell graves of interest to her had been respectfully tended by Afro-Jamaicans (presumably descendants of slaves) who had taken the name Campbell. Presumably, these Afro-Jamaicans had had some connection to the plantations managed by Campbells, probably in the Nineteenth Century.

On 22 August, 1757, when Colin Campbell (son of Colonel John of Black River) wrote about "cousin Duncan" and an unnamed ship, was about the time "cousin Duncan", now settled in London, began to compile the single-most illuminating set of original documents relating to any of this - his own Letterbooks.
Duncan Campbell Letterbooks, A3225-A3230, ML. The Duncan Campbell Letterbooks, (ML) are held as: A3225 ML Vol. 1. of Business Letter Books, March 1772-October 1776; A3226 ML Vol. 2 of Business Letter Books, 13 December, 1776-21 September, 1779; A3227 ML Vol. 3 of Business Letter Books, 30 September, 1779-9 March, 1782; A3228 ML Vol. 4 of Business Letter Books, 15 March, 1782-6 April, 1785; A3229 Vol. 5 of Business Letter Books, 1 December, 1784 -17 June, 1788; A3230 ML Vol. 6 of Business Letter Books, 20 June, 1788-31 December, 1794. Some ML Blighiana also contributes material relevant to Campbells. All Campbell letters hereafter are referred to by individual date. The breaks created between business letter books are not in all instances covered by letters entered into Private Letter Books ML A3231, comprising three volumes of same. An Australian descendant (great-grandson of Duncan died 1803) who died in Queensland, Australia, at Almaden, William Dugald Campbell (WDC 1848-1938), took copious but sometimes inaccurate notes on his family history, held as ML A3232. Reference here to these notes is denoted "Notes of WDC". The present writer has lodged with ML a copy of the Will of Duncan Campbell (1726-1803), courtesy Public Record Office, PROB/11/1388, kindly forwarded by Mollie Gillen.

Thames hulks overseer, Duncan Campbell (1726-1803)

In 1758 in London, Duncan, by now a ship's captain following his naval experience by 1748 on HM Dove, branched out from his London-Jamaica trade, already established courtesy of his relatives on Jamaica, as above, to become partner with John Stewart, the already-established London convict contractor shipping felons to Virginia and North America, backloading tobacco. But Campbell did not open his Letterbooks till 1766.
The late1740s were busy for the family. In 1746, Richard Betham matriculated at Glasgow. In 1748 Richard Betham married Principal Neil's daughter Mary/Molly. Mary's daughter Elizabeth (Betsy) married William Bligh in 1781. In 1752, Betham became a member of the Literary Society of Glasgow. By 1747, Duncan had been serving as midshipman on HM Dove, from February 1747 to 14 May, 1748. On 25 March, 1748, Duncan's brother Archibald was commissioned Ist Lt in North British Fuseliers. On 3 August, 1749, Duncan was made a Guild Brother of either Renfrew or Beufrew (the WDC original is unclear). Duncan over 1750-1751 was on voyage II on Elizabeth, as captain. (Notes of WDC). He also voyaged as captain between Jamaica and London on Mary, also in 1752-1754. (His owners then are unknown). It was on these voyages he met Rebecca Campbell, later his wife.
Meanwhile, to April 1770, Matthew Ridley (born in England in 1749), first went to America in 1770 as the manager of the Maryland branch of John Stewart and Campbell. Ridley knew Benjamin Vaughan, and by a second marriage Ridley became the brother-in-law of John Jay.

This was in fact a unique move - since except for Duncan, it is very difficult to find in eighteenth-century British commercial history, another case of a merchant regularly sending his own, wholly-owned ships, on two mostly-separate runs, to both the Caribbean, backloading sugar, and to North America, backloading tobacco. With this, the only merchant working both runs, and also shipping convicts to America, was Duncan - making him conspicuous. In 1775 when he lost his trade to America, he survived, barely, as a West Indies merchants, largely due to the circumstances of his relatives on Jamaica.
Some information on Stewart and Campbell's convict and trading ships drawn from Campbell's letterbooks will be helpful. Ships owned or operated by Stewart and Campbell are suffixed JS&C to 1772, or C* after 1772. About 1758, Thetis and Elizabeth, JS&C. 1767, the Jupiter Capt. Iain. 1767, The Carolina Merchant Capt. Wilson. 1764, Justitia (later a long-lasting Thames prison hulk), JS&C, Capt. Colin Somerville, whom A. E. Smith records as making seven voyages on her. 1764, Westmoreland, Capt. McCardell. 1769, Capt. David Mitchell. 1764, Friendship, Hereford. 1772, Thornton (named for American clients) JS&C Capt. Dobbie. 1764, Susannah. 1772, Friendship JS&C Capt. Ogilvy. During July 1772, Capt. Dougal McDougal was on Tayloe (named for American clients, the noted Tayloe family of Virginia) for them. Smith, (p. 328), records Capt. McDougal on the vessel Dolphin, sailing from London with 141 convicts on 2 June, 1764, arriving at Annapolis on 14 August, 1764. 1772, Justitia, JS&C, Capt. Neil Gillies. On 9 July, 1773, Campbell wrote to Capt. McDougal then on Tayloe. Capt. Finley Gray was on Justitia in November 1772. 1772, Union, Capt. Campbell (otherwise unknown as a Campbell). 1772, Thornton, JS&C, Capt. John Kid. 1773, Davis, Capt. Brown. 1774, Henny, Capt. Richards. 1774, Tayloe, JS&C. 1774, William, Capt. Whittle. 1774, Capt. Millar. 1775, Samson, Capt. Cooper. 1775, Ipswich, Capt. Castle. 1775, Thornton for C*. A Capt. Ratcliffe in 1772 took convicts on Campbell's Jamaica ship Orange Bay for C*, to then pick up lumber from Virginia handled by Tom Hodge. Campbell's commercial reach was to Jamaica, Europe via Bremen, Virginia, Maryland, Philadelphia, Georgia, some Scottish ports, Whitehaven at times, Newcastle, Cork, with stops at Barbados and Madeira not unusual.

Note: Duncan Campbell's correspondents, listed from the index to his business letterbook 1772-1776: included: Allison and Campbell, William Adam, Samuel Athawes, Colonel William Brockenbrough and Austin Brockenbrough, Dr John Brockenbrough, Adam Barnes and Johnson, James Bain, Rev. Mr Beauvoir, James and Robert Buchanan, George Buchanan, Robert Cockerell, Messrs. Campbell and Dickson, Colin Currie, Stewart Carmichael, Cooper and Telfair, William Dickson, Charles Eyles, Fitzhugh, Fauntleroy, Richard Glascock/Glascook, Benjamin and Charles Grimes, Henderson and Glassford, Rhodam Kenner, Abraham Lopez and Son, James Millar (of Jamaica), Daniel Muse, Hudson Muse, Hugh McLean, Joshua Newall, George Noble, Francis Randall, Major Henry Ridgely, Adam Shipley, William Snydebottom, Richard Stringer, Alexander Spiers and Co., Spiers, Finch and Co.; Dr. Sherwin, Tayloe and Thornton, William and Edward Telfair, Charles Worthington. Some of these men lived in North America, some on Jamaica.

Yet Campbell the hulks overseer and his relatives have escaped many nets, as we shall see.
Some of his own descendants are mentioned briefly in Charles Rathbone Low, History of the Royal India Navy, 1613-1863. 1877. Reprinted by Royal Navy Museum, Portsmouth, in conjunction with London Stamp Exchange, nd. 1990? Many extant references to the hulks overseer are incorrect, such as his listing in Rex Nan Kivell and Sydney Spence, Portraits of the Famous and the Infamous, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, 1492-1970. Sydney, Batsford, 1970., where it is stated incorrectly he was born in 1741.

In 1757-1758, young Captain Duncan Campbell (the only one of his own family who went on the sea) with the help of his relatives on Jamaica was rising. He and his investors had bought a ship, Orange Bay, which would regularly sail the London-Jamaica run. Though it is not known how he made the business connections, Duncan by 1758 was also a junior partner with convict contractor John Stewart, sailing regularly to Virginia and Maryland. However, as time sailed by, Duncan always gave his Jamaican relatives great loyalty, and consistent service in business matters. It should be noted also, that he and Rebecca inherited Dugald Campbell's plantation, Saltspring. Dugald had had nine daughters, it is not known if all survived, or all married, but it seems as if Duncan was one of up-to-nine brothers-in-law - and he inherited Saltspring.
By 2002, Duncan's own career as a convict contractor is noted at length on the Internet at a website titled The Blackheath Connection at: http://www.danbyrnes.com.au/blackheath/

Two standard historical works on convict transportation to North America are: Wilfrid Oldham, Britain's Convicts to the Colonies. Sydney, Library of Australian History, 1990. [This title is a slightly modified version of Wilfrid Oldham, The Administration of the System of Transportation of British Convicts, 1763-1793. Ph.D thesis. London University. 1933] Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labour in America, 1607-1776. Gloucester, Massachusetts, University of Carolina Press, 1947. [Peter Smith, 1965] See also, Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains. Phoenix Hill, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Allan Sutton, 1992.], Eris O'Brien, Shaw, Ekirch [Roger A. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775. Oxford University Press. And also, importantly, Roger A. Ekirch, 'Great Britain's Secret Convict Trade To America, 1783-1784', American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 5. December 1984., pp. 1285-1291.; and Kenneth Morgan, 'The Organisation of the Convict Trade To Maryland: Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, 1768-1775', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, Vol. 42, No. 2, April, 1985., pp. 201-227.

Meanwhile, given email arriving to me as webmaster of The Blackheath Connection, it seems also in 2002 that interest is resurfacing in the United States in their 40,000-50,000 convicts arriving between 1718 and 1775 as cheap labour to Virginia and Maryland.

Advertisement

Follows here a list of the said English ship managers operating 1717-1775, shipping convicts to America: 1717: Francis March, London:
1718 Jonathan Forward, London;
1720 members of the Lux family, Darby, John, and Francis (probably London before becoming colonials, (later linked to Jonathan Forward's operations) and in 1750, William Lux;
1721-1722, Jonathan Forward Sydenham of London;
1722, ? Cheston;
1731, various men named Reed, to 1771;
1737, Joseph Weld in Dublin;
1739, Andrew Reid, London, with James and Andrew Armour, London, and John Stewart of London;
1740++, Moses Israel Fonseca, London;
1740, Samuel Sedgley, Bristol;
1740, James Gildart, Liverpool;
1744, John Langley, Ireland;
1745, Reid and Armour, London;
1745, Sydenham and Hodgson, London;
1747, William Cookson of Hull;
1749, Jonathan Forward Sydenham a nephew of Jonathan Forward above;
1749, Stewart and Armour, London;
1750, Andrew Reid, London;
1750, Samuel Sedgely and Co of Bristol; John Stewart and (Duncan) Campbell, London (JS&C);
1758, Sedgely and Co (Hillhouse and Randolph), Bristol;
1759, Stewart and Armour, London;
1760, Sedgely and Hillhouse of Bristol;
1763, Andrew Reid retired;
1764, John Stewart and Duncan Campbell, London;
1766, Patrick Colquhuon, Glasgow; 1766, Sedgely and Co. at Bristol replaced by William Randolph, William Stevenson and James Cheston, Bristol;
1767, Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, Bristol? with a colonial agent Cheston;
1768, Jonathan Forward Sydenham, London or nearby counties;
1769, Dixon and Littledale, Whitehaven;
1769, Sedgely, Bristol; 1769, any ships captain providing necessary securities could transport felons;
1770, James Baird, Glasgow;
1772, John Stewart died, Duncan Campbell carried on alone in London until 1775.

At Bristol, Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston (SRC) were active till 1776; they made ill-advised and vain attempts to transport felons to North America at the end of the American Revolution. Wisely, Duncan Campbell made no such attempt.
(The above list does not include merchant names transporting convicts from Ireland.)

People in the US have bothered little with their 1775 40,000-50,000 convict emigrants of pre-1775 days, and do not seem to find Daniel Defoe's satirical novel on a female convict determined to return to England from transportation to America at all amusing - Moll Flanders. But a feisty gal, was Moll!

These convicts formed an underclass; little is known of their lives once they had served their time as servants, or about whether they married and stayed in the colonies, returned to England, or simply worked for themselves and then died-in-exile. US historians have mostly been concerned to estimate their tendencies to recidivism, and they are mostly taken to have disappeared onto some colonial frontier. My view is that many must have had children, and that descendants of those children must now form a large number within the US population.
See Bernard Bailyn, 'The Peopling of the British Peripheries in the Eighteenth Century', Esso Lecture, 1988. Canberra, Australian Academy of the Humanities, Occasional Paper No. 5, 1988. Here, Bailyn writes, p. 19, "I have never found a single reference to a convict in any genealogy or history of an American family, nor, in any other way, does a single one of the 50,000 convicts sent to America appear as such in American history."

Coldham has done a great deal of genealogical work on shiploads of convicts, and so listed most of the convict ships used in the trade 1718-1775, at one point mis-listing one ship as Green Garland, when it was actually Green Island, a ship managed by Duncan Campbell and actually named for a location of Jamaica, Green Island.
Peter Wilson Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants in Bondage, 1614-1775. Baltimore, Genealogical Publishing Co., 1988. Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains. Phoenix Hill, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Allan Sutton, 1992.

I've claimed above that Duncan's biography has been splintered by historians, and this happened with one US historian of Anglo-American business life to 1775, Alison Olson.
See Alison Olson, 'The London Mercantile Lobby and the Coming of the American Revolution', Journal of American History, Vol. 69, No. 1, June 1982., pp. 21-41. Alison Olson, 'The Board of Trade and London-American interest groups in the eighteenth century', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies, 8, January 1980., pp. 33-50. Alison Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690-1790. London, Harvard University Press, 1992. Alison Olson, 'Coffee House Lobbying', History Today, Vol. 41, January 1991., pp. 35-41. Alison Olson, 'The Virginia Merchants of London: A Study in Eighteenth Century Interest Group Politics', William and Mary Quarterly, Series 3, Vol. 40, July 1983., pp. 363-388.

Olson identified a group of London-based importers of tobacco whose views became split along pro-American or anti-revolutionary lines, as a major upheaval threatened their business, the American War of Independence. As opinions rumbled in both America and England, Duncan's opinion was pro-government, although not in any blustering way.

Before 1775, it was also clear that numerous American colonials owed substantial sums of money to merchants resident in Britain, and by 1786, Duncan would in fact be one of several sometime-chairmen of a lobby group known as the British Creditors. These creditors pressed their own government and their US debtors for repayment, a tortuous matter as the Americans had not yet established a legal system able to address such matters.

Remarkably, in 1786, Thomas Jefferson, then US' plenipotentiary minister to France, sought out a representative of the British Creditors - who it happened was Duncan Campbell, then in Mincing Lane, only months before Duncan moved his premises to 3 Robert Street, the Adelphi.

In 1786, Jefferson and Campbell not surprisingly disagreed about the debts, and any related interest charges on monies owed, and matters were not concluded till after the negotiations of the 1794 Jay Treaty.
See by date, remarks on this Jefferson-Campbell meeting in Julian P. Boyd, (Ed.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 9. (1 November, 1785 to 22 June, 1876). Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1954.

This meeting happened within the diplomatic period of Jefferson's life treated so well in the movie, Jefferson in Paris. Is it significant? Jefferson mentioned this meeting in his letters, but Campbell did not mention it in his letterbooks. Although of course, Campbell in his later letters to his aggrieved British merchant brethren gave them to understand that he had had a "no" from an American who might know - he simply declined to mention the name, Jefferson.

Across decades, US historians have typically referred to these issues as "the debt repudiation question". It should be noted here that Jefferson in treating these issues, in his personal as well as his political life, behaved most honourably in the way he wrote about, or politicked about, such debts and necessary repayment, (hence the later terms of the Jay Treaty).
Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay's Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy. New York, Macmillan, 1923.

Here, though, arise here two problems for US culture... First problem - It can't be seen that Jefferson behaved as honourably as he actually did, unless one knows that in London, he met a senior figure of the British Creditors, as they called themselves, Duncan Campbell - and we know who Campbell was.

Second problem - the debts could not be repayed without emphasis on more tobacco production. Which involved use of slave labour, a factor which got entangled in post-1783 debates over the continuation of the use of slavery; issues which since 1803 have entangled Jefferson's reputation.

Duncan himself remained deeply preoccupied about recovering his American debts, till his death in 1803, and his estate received less than 50 per cent of amounts outstanding.

Considering events to 1775, Olson identified Duncan as a merchant-activist, who presumably knew, or knew of, other debt-worried British merchants such as:

On the pro-British side (on one side of the Atlantic or the other) were merchants such as: Governor Hutchinson (a "tea importer" and former British governor recalled to London); William Molleson (an American merchant in London), trading as William and Robert Molleson, of No 1, America Square; Christopher Court and Thomas Eden, Lyonel Lyde and Co., Dunlop and Wilson, Gale, Fear and Co., Wallace, Davidson and Johnson - and Duncan Campbell. (One of Campbell's colonial correspondents, William Fitzhugh, wrote to James Russell warning of local "incendiaries" in the colonies.) Also, Blackburn, Barclay and Champion (Barclay by now also an investor in the English South Whale Fishery of the day), Samuel Athawes, John Sargent, Brigden, Norton, and Russell, William J. Baker, a noted merchant dealing with New York. Thomas and Rowland Hunt "never signed a single pro-American petition". To 1775, some of the leading Glasgow merchants with links in the colonies were Alexander Speirs and William Cunninghame. So the lists can run.

On the American side, noted names were John Hancock (the Boston patriot merchant said to be partly-responsible for the Boston Tea Party). In London were pro-Americans such as William Lee and Josiah Quincy, and the radical London alderman, John Wilkes.

But Olson also became mystified, as in late 1774, Duncan disappeared from view, (and she did not become aware of the Jefferson-Campbell meeting in 1786 on the same issues.) Duncan did in fact almost disappear from view in late 1774, as his wife Rebecca died, possibly due to complications of child-birth, leaving Duncan with a forlorn new-born, and older motherless children.

Campbell dropped out of London-American merchant politics during a crucial period, late 1774, and apparently ignored his fellow merchants? The reason was that his wife Rebecca had died, 7 December, 1774, leaving him with a motherless new-born, Little Duncan, and other young children. (By 25 January, 1775, Duncan's brother Neil was sitting as amanuensis by Duncan's sickbed as they wrote to Rebecca's brother John on Jamaica... "the expected stop on remittances from America" would make it difficult to pay [Duncan and John's] creditors in London... Duncan wished John, and Duncan's own daughter, Henrietta, who was then visiting Jamaica, to come to London to assist following Rebecca's death.)

Very emotional with grief, Duncan also had to watch the decline of his American business. In later 1775 he became lumbered with an intractable - and official problem - the upkeep of the convicts he had penned up in two ships now on the Thames, which he could no longer send to America, a situation which hemmed him in as he was contracted.
The children of Duncan and Rebecca were: Eldest daughter Henrietta Campbell, (b.15 Nov 1754;d.1795), who married Colin Campbell, merchant of Glasgow, and also of Holland Park, Jamaica, (m.14 Aug 1776(Div)), Rebecca Campbell (b.28 May 1756;d.Sep 1781); eldest son Dugald Campbell (b.1760;d.1817), Mary Ann Campbell (b.1761) who married (against her father's wishes) a soldier, William Willox (m.Aug 1781(Div)); John "Jack" Campbell (b.5 Feb 1770), who by the late 1790s was partner with his father in contracting for the overseership of the Thames prison hulks; Ann Campbell (b.1769;d.22 Dec 1801) who married Dr. William Peele; Duncan Campbell Junior, (b.1 Dec 1774;d.22 Apr 1858) who married firstly Harriot Mylne (b.1773;m.1846;d.8 Aug 1834) (Daughter of architect Robert Mylne (1734-1811) FRS); and secondly, Elizabeth Phillips.
Except for occasional references in Duncan's Letterbooks, it remains difficult to keep track of his Jamaican relatives, for lack of comparative information. Rebecca's brother John, who frequently went to the US with ill-health, died in 1782 at New London, Connecticut.
Note: See also, A. I. B. Stewart, 'Major John Campbell (died in 1685) and Principal Neil Campbell', Journal of the Clan Campbell Society, USA, pp. 11-13. nd. [Providing also a new but still inconclusive report from Clan Campbell, Journal, USA on the paternal grandfather of Duncan Campbell (1726-1803) the hulks overseer of London]

Duncan employed many ships captains. Of them, the closest to him in family terms were his nephews Somerville, and later the husband of his niece, Elizabeth Betham, William Bligh. By June 1771, Captain Colin Somerville had died, and his brother Neil Somerville had lost Orange Bay (named for the Jamaican Campbell plantation of that name) between Blackwall and Greenwich "by a careless pilot" on the Thames. Duncan was then in the country, and had written to a brother of Colin Somerville on the death. By early June 1771, John Paterson in Glasgow had written to Duncan on the "meaning of the affairs" of Capt Colin Somerville deceased. A question arose of Capt Somerville's girl, a convict; and his [ship's] mate. By 4 June, 1771, Duncan had received news from Tom Hodge, his convict-selling agent in America, news of "Capt Somerville's writings".

With Neil's ship lost, things were worse than regrettable. Colin Somerville had betrayed his employer-uncle, with probably some shady business dealings, but certainly by falling in love with a convict girl, and keeping her on his ship back and forth on the Atlantic. In so doing, Colin was, repeatedly, returning her from transportation. If legal authorities had discovered this, it would have meant the cancellation of Duncan's contracts to transport convicts. Duncan was gravely concerned, but as it happened, he kept this contracts. Colin Somerville's betrayal was probably the worst service any of Duncan's captains ever gave him.

Duncan's sister Ann (1712-1796) had married John Somerville (died 1767), Provost of Renfrew and Greenock, of Park. Their children were Capt. Colin Somerville (b.1718;d.Jun 1771), Ann Somerville who married Alexander Campbell of Inverness; John S. Somerville, dsp (b.1731); Henrietta Somerville who married writer Hugh Snodgrass of Paisley; Captain Neil Somerville (b.1740;d.1796) who married Miss E. Scott; John Somerville (b.1743); Francis Somerville, planter of Green Island, Jamaica (b.1744); Agnes Somerville (b.1751) who married George Noble, merchant of Kingstown, Jamaica (b.14 Aug 1745;m.18 Sep 1776;d.26 Mar 1791); and Alexander Somerville.
There was also a tobacco-ferrying Capt Thomas Somerville of the 1760s, but I do not know if he was one of this Somerville family. He is noted in Jack P. Greene, (Ed.), The Diary of Colonel Landon Carter of Sabine Hall. Two Vols. Charlottesville, Virginia, Virginia Historical Society/University Press of Virginia, 1965., Vol. 1, p. 297.

By January 1774, Duncan's ships Orange Bay and Tayloe were at Green Island, Jamaica. Duncan in London on 15 January 1774, wrote to Rebecca's brother, John Campbell of Saltspring per Henny Capt Richards,
"I wrote to you the 13th of last month by the Britannia since which time I have not had the pleasure of hearing from you. As I have in my former letters been full on the head of business with CC I have now nothing further to say on that subject, having had no information from, or converse with him since my last. What I have already written will guide you in some degree as to the shipping your crop, you will no doubt consider matters with due deliberation before you take your measures which is the sure way to obviate future difficulties. I have been very open as to my Abilitys, and I trust you will not have occassion to push me beyond that line.

In my last I mentioned Mr McLachlan becoming a Planter I hope you will have before this reaches apply'd to him and to GB (?) likewise, Joe B has written to his sister .....

My poor boy Jack has been very ill for some time past, with the Dregs of the Measles. I flatter myself now from what Davison says he is out of danger he is just gone with his Mama to take a little airing, he is amazingly immatiated, but if he could get rid of a Fever which comes on every night I think he would soon pick up strength. The house had very dull holydays on his Account but thank God we have now so good a prospect

Dug is now by me. We set out for Canterbury tomorrow. He has made good progress at that School, is now in good hands and I have no doubt will answer every expectation I have formed about his education

[declining to pay Mr. Dickson's bills - ill made sugars - even Hibberts for 250 pounds I have refused - the Orange Bay and Tayloe ought to be at Green Island]"
Transcript from Duncan Campbell's Letterbooks, ML A3225, p. 221.

Oddly, then, we can find good-quality genealogical information on Duncan and his Somerville ships captains, his relatives - while information on the careers of Duncan's Jamaican relatives, as planters, remains misty. But as indicated above, Duncan from 1774 was to see the destruction of his business with North America. Picking himself up, taking his losses on the chin, Campbell from 1776 became the overseer of the Thames prison hulks used to pen the convicts that England could no longer send to America.
See Charles Campbell, The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement, 1776-1857. Bowie, Maryland, Heritage Books, Inc., 1994.

The prison hulks and their overseer of course are always to be mentioned in the British penal histories arising from the outbreak of the American War of Independence from 1775, due to the subsequent history of the transportation of convicts to Australia from 1786-1788, yet Duncan and his connections of the 1780s and 1790s have never been properly placed in any kind of history at all. And, this is despite the enormous historical and literary attention given since 1789 to the mutiny on the Bounty, and to Captain William Bligh, who was "a nephew-in-law" of Duncan, the hulks overseer. (As we will still not tend to find, however, indicated on genealogical or historical websites of our own day.)
Historians' works on the close of convict transportation to North America include: Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains. Phoenix Hill, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Allan Sutton, 1992. Roger A. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718-1775. Oxford University Press. And also, importantly, Roger A. Ekirch, 'Great Britain's Secret Convict Trade To America, 1783-1784', American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 5. December 1984., pp. 1285-1291. Kenneth Morgan, 'The Organisation of the Convict Trade To Maryland: Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, 1768-1775', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, Vol. 42, No. 2, April, 1985., pp. 201-227.

Throughout the 1780s, as the children by his first wife grew older, Duncan Campbell, overseer of the Thames prison hulks, had another, younger family growing, children by his second wife, Kentishwoman Mary Mumford. (1756-1827).

Mary Mumford married Duncan on 25 January 1776. She was daughter of John Mumford (1723-1787) of Sutton Place, Sutton-at-Home, Kent, and sister of John Mumford (d.1825), High Sheriff of Kent. She and Duncan had the following children: Elizabeth Campbell (b.14 Nov 1776) who married barrister Alexander Pitcairn (of the family which gave the name Pitcairn to the island which became the refuge of Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian); Mumford Campbell, JP, (b.Feb 1778;d.9 Feb 1855), who had two wives, a Miss Harris and also Frances Sarah Smith; William Campbell (b.Mar 1779), Launce Campbell (update, daughter of Rebecca Campbell, not daughter of Mary Mumford) who married Lt. Philip Glover of 6th Inneskilling Dragoons, married 7 Sept. 1800 at St Mary's Marylebone, London); William Newall Campbell (Unmarried), (b.22 May 1780;d.8 Nov 1856) who married Christiana Pearce (b.1793;d.10 May 1860); Colin Campbell (b.12 Jul 1783); Louisa (Loisa) Campbell (b.May 1784;d.Aug 1804); Mary Ann Campbell (b.Jan 1785;d.27 Aug 1846), Neil Campbell (b.Jan 1787;d.13 Jun 1793), and Augustus Campbell.

Mary as a younger woman, remained friends with Duncan's niece, Elizabeth Betham, wife of William Bligh, who from 1784 had sailed several of Duncan's ships on the Jamaica run. It has been tragic that this small point of family intimacy has gone unnoticed by historians of Bligh and the Bounty, since writers on Bligh have traditionally seen Duncan merely as "an influential West India merchant", and not as a senior member, almost the merchant banker, of a lively mini-clan of Campbells active between Glasgow, Arygyllshire, London, and Jamaica.
Bligh Letters, 1782-1805, p. 378, Mitchell Library, Sydney. On social life ... Elizabeth Bligh enjoyed the company of the women of the Mumford family. On 18 January, 1786 she wrote to her uncle Duncan, she was looking forward to the "pleasure of seeing Mrs Campbell & her cousins this week - tomorrow I will wait upon you. I beg Mrs Campbell may not think of sending her Coach... Your much obliged Niece, Elizabeth Bligh."
Some consideration of the descendants of Duncan Campbell (died 1803, who married Mary Mumford) who stayed about Kent, is given in Zena Bamping, West Kingsdown - The story of three villages in Kent. (2nd ed) London, 1991 Tyger Press Limited, 1991. (36 Goldington Street, London. NW1 1UE.)

Duncan Campbell's Letterbooks have been held by Australia's major archive of Australiana, the Mitchell Library in Sydney, since the early 1950s, acquired by the library from the estate of the biographer of William Bligh, writing in the 1930s, Dr. George Mackaness, once Mackaness had died. Mackaness was given the Letterbooks by an Australian descendant of Duncan, William Dugald Campbell (WDC), though it remains unexplained how WDC acquired the Letterbooks from family members then in England. (WDC made one if not two trips to England and Scotland in search of his family history). However, it remains unexplained why Mackaness as Bligh biographer failed to emphasise that the writer of the Letterbooks was in fact the overseer of the Thames prison hulks, also the promoter of Bligh as a captain for a breadfruit voyage .

See George Mackaness, The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, RN, FRS. Two Vols. Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1931.

My own observation on Mackaness' minor works on Bligh, in follow-up to his biography, which mention Campbells on Jamaica, is that with his consultation of the Letterbooks he retained for so long, Mackaness is often wrong or misleading. It seems also that the way Mackaness handled the historical information has deflected attention from the Campbells on Jamaica since the 1930s. Certainly, I have not yet seen a website on matters of Bligh or the Bounty which seems aware of the genealogical problems outlined in this article, and certainly, compilers of information appearing on websites are in an ideal position to post the latest-known information. The result is a great loss to the Pacific history of associations with the name Campbell.
George Mackaness, (Ed.), 'Fresh Light On Bligh: some unpublished correspondence', Australian Historical Monographs, Vol. 5, (New Series). Review Publications, Dubbo, NSW, Australia, 1976 (Reprint). George Mackaness, (Ed.), 'Some correspondence of Captain William Bligh RN with John and Francis Godolphin Bond, 1776-1811', Australian Historical Monographs. Reissued by Review Publications Pty. Ltd., Dubbo, NSW, Australia. Orig., 1949. I have also explained Mackaness' use of the Campbell Letterbooks in my Commentary to Oldham, Britain's Convicts, pp. 251ff.

***************

In all, it remains very odd that the genealogy of a principal of the College of Glasgow, and a professor of Divinity at that university, plus the genealogy of the first Campbell planters on Jamaica, plus information on Duncan, the promoter of the captain of the Bounty voyage, Bligh, should all be linked, and yet remain mysterious for as long as two centuries of "modern history".

Meantime, Duncan Campbell never sent a convict ship to Australia, or any ship at all, though he had every opportunity to do so if he wished - and he is incorrectly called the corrupt contractor for the First Fleet of convict ships to Australia in Robert Hughes' book, The Fatal Shore.
See Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868. London, Pan Books/Collins, 1988. Finding much to complain about regarding the treatment of the First Fleet convicts, Hughes writes, (p. 70): "To begin with, the fleet was undervictualled by its crooked contractor, Duncan Campbell. He had shortchanged the convicts with half a pound of rice instead of a pound of flour.." and so on. With just one sentence, Hughes disposed entirely of William Richards, and wrote him completely out of the history. Hughes however does not for example cite any references for the notion that Campbell as contractor for the First Fleet was "crooked". In fact, there are no such references available, at all, and Hughes is simply wrong here.

Follows a list of some of the London-based merchants who did take contracts to transport convicts to Australia before 1800 or were involved with the shipping: Names regarding the First Fleet included: William Richards Junior (who was not corrupt, and as far as is known, no relation of the Captain Richards once sailing for Duncan of London), London alderman William Curtis (later Sir, a baker of sea biscuits) and alderman George Mackenzie Macaulay of Blackheath, Leightons, James Mather. For the Second Fleet to Sydney, London-based slavers who were supplying slaves to Jamaica at the time, Camden, Calvert and King. The Third Fleet, the Enderby whalers (resident at Blackheath) together with Calvert's firm. Later, a London whaling investor, John St Barbe (also of Blackheath, next door but one to Enderbys).

With the first Campbells of Jamaica, it may remain debatable for a time, which area of information needs tidying first; the basic genealogies, or the history of the first sombre decades of European life in Australia after 1788. Not to speak of the story of breadfruit being taken from Tahiti to the Caribbean.

Through the 1780s, the idea warmed up, of using breadfruit from Tahiti as a cheaper way to feed slaves on sugar islands. Orthodox wisdom has it that a ship named HMAV Bounty was sent to obtain it, Capt. William Bligh. This orthodox wisdom also tends to assume that Bounty was a lone ship sent on a special, scientific mission. In fact, she was one of two ships planned to visit Tahiti from Britain in 1787-1789, the other ship being the First Fleet ship, Lady Penrhyn. The problem with dealing with this unorthodoxy is that traditionally, Bounty continues to be seen as a lone ship, not part of a burst of shipping Britain sent into the Pacific, 1786-1792, the first major burst of such shipping being of course, the First Fleet of convicts sent to Australia.

In fact, and as earlier indicated here, a majority of the shipowners putting ships into the Pacific 1786-1792 were residents of Blackheath in London, near Greenwich. The contractor of the First Fleet was William Richards Junior. Some shipowners William Richards dealt with as he gathered the First Fleet included: Leightons, Hoppers of Scarborough, William Walton and Co., the whaler James Mather and the Greenland whaler, alderman William Curtis (but most of these merchants did not continue their involvements with the Pacific).

Despite Hughes, in modern writing, in The Fatal Shore incorrectly naming Campbell as "the crooked contractor" of the First Fleet, Campbell never sent a convict ship anywhere after mid-1775. In the 1780s resident at Blackheath, Campbell could easily if he'd desired have sent convict ships to Australia; government had sought his advice several times on the likely costs of transporting convicts to Australia (New Holland), but he never sent one.

Political disturbances wracked Jamaica during 1787, and yet another hurricane caused damage of £50,000. In London, both Campbell and Sir Joseph Banks would have known of this. West India planters must have been worried, since slaves - property, not people - were starving. There was also the problem of the dispute between Britain and the United States over the West Indian carrying trade.

Walvin reports that in 1788, a leading Liverpool slave trader, John Tarleton, spent three and a half hours trying to convince prime minister Pitt that abolition of the slave trade would bring "total ruin".

The poet Coleridge described the anti-slaver, Clarkson, as "the moral steam engine... the giant with one idea" .. From 1787, three other writers besides Clarkson worked on anti-slavery, Rev. James Ramsay, Zachary Macaulay of the Clapham sect, the father of the historian, and James Stephen. (Macaulay had a personal interest in sugar being produced in India). Clarkson, who researched the slave trade, said the trade cost the lives of 2000 British sailors annually.

Historian Eric Williams asks why it took until 1807 for slavery to be abolished? He answers, because of the French Revolution and the issues ranged round around St Dominigue. Meantime, the only English poet to write anything useful against the slave trade was Robert Southey, with his 1798 ballad, "The Sailor who had served in the Slave Trade", a psycho-drama finger-pointedly set in Bristol.

In the presence of new information, speculation also visits. Lady Penrhyn was built on the Thames in 1786 for alderman William Curtis of London. Her First Fleet voyage was a maiden voyage and after it she was bought by Wedderburns and placed on a regular London-Jamaica run. She had probably always been intended for the West India run. Why did Curtis name herLady Penrhyn? Lord Penrhyn once spent £30,000 in 1790 in an unsuccessful attempt to control Liverpool, his slaving port. (Richard Pennant, Baron Penrhyn, was the chairman between 1777-1783 of a powerful lobby group of West Indies merchants and planters, and it was presumably for his lady that Curtis had named his First Fleet ship, Lady Penrhyn?
Richard Pennant (Lord Penrhyn, his DNB entry) is said to have once spent £30,000 attempting but failing to become MP for Liverpool.

By late 1786-early 1787, there had been an idea to detach a First Fleet ship and send her to Tahiti to take breadfruit to the West Indies, an idea Sir Joseph Banks would have known about.

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies at Russell Square in London holds microfilm copies of the minute books of the West India Committee, for Planters 1785-1822; and Planters and Merchants May 1785-December 1792.
See Microfilm, Reel 3, West India Committee Archives, West India Planters, 1785-1822: Planters and Merchants Minutes, May 1785-December 1792, held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London. Douglas Hall, A Brief History of the West India Committee. Caribbean University Press, 1971., a treatment tracing the committee's change in role as it moved from promoting the interests of slavers and absentee landlords of the West Indies to examining the welfare needs of descendants of slaves.

When these merchants met (from May 1784), Lord Penrhyn was usually in the chair. Here, it is necessary to suggest that despite Bligh's fame and the notoriety of the mutiny on HMAV Bounty, Campbell's role in having his employee, Bligh, given command of Bounty, is not well understood, and indeed, has provoked too few questions. Was Campbell a powerful West India merchant? And did he know Joseph Banks?. Even if "yes" is the answer to both questions, a connection between the three camps - Campbell's, Banks', and the West India merchants - still needs to be proved.

As a West India merchant trading to Jamaica since 1753, Campbell was a loner. If his surviving correspondence is an accurate guide, he seldom dealt with other West India merchants in London; but his letters to correspondents on Jamaica itself were always effusive, for normal family reasons. His Letterbooks indicate of the buyers of his tobacco before 1775, but nowhere does Campbell ever indicate who bought his sugars, which is yet another detriment to finding more information on the commerce of the Cambpells on Jamaica.

Duncan Campbell's name does not appear in the West India lobby group's minute books as a result of his attending meetings, so the conclusion is that he was NOT influential among the London merchants who usually attended. When they met in 1787, the West Indian merchants and planters discussed business such as intercourse with America, meetings with the Privy Council's committee for trade, free ports in the West Indies, duties on rum, competition from the import of foreign sugars. Campbell would naturally have been interested in such issues, but the records of the meetings between 1786-1787 do not mention his attendance.

On 30 March, 1787, though we do not know with whom he had recently spoken, Banks informed both Lord Liverpool and Lord Sandwich that the plan of sending a vessel to Tahiti purely for breadfruit was more likely to be successful than an alternative one of detaching a Botany Bay transport.

By that date, the Botany Bay ships were only waiting for a few more convicts and official matters to be concluded. But here, the mystery of Lt. Watts and Macaulay chartering Lady Penrhyn remains. Banks was probably correct as to the inadvisability of detaching a transport, for by 30 March he could have found out the proposed routes of various ships after they would leave Botany Bay, whether they had East India Company charters to backload tea, or not. So it is probable that Macaulay, if he and Curtis had been planning to take some breadfruit from Tahiti, or been asked to do so, changed their mind about late March and decided to survey Nootka Sound, in which Curtis did continue interested. That is, if Lady Penrhyn had picked up breadfruit, the Bounty voyage may never have happened!
Hughes, , Chronicle of Blackheath Golfers, p. 4 recorded Macaulay as a member of the Blackheath Golf Club in 1787 and as club captain in 1793. February 1787: Mackay, , Wake of Cook, Ch. 5 treats breadfruit for slaves on Jamaica. Mackay conveys, Ch. 5, 30 March, 1787, Banks was pointing out the disadvantage of fitting a convict ship to go to Tahiti, citing CO/201/2/224, 9 March, 1787, after Banks in Feb. 1787 had suggested a convict transport go to Tahiti.
The initial evidence used here about Curtis and Macaulay comes partly from Arthur Phillip, The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay. Sydney, Hutchinson of Australia, 1982. (Originally published in 1789). In the section by Macaulay's employee, Lt. Watts, Ch. XX, is recorded information useful in piecing together the involvements of Macaulay and Curtis. On Macaulay's Pitt in 1792, see Jack-Hinton, Search for the Islands of Solomon, p. 318, Note 3 and p. 319.

Hinton East was a botanically-minded receiver-general on Jamaica. East, writing to Joseph Banks in July, 1784, had asserted the "infinite importance" of breadfruit to the West Indies. East hoped the Assembly of Jamaica would again take steps to re-awaken English interest in breadfruit... cloaked in botanical "motives", the search would be mounted for cost effectiveness in feeding slaves of the Caribbean.
On Hinton East and other interested parties, see Dawson, The Banks Letters, earlier cited. Also, Glynn Christian, Fragile Paradise, pp. 53ff; Owen Rutter, Turbulent Journey - A Life of William Bligh, Vice-Admiral of the Blue. London, Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936., pp 76ff. As noted earlier, Hinton East, writing to Joseph Banks in July, 1784, had asserted the "infinite importance" of breadfruit to the West Indies. East hoped the Assembly of Jamaica would again take steps to re-awaken English interest in breadfruit. Brief mention has been made of the receiver-general on Jamaica in the 1780s, the botanically minded Hinton East, and some matters concerning Sir Joseph Banks and the estate of Elisha Biscoe [in Jamaica]. Only one of Bligh's biographers, Hough, has suggested that Banks owned or had an interest in a Jamaican plantation, but if Banks had such land, it would have added financial incentive to his botanical motives for transplanting breadfruit to gain cost effectiveness in slave rations. Political disturbances wracked Jamaica during 1787, and a hurricane caused damage of £50,000. Both Campbell and Banks would have known of this. West India planters must have been worried, since slaves - property, not people - were starving. There was also the problem of the current dispute between Britain and the United States over the West Indian carrying trade. On Hinton East and other interested parties, see Dawson, The Banks Letters, earlier cited. Also, Glynn Christian, Fragile Paradise, pp. 53ff; Owen Rutter, Turbulent Journey - A Life of William Bligh, Vice-Admiral of the Blue. London, Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936., pp 76ff. Kennedy, Bligh, p. 15 mentions Hinton East meeting Banks in London in 1786.

Advertisement

No records or even opinions have been sighted by the present writer to the effect that Campbell and Banks were acquainted in such a way that led them to meet even irregularly, although after 1777, Banks and Solander had helped set up a hulks hospital. Much is unclear and imprecise concerning Banks' promotion of Bligh for the voyage, as it is concerning Campbell's part in proceedings. It is also necessary to consider the not-informal business of retrieving Bligh from the West India mercantile and arranging his re-entry into the navy, whilst Bligh himself was unaware of proceedings.

***************

The crewing of Bounty...
Most writers on Bligh agree the seeds of the Bounty mutiny lay in the way the ship was crewed, but here, attention is needed to those close to Bligh who had an influence on the crewing, especially Campbell, Richard Betham who policed smuggling on the Isle of Man, and their associates.

In general, Bligh, although a magnificent sailor technically and practically, was a poor manager of men. On top of this, he has been badly maligned, his family history has been unresearched or misread. Bligh could not resist becoming puffed up by any authority he happened to be given, and he suffered a personality disorder, and a rigidity, expressed by his inexcusably foul mouth and losses of temper, interpersonal problems that were rooted in a gross insensitivity to the feelings and awarenesses of others. Bligh simply had no capacity for empathy.
The Bounty mutiny was largely due to the way the ship was crewed. Bligh's biographer, Gavin Kennedy, argues persuasively that Fletcher Christian became semi-suicidal, and irrational. Glynn Christian's book (Glynn Christian, Fragile Paradise, on Bounty's crewing, pp. 60-64) is elaborate on Christian's emotions as he was being driven by Bligh. A descendant of Christian, Glynn, in his book of personal discovery of the mutineer, Fragile Paradise, writes: "It is strange that Bligh, a man dogged in the pursuit of his duty to the king, allowed himself to sail with neither the muscle he needed to man the ship nor the muscle he needed for discipline". Kennedy in his biography of Bligh, makes the same point, showing that by attending to the fancies of others, as well as to some of his own, Bligh "appeared to dilute the strength of his crew". Too much attention to family concerns and linkages was just one of the reasons Bligh's crewing was inadequate. Bounty was not crewed as a naval vessel usually was, whether the king was interested in her or not. Despite Bligh's alleged liking for the extremes of naval disciplines, he had not himself been under that discipline for four years, as he had been sailing between London-Jamaica. Bligh crewed the ship with too many friends, old shipmates and acquaintances, including men recommended by his family. There was no single reason disaster could be expected, yet disaster struck.
In general, the mutiny was a minor incident in British naval history, related to a special mission on behalf of West Indian slave owners, and invested with prestige by Sir Joseph Banks, The Royal Society, and George III, who was impressed by his sugar revenues. See also, Bengt Danielsson, (Trans. from the Swedish), What Happened on the Bounty. London, Allen and Unwin, 1962. Before stepping onto Bounty, Bligh and Fletcher Christian had sailed together several times on Campbell's Jamaica ships.

Thomas Douglas (or, Hamilton-Douglas), fourth Earl Selkirk, of St Mary's Isle, a friend of the Bethams on the Isle of Man, complained on 14 September of the complement of Bounty, as Bligh had refused to take out his son, Dunbar Douglas. Bligh told Selkirk that Lord Howe had fixed the complement of the ship. Bligh's father-in-law, Richard Betham, also desired Bligh to take out Dunbar Douglas, and the fellow had just arrived from the West Indies in time to go out. Betham had written..., "and I hope my Lord Selkirk will allow him [to go], as it will give you [Bligh], the pleasure to be the means of his [Dunbar's] promotion." Betham wrote to Bligh on Dunbar Douglas on 21 September. This was an "opportunity" that Bligh forcefully declined.
Gavin Kennedy, Bligh, p. 21 indicates Bligh in September, 1787, wrote to "Lord Selkirk", who then wrote to Banks, on the subject of crewing Bounty. This fourth Earl of Selkirk thought Bligh a sad case as he might not get promotion from this command, and mentioned that Hunter, out to Botany Bay with Capt. Phillip, had received a better promotion. Selkirk's information concerning naval matters and the Pacific was keen. Selkirk also knew of Campbell as a friend of Betham, and Bligh, of course, which Kennedy may not have known. (A member of the Earl's family was later governor of the Isle of Man.) The intended Bounty sailor was Dunbar Hamilton-Douglas, (1766-1796), fourth son of fourth Earl Selkirk by Helen Hamilton, later Captain or Commander RN, who died of yellow fever about St Christophers. Dawson, Banks Letters, variously. The fourth Earl became Rector of Glasgow University not long after Duncan Campbell's father had died. GEC, Peerage, Dundonald, p. 528 ; Selkirk, pp. 618-621. Burke's Extinct for Dunbar. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Hamilton and also for Hope-Dunbar. Stenton, British Parliamentarians, Vol. 1, p. 253; and in Vol. 1, p. 528. Stenton registers Katherine Jane of this Hamilton-Douglas family, marrying MP Loftus Wigram, son of the convict contractor to Australia, Robert Wigram/Fitzwigram. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage for Wigram/Fitzwigram. Earl Selkirk's name is also associated with Kirkcudbrightshire. He was greatly interested in the problem of the depopulation of the Highlands and the settlement of Scots in areas of the British Empire, especially Canada. There had been a family rumour that Lord Selkirk had been in love with DC's sister, Molly, who married Richard Betham. However, Richard Betham and Molly C were married on Sept. 13, 1748 (recorded in The Scots Magazine, as noted by WDC). Lord Selkirk's name is also associated with Kirkcudbrightshire. He was greatly interested in the problem of the depopulation of the Highlands and the settlement of Scots in areas of the British Empire. Selkirk wanted his son Dunbar Douglas to go on Bligh's Bounty but was disappointed. fix note - 1771 - born, Thomas Douglas Selkirk 1771-1820, later 5th Earl of Selkirk, a Whig politician after 1799, of St Mary's Isle, Kirkcudbrightshire, in 1803-1811. Interested in the settlement of Canada, eg Manitoba. son of Dunbar Hamilton Douglas, was a friend of Sir Walter Scott, interested in question of depopulation of the Scottish Highlands, and settlement thereby of the British Empire. The family resided at St Mary's Isle, Kirkcudbrightshire.

News that Duncan Campbell was close to matters for the crewing of the breadfruit ship had perhaps gotten about in some mariners' circles! Campbell was in receipt of a request from John Sheppard at Gravesend (who may have been a mastmaker there), that Sheppard's son go on [Campbell's ship] Lynx/breadfruit ship, as gunner. Actually, whether Sheppard wanted his son to go on the breadfruit voyage, or merely wanted him on Campbell's Jamaica ship Lynx, is not clear. Campbell when Lynx had been rejected for the breadfruit voyage put her in command of Capt. Ruthven. Interpretation of Campbell's reply to Sheppard might depend on why Campbell might have needed a gunner for Lynx, if she was only to continue sailing to Jamaica.
Duncan Campbell Letterbooks: Transcript from ML A3229, p. 342: Note: Campbell to John Sheppard, Gravesend, 21 Sept., 1787. Campbell seems to have suggested that Sheppard's son be gunner on Lynx or with Bligh - on the assumption that Lynx would be accepted for the breadfruit voyage. Campbell was still prepared to see young Sheppard go on Lynx with Capt. Ruthven. Mackaness, Life of Bligh, p. 51, p. 59, Vol. 1. See also, Richard Betham to Bligh, 21 Sept., 1787. Campbell to Nepean, 22 Aug. , 1787; 30 Aug., 1787: Campbell to Dugald Campbell, 30 Aug., 1787. Campbell to his son Dugald in Jamaica. (Quoted from Mackaness, Life of Bligh, Vol. 1, p. 5). Relevant letters from Campbell's Letterbooks include: Campbell to John Sheppard, 21 Sept., 1787; Also, Richard Betham to Bligh, 21 Sept., 1787; Mackaness, Life of Bligh, p. 59, Vol. 1. [Note to the superscript: Duncan Campbell, London, to Dugald Campbell, Jamaica, 30 August, 1787, cited in Mackaness, Life of Bligh, Vol. 1, p. 51]. On 10 May, 1787, government advertised for a vessel for the breadfruit voyage. The incoming tenders were made into a short list of five ships by 16 May. Campbell on 15 May tendered his ship Lynx, 300 tons, with a third flush deck able to be put on her, new sheathed. Campbell considered her "a compleat little ship". This was all a handy idea as Bligh had sailed Lynx and knew her well.

The proposed breadfruit voyage was common knowledge to those who had recently begun thinking about the Pacific. Arthur Phillip at Rio de Janeiro on 2 September, 1787, with the First Fleet, wrote to under-secretary Evan Nepean at the Home Office, "[those] articles will, I hope, be sent out with the ship that goes for the breadfruit." The advertisement for tenders for the breadfruit voyage had only been published on 10 May, three days before the First Fleet sailed from Portsmouth.
Phillip to Nepean re items to go out in the breadfruit ship, from Rio de Janeiro, 2 Sept., 1787, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1, part 2, p. 111.

By 9 September, 1787, a more complex plan had emerged for fitting up two ships ex-NSW, one for China, one for India, promoted by West India merchant Benjamin Vaughan. Vaughan was an influential member of the West India Lobby group (he had probably met Jefferson in March-April 1786). In 1784 he was a member of the Certificate Committee of the West Indian Planters and Merchants meeting at the London Tavern. Vaughan was on their select committee in May 1785, and on the standing committee in December 1787. Three other Vaughans were also associated with the standing committee about then. Given the number of Campbells on Jamaica, the absence of the name Campbell from names of the London-based West India lobby groups remains intriguing.

Bligh anyway began to crew Bounty and found in Richard Betham a "helpful" father-in-law. Peter Heywood, whose father had been steward of the Duke of Atholl and Deemster of the Isle of Man, whose uncle was Sir Thomas Pasley in the navy, had his appointment to Bounty procured by Betham. John Hallet was a brother of Anne Hallet, a friend of Bligh's wife, Elizabeth. John Hallett of Hythe, near Southampton, father of John, on 25 August wrote to Banks thanking him for procuring his son's appointment to Bounty.
The crewing of Bounty is referred to in Kennedy, Bligh, pp. 19ff; Mackaness, Life of Bligh, Vol. 1, pp. 51-59, giving Richard Betham to Bligh, 21 Sept., 1787, on Peter Heywood. Hallet to Banks, Dawson, The Banks Letters, p. 380.

The boy Hallet was willing to come to London immediately if Bligh thought such was necessary. William Peckover, who had been gunner on Cook's Discovery, third voyage, became gunner of Bounty. Alex Smith alias John Adams, was son of a Thames lighterman. Edward Young, nephew of Captain Sir George Young, was also a protégé of Banks, and was known to Peter Heywood.

Bounty was at Spithead by 4 November, to wait twenty days for Howe's final orders. Bligh became increasingly impatient. On 28 November the ship's crew received two month's pay in advance. On the afternoon she left Spithead, and shortly after, Bligh was vociferous in complaint to Campbell, to whom he wrote a marvellous seaman's letter, on 10 December.

He feared he would be unable to get about Cape Horn in time. He was correct. Try mightily as he did, he failed to get around Cape Horn. The story of the mutiny, of course, is history.

By October 1789, Campbell had developed a habit of going into the country more frequently. In October 1789, his son Dugald wrote from Jamaica on buying more negroe ground. After his magnificent sail to Timor, Bligh at Coupang on 19 August, 1789 wrote to his wife, Betsy, about the mutiny: "know then, my own dear Betsy, I have lost the Bounty". In October 1789 Bligh also wrote from Timor about Fletcher Christian and the mutiny to his wife Betsy, addressed to her c/- Duncan Campbell at the Adelphi.
The Mitchell Library, Sydney, holds various of William Bligh's letter to Duncan Campbell on commercial matters. ML, CY Reel 178, Safe 1/40: William Bligh, Letters 1782-1805. See Mackaness, Life Of Bligh, Vol. 1, p. 49.
Paul Brunton, Awake Bold Bligh: William Bligh's Letters describing the Mutiny on HMS Bounty. Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1989., p. 1. During April 1989 was observed the bicentenary of the mutiny on the Bounty. Two exhibitions were mounted on this subject, modestly in Sydney, at the New South Wales State Public Library, and spectacularly at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London. That original letter is now in the care of the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and was displayed during mid-1989 when the Mitchell and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, were both holding exhibitions on the bicentenary of the mutiny.

Bligh on 12 October, 1789 had written to Campbell from Batavia, giving an explicit and unadorned account of his experience of the mutiny... "the most severe treachery". A packet sailed on the 15th. Bligh sent his mail by it but hoped to reach home before his letters did. There is no indication in Campbell's letters that he received Bligh's October letter from Batavia before Bligh set foot back in England.

In another domain, incredible as it seems today, because of the way the Bligh legend has been written, Campbell in London on 6 January, 1790 was writing to his eldest son Dugald, a friend of Bligh then on Jamaica, hoping that his youngest son, (Little Duncan, aged nine), then on Jamaica visiting Dugald, would be coming back to London with Bligh on Bounty. This was to be a very cheerful private use of a king's armed vessel, indeed!

Campbell wrote... from

London 6 January 1790

.....Since the above, I had had the great satisfaction of receiving my Dear Dugald's Letters of the 11 & 27 Oct, the favourable Accounts of the Weather therein conveyed was a very pleasing circumstance to me. I have read with attention that part of your letter touching the purchase of 60 or 70 Acres additional of Negroe Ground, adjoining to that of Saltspring, which you seem to think may be bought a Bargain. ... I have referred also to Mr brown's letter on the head of such a purchase & his letter seems to me to be very much to the purpose. ....

I will however contrary to my inclinations, to the laying out of further money in Jamaica, agree to the purchasing 60 or 70 Acres of the land which you so strongly recommend .... I have told him [Mr Brown] of my intention of giving you the sole management of my Jamaican Affairs, which I trust he will receive with becoming propriety .... I observe what you say about sending Duncan home with Bligh should he arrive in time. I am not so clear that Duncan will now at so early a period benefit by the change - he is not come the length of Nautical observations, nor will he be so well informed in Loading and Stowing a ship as in the Lynx now be so well accomodated: if however the departure of the two Ships was to happen nearly at the same time, in that case I should have no objection to Duncan coming home in the Bounty.

......Shift on your Account in the Britannia Capt Lamb.

Duncan Campbell Letterbooks, Vol. 6, ML A3230. Capt. Lamb: Edward Lamb, who had been chief mate with midshipman Fletcher Christian with Bligh on Bligh's last voyage on Campbell's Britannia to Jamaica. After the Bounty mutiny, Lamb came to Bligh's defense when Fletcher's brother, Edward Christian, came forward to protect the name of Fletcher, accused of mutiny. Lamb felt he knew the two men and always retained a poor impression of Fletcher. Lamb's offer, dated 28 Oct., 1794, is recorded in Bligh's Narrative; Mackaness, Life of Bligh, Vol. 1, p. 46. On 1 Dec., 1790, Campbell in London wrote to his son Capt. John C of the Lynx; 1 Dec. was the birthday of Little Duncan whom John was to teach reading and navigation. Dugald was the son of his father's first wife, Rebecca. Little Duncan was Campbell's son by his second wife, Mary Mumford.

Writing to Dugald on 3 February, 1790, a month before he found out what had happened to Bligh, Campbell began:

London 3 February 1790

To Dugald Campbell, Jamaica

......our prospect of evading storms which have on so many occassions blasted our hopes of a Crop at Saltg. ... I am glad to observe you are making the necessary exertions for succeeding Crops, I hope & trust with less attending expences. The quantity you expect this year I hope may be increased without overworking your Negroes, which is at all times to be avoided, as well from motives of humanity, as real benefit to our Interests. The folks who are for promoting the abolition of the Slave Trade, have now taken it up with as much Zeal as in the last Sessions: yet I cannot say I have no so great fear as many of my friends here seem to have; my relyance is than on the Ultimate Mature & important deliberations of the Legislature such dangerous consequences will open to their view affecting the Wealth and Commerce of their Country, as must call forth the Wisdom of Parliament to prevent so unpolitick an event from taking place. I have perused your letter of the 9 Nov to your Uncle Neil...[Duncan's brother, Neil, who had just died]

I shall begin to look on the Account of Duncan's arriving every day. Tho I have heard of Jack being safe arrived at Madrass, & being on the best terms with his Capt; yet I have no letter from himself; he has an arduous task on his hands. By the Accounts from Madrass the Chief Mate is mending but slowly. I think the Valentine is now on her passage home, & I flatter myself with the hope of seeing Jack in all May.
From Duncan Campbell's Letterbooks: Note: On 23 February, 1790, Neil Campbell, aged 66, Duncan's brother, died at Woolwich. Neil had been Clerk of Survey to HM Warren, the Arsenal, on the Thames at Woolwich. He was buried on the 27th at Plumstead Churchyard, east of Woolwich. Thames historians inimical to Campbell as hulks overseer have suggested Neil assisted Duncan with establishing the hulks, which may or may not have been the case in fact. They also suggest Neil himself had been assisted in obtaining his position by the Duke of Argyll. In 1790, Capt. Douglass was on Campbell's ship Lynx.
Concerning Campbell's later land purchase(s) at Blackheath, See Burke's Peerage. Edward Viscount Coke in 1747 married Mary Campbell (d. Sept. 30, 1811), co-heir of John, Duke of Argyll and Greenwich. The Duke had probably helped Neil (Duncan's brother) find a position at the Warren (the Woolwich Arsenal) in 1775. Thomas William Coke, the popular MP for Norfolk, and an agricultural innovator, later Lord Leicester, sold ground at Blackheath to Campbell in 1784. One of the farms south-east of there that Campbell purchased was Brandshatch, the site of the present-day motor raceway. The Mitchell Library, Sydney, has a transcript of Duncan Campbell's will.

Campbell at this time (February 1789) was considering giving Dugald the sole management of Saltspring.. Bligh's probable landing soon at Jamaica [as far as Duncan knew] had been referred to in an earlier letter to Dugald - the assumption of course being there had been no interruption to Bounty's breadfruit voyage. Campbell did not feel that such an unpolitic event as the abolition of slavery, could in the wisdom of Parliament, occur.

Otherwise, Campbell was dubious about little Duncan coming home with Bligh on Bounty, as the lad might learn less, commercially. Unless perchance, Bounty left Jamaica in company with Lynx. Campbell directed Dugald to shift his own account in Britannia Capt. Lamb. As Campbell later found, Dugald had intended to put Little Duncan on Bounty for his voyage home... And there is no indication from Campbell's letters here that he had received Bligh's October letter to him from Batavia, before Bligh set foot back in England.

And shortly, Campbell was visited by an angry Pacific hurricane. Bligh arrived back in England on 14 March, 1790, at the Isle of Wight, from Batavia via the Cape on the ship Vlydte.

Already he had written heart-broken letters to his wife, Betsy, and to Campbell, about losing Bounty. Soon, Bligh was on Campbell's Adelphi doorstep. Curiously, Campbell does not seem to have been upset about the outcome of the voyage, nor does he seem to have had any anxiety about any loss of face, as withThe Royal Society, or the Society of Arts, or before West India merchants, due to the mutiny. The expression of outrage, it seems, was mostly left to Bligh.

The sensation caused when Bligh returned home greatly disturbed the development of an accurate picture of the Pacific's maritime history to date. The events of 1789, including Britain's decision to further pursue its creation of a convict colony by raising the NSW Corps and sending the Second Fleet, had much to do with the way both Australia, and Tahiti, were entered into international consciousness - and here one does not mean only European consciousness. Tahiti entered "history" because of Cook's first voyage of exploration, then with the Bounty voyage, plus some contacts by the French and Spanish, but not including the visit by Lady Penrhyn. Breadfruit was anyway destined to be ignored by slaves.
Kennedy, Bligh, pp. 130ff on Bligh's return to London. By 1850 on Jamaica, breadfruit was fed to pigs and poultry. The slaves did not like it, though sometimes it has been used as an emergency food.

***************

Was there anything that Bligh's 1930s biographer, Mackaness, or other writers, may not have known about? Campbell when he heard the news of the mutiny took it apparently calmly: no apoplexy. His sister Molly's (Mary) son, Dr Campbell Betham, had recently graduated in medicine from the University of Edinburgh, then gone to Whitehaven to begin his practice. (Molly's husband, Bligh's father-in-law, Richard Betham, had died about 31 May, 1789.
Duncan Campbell's friend, George Kinlock, had paid the medical student's last bills after the death of Richard Betham, which had been kept a secret from the student until after he had graduated. Letter, Duncan Campbell to Dr Campbell Betham, 19 March, 1790.

According to records on the Isle of Man and other information in the Campbell Letterbooks, Betham was certainly deceased by late 1789. His will, with one Robert Heywood assisting the executors, was dated 31 March, 1787. A document at the Isle of Man archives has someone applying for his post, as Betham was deceased, on 31 May, 1789. Betham's will was probated about 24 June, 1789. Some fresh aspects of Manx background came to the fore with the defence of the mutineers and their reputations.
I am grateful to Ann Harrison, an archivist at the Manx Museum Library, for assistance in researching Richard Betham, his death date, and providing material from the Atholl Papers Index. Mutineer Heywood later wrote to Betham, not knowing Betham was dead, bemoaning the events of Bounty's voyage, an indiscretion which can have put Bligh in no better humour about Heywood. Bligh once wrote to Heywood's mother about Heywood's "baseness". Item: Betham R, 31-5-1789, X/5-30, H. Cosnahan to G. Farquar, applying for the post of Mr Betham who has now died. Records, Manx Museum Papers.

Campbell about the time Bligh returned was, initially at least, more interested in helping the Betham children with the execution of their father's will, and he wrote about the Betham estate to Dr. Campbell Betham at Whitehaven. Betham had not become wealthy and his wife Molly had predeceased him. Betham had given a pledge for the payment of debts and legacies, to Robert Telly and Robert Heywood Esquire, both of Douglas, the Isle of Man. Betham gave everything to his daughter Anne and his son Campbell the young doctor, exceptions noted in codicils, should he have written them. There was nothing for Harriott Colden formerly of New York (older sister of Dr. Campbell ) or her two sons, and oddly enough, nothing for Bligh's wife, Elizabeth.

A Campbell letter is relevant...

London March 19, 1790

Dr Campbell Betham

I receive your letter of the 15th Inst - advising me of your having taken up your residence at Whitehaven & of your intentions to practice & for aspect of success in that place, which gives me much satisfaction. Nothing can contribute to that success more than a minute attention to your demeanour and address. Levity in every situation of Life is disgusting, but more particularly so in a Man of your profession. Let me convince you therefore to adopt a deportment suitable to the character you profess. & to study by all means to get into the good graces of the old ladies even more than the young, those of the last will naturally follow the first, to accomplish this you must yourself study the Graces. A Well bred Man will always meet with attention and respect. I send you herewith the Deed which you and your sister will sign, first filling up the dates in words, & return it to me as soon after as you please, you may draw for the money. I observe what you say as to the money you suppose to be owing to Mr. Kinlock. It was me who paid your Bill, but that you will settle when you can better afford it. I send you herewith a few letters the purport of which you will see by perusal, afterwards seal and deliver them or not as you may seem best. I think they can do no harm & may be of some service to you. Poor Bligh has come home without his Bounty, but I trust & hope his conduct will be so rewarded that upon the whole he will suffer but little. All my family desire to be remembered to you - I am

But it may have been that young Dr Betham was given to levity, and Duncan himself a little depressed. Duncan's brother Neil had died aged 66 on 23 February, previous, buried the 27th in Plumstead Churchyard. Yet, Campbell was shortly involved with Bligh's propagandising for a suitably vindicating aftermath to the mutiny. It is also not known if Campbell had ever met his employee, Fletcher Christian. Why did Campbell take the news so quietly? As a man long-experienced in employing ships captains, he may not have been so impressed with Bligh's personality, and hence unsurprised at hearing of a mutiny? He may not have cared greatly whether the voyage had been a success or a failure, but this seems unlikely.

There were perhaps other reasons for Campbell's reticence. At the time in London, representatives of slaving interests in Parliament were defending their industries, claiming that the mortality of slaves on the Middle Passage was not as large as the loss in the transportation of British convicts! One does not imagine Campbell would have wished to buy into that argument, since he would have drawn attention to himself as the major convict contractor operating from London till 1775, whilst it was his policy as hulks overseer to avoid publicity at all costs. The death rate on convict ships to North American was normally about one-in-seven.

At the time, because of the healthiness of the First Fleet, the mortality rate of that Fleet had caused no comment. At the time, the death rate of the Second Fleet was unknown? The only death rates for transportation that could have been referred to were the rates known for before 1775. One doubts Campbell would have liked his associates to be reminded of that aspect of his career. Since the Bounty project had long been promoted by slaving interests, as the mutiny story hit the headlines, it might well have been that Campbell stayed out of matters as far as possible, in order primarily to keep mention of himself and the hulks out of the newspapers.

If Campbell did feel that any of his prestige had been damaged in public because of the mutiny, he had other reasons to lie low. A nobody named Fletcher Christian - his former employee - had taken a king's ship, generating indignation amongst officials. The Royal Society was scarcely amused, though strangely, historians of the mutiny have only canvassed Banks' views. Finally, George III and the navy sent off HMAV Pandora on a punitive expedition to capture the mutineers. Campbell may well have felt that anything he might say would be quite superfluous. On the evidence of his Letterbooks, however, he took the news calmly. He had a practical task to hand - helping Betsy Bligh, her sisters and her brother - execute their father's will and organise his estate. Also, the British Creditors were meeting again.

Whatever Campbell thought about the mutiny, he did become keen to see Bligh's words published. The aftermath of the Bounty mutiny has been treated with remarkable passion, more than was ever warranted. Generations of writers have exercised their wits on the legends, screen writers have agonised over niceness of portrayal, and many have wondered why Bligh's personality was so much a magnet for mutiny. Bligh certainly deserves a place in maritime history for his magnificent open boat voyage to Timor. Yet it also seems that Campbell never again alluded to the mutiny in family letters written after the early 1790s.

***************

One Londoner who knew Jamaica was keen to know more about the mutiny. At the time, Campbell was associated with the London charity for Scots, the Scottish Corporation. On 17 March, Bligh was presented to George III in company with Sir Joseph Banks. The same day, Campbell wrote to a man who had nominated him (Campbell) for a seat on the board of a charity for indigent London Scots, the Scottish Corporation, a charity chartered by Charles II for the relief of poor natives of North Britain not entitled to any parochial relief in England. This was Lt. General Melville of Brewer St., who invited Campbell to dine with him on the 20th. Melville, who was a member of the West India merchants' lobby group, was curious about news of Bligh's return and may have wanted to report to the lobby group. So he invited Campbell to dinner? That same day, 17 March, Campbell replied to Melville, declining the invitation, as on the 20th he had to chair a meeting of the British Creditors. He wrote...

Adelphi 17th March, 1790

Lieut. Gen. Melville, Brewer Street

I had the honour to receive your very polite letter & kind Card of invitation to dine at Brewer Street on Sunday on which day being engaged I am deprived of the pleasure of waiting upon you. The approbation you are pleased to express of the little services I have been enabled to render the Scottish Corporation is very flattering to me. I cheerfully accept the honour done by me by your Nomination & will endeavour to merit a continuance of your favourable opinion in the execution of that office to which you have recommended me. With great Respect and Regard I have the honor to be

Dear Sir

Presumably this was the same Melville, the inventor of the carronade gun, whose gardens at St. Vincent were intended to house transplanted breadfruit. Mention of Melville here means some other cross-links of information can be considered. One merchant inconvenienced by the American Revolution had been Charles Gore of Liverpool.
See Gore: entry, USA National Union of Manuscripts, Catalog. 66-51. R. H. Campbell, Carron Company. London and Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1961. For the duration of disturbances, 1774-1783, Gore kept a set of letterbooks now in an American archive. Two of Gore's correspondents were Bamber Gascoyne; and Richard Pennant, Lord Penrhyn, leader of the West India lobby group. Bamber Gascoyne was concerned with the Carron Company of Stirlingshire, manufacturers of the carronade gun invented by Melville.
Duncan Campbell to Lt.-General Melville, 17 March, 1790. Presumably this was Robert Melville (1723-1806), LLD of Edinburgh Univ., FRS, was promoted general in 1798. On Melville, see Alan Valentine, The British Establishment, earlier cited. Melville established a botanic gardens at St. Vincent in 1765. Melville incidentally has been mildly disputed in a Carron Company history as the inventor of the carronade gun, which was deadly at close range for naval warfare; it is a question of the use of prototypes versus an inventor's claim to a singular discovery.

The British Creditors were a lobby group of British merchants wishing to retrieve their monies owed them by Americans from before the outbreak of the American Revolution. Duncan Campbell was one of their sometime chairmen.

The British Creditors' committee met again on 22 February, 1790 with Grenville, and with Pitt on 20 March, 1790, with no success. The debate went on until the conclusion of the Jay treaty in 1794. Meanwhile, William Bligh was baying loudly at the moon of Fletcher Christian's betrayal.

The mutiny story excited London. On 6 May 6 at the Royalty Theatre in Wells Street near Goodmans Fields was staged a play, The Pirates, Or, the Calamities of Capt. Bligh.

On 15 May the same theatre, extracting the utmost, boasted a new musical piece giving a hint of the exotic temptations the mutineers had succumbed to, Tar Against Perfume, Or, The Sailor Preferred. All of which was pro-Bligh propaganda, as was an account published in The Gentleman's Magazine.

On 7 May, 1790, James Matra wrote to Sir Joseph Banks of an attempted mutiny by Gray and Anderson on Cook's first voyage.

Apart from rising talk of a second breadfruit voyage, and the reactions of naval men. Campbell became enthusiastic about the publication of books stemming from the voyage, and the mutiny, and sent copies to his son Dugald in Jamaica. Campbell also became involved with Bligh's propagandising for a suitably vindicating aftermath to the mutiny. The entire affair was treated with more passion than was warranted, unless it is accepted that the preservation of British naval discipline was regarded as a matter for international policing, in an environment where policing activity was also placing convicts also on Australian soil. Bounty however had largely been crewed by Bligh and his family. Seldom in naval history does a man with family help choose the naval crew who will mutiny under him!.

The reactions to the mutiny of the British Navy and its judicial arm is well recorded. Some mutineers were hung after HM Pandora Capt. Edwards, was sent out on a highly punitive expedition to scour the Pacific and find the mutineers. (Of late, Pandora, which was wrecked, has been the subject of impressive marine archaeology). True, Bounty was a king's ship, and the king in a sense had been affronted by the mutiny. Many of Bligh's family worked in a highly authoritarian atmosphere as government functionaries, and their attitudes doubtless produced a punitive view of mutineers. Bligh's abusive mouth and dominating temper doubtless provoked Christian, and others, to act against him. Bligh later was thrown off a ship at the Nore mutiny, and although he was probably morally correct as governor of New South Wales when he confronted traders there, his attitude and way of expressing it in NSW provoked further rebellion there.

Bligh on arriving home had immediately set about to put the record straight. Early on, naval authorities had expressed little interest in the affair, declining even to repay Bligh over £300 for losses by the mutiny, including loss of his library. Had Bligh not moved quickly, and as powerfully as he was able, his entire naval future could well have been ruined, and he might have ended the rest of life, unsuited as he was to the mercantile, sailing to Jamaica for Campbell. The anti-mutineer campaign set in play was a masterpiece of public relations of the day, undertaken with rage and frustration. It was also a pre-emptive strike against any forces the Christian family might be able to rally.

Technically, Bligh was a superb mariner. He was also a well-meaning man with almost an artist's eye for natural beauty. But he suffered greatly from a personality disorder often expressed with a shockingly foul-tempered tongue. He was especially difficult when he was overly impressed with whatever authority had been designated him and other people's failings happened to displease him.

Such traits ill-fitted him to be a commander, and were also what made him a mediocre commercial ship's captain. Bligh may have realised that the mutiny had provided him with an opportunity to present himself as a pugnaciously professional naval man. In fact, Bligh had not been in the navy for four years before he stepped onto Bounty... he had been on Campbell's ships.

But as a public relations story, the mutiny gave Bligh an opening as the naval man, adventure-loving, loyal to the King, animated by a profound abhorrence of any breach of naval discipline, any affront to the King. It was now a far cry from the day of Bligh's outrage at the mutiny, the day of the cry of the desperate emotions, almost suicidal before the mutiny, of the too-much-insulted Manxman, of Fletcher Christian, complaining at the way he had been used, "I am in hell". It was the cry of revenge and vindication Bligh now heard... his own cry.

Meanwhile, Little Duncan arrived home by Lynx in April 1790. Later, Lynx was taken to Madras by Duncan's son, John. Campbell's favourite whom Bligh was asked to look after. By 7 April, 1790, Campbell was writing to Dugald again... Bligh was just then at Duncan's elbow and would write to Dugald...

London April 7, 1790

To Dugald Campbell Jamaica - ...Boyick [clerk to Duncan Campbell] also sent you a copy of Bligh's letter to me with the heads of his misfortune A Narrative of his voyage from Otaheite - will speedily be published which I will send you. Bligh is now at my Elbow & means to write you by this Packet, he expects & will certainly obtain promotion, but that cannot take place till a Court Martial is held upon him which cannot be done till the People at Batavia arrive: these are expected in all May; about that time I flatter myself with the hope of seeing Jack, ...
Campbell's trade to India is little-mentioned in his Letterbooks as it was on his son John's account. Duncan had presumably provided John with capital. See Bligh to F. G. Bond on Boyick. Bligh referred to Boyick in this letter. George Mackaness, (Ed.), `Fresh Light on Bligh', p. 17, p. 35.

Master of the Bounty, John Fryer, arrived with others in England on 7 October. Fryer shortly went to visit a distant relative of Fletcher and Edward Christian, John Christian at No. 10 Strand, an address close to Campbell's Adelphi address. By that time, Bligh's own account of the mutiny was in the hands of Sir Joseph Banks, probably read by other Fellows and members of The Royal Society.

It has been said of Fletcher Christian, by his shipmate Lamb on a Campbell ship, that he was silly with women, easily besotted. With the Bounty VD list, speculation visits. Where did the particular infections come from? Had the Bounty sailors already been infected when they left Britain, or picked up some infection at the Cape of Good Hope? If so, did they then in turn infect the Tahitian women? Or, was it that the crew of Lady Penrhyn, (that "floating brothel" full of women plucked from the London streets) calling only weeks before Bounty arrived, had infected Tahitian women? But perhaps one would need to check Bounty's medical log for the entire voyage to be sure of matters here.

Over 4-7 May, 1788 the Lady Penrhyn (Capt. Sever) and Scarborough (Capt. Marshall) left Port Jackson, or Sydney, their work of delivering convicts over. The supercargo of Lady, Lt. Watts, found from his secret orders from George Macaulay he was to take command of the ship from May until whenever she completed her fur gathering about Nootka Sound. Watts guided Lady on a hitherto mysterious commercial voyage, first to Tahiti, then to China for a cargo of tea per her charter with the East India Company. Thence, home to England.

Arthur Bowes, surgeon aboard, diarised that at noon on Sunday, 18 May, 1788, Capt. Sever, Mr. Watts and himself opened "papers relative to our future destination". "The Mackenzie M'Cauly" (sic) had engaged the ship to North West America, Watts giving orders to Capt. Sever, to trade for furs, thence to China for tea as per charter. Lady by 15 May, 1788 was off Lord Howe Isle, by 2 June at Macaulay Isle, by 9 July, off Osnaburgh Isle. Scurvy began to bother the crew and Lt. Watts advised Capt. Sever to go to Tahiti, where the chief (Otoo, later, Tinah) was pleased to see Watts again. Macaulay Isle being named for Watts' employer, London alderman George Macaulay, of Blackheath.
See The Journal of A. Bowes-Smith, Surgeon in the Lady Penrhyn, 1787-1789, Sydney, Trustees of the State Public Library, New South Wales, 1979.

Lady Penrhyn got to Macao, HMAV Bounty got to Matavi Bay, Tahiti. We are left considering that no British ship had been to Tahiti for years, since Cook. Suddenly, in 1788, two British ships arrived there, one naval, one commercial. Significantly associated with the two ships were two men who were members of the same golf club, Campbell, Bligh's mentor, and Macaulay, a friend of Watts! The biographies of Campbell and Macaulay and news of the Blackheath Golf Club have gone wasting. Macaulay was well-known enough in London, or at least on board Lady Penrhyn, to be familiarly referred to as "the Mackenzie M'Cauly", and be recognised by men on the ship. Seldom in history have two members of the same golf club been associated with the opening of an ocean, and still escaped attention!

The mystery is: if Macaulay had been a self-promoter, and/or an influential man, how and why was he written out of the history? Was it that shipping convicts was so tainted a business that shipmen "forgot" they'd been involved? This possibility certainly does not apply to the Enderby whalers. But between May 1787 and May 1788, Macaulay, remaining in London, does not appear to have done anything resulting in his being named in the documents usually read by (Australian) historians. Though Macaulay may have been heard of again in the documents of the Corporation of the City of London, he did not surface in shipping records until there sailed from England on 26 December, 1788 his ship Pitt 775 tons Capt. Edward Manning for St Helens and Bencoolen. Alderman Curtis meanwhile with Henry Dundas' help in 1791 wished to send another ship to Nootka Sound. (It is not known if she sailed, however). (Note: By 1789 or later, according to Bateson, Lady Penrhyn was later purchased by Wedderburns and put on the London-Jamaica run).

The tracks of the First Fleet ships have only been described relatively recently. Scarborough for example once she'd set out from Sydney by 4 September, 1788 was about Grafton Island, and Lema Isle; she anchored in Macao Roads on 8 September.

***************

Lady Penrhyn's secret orders :

From 18 May, 1788, supercargo Watts was to order Lady Penrhyn to sail to the North West coast of America to trade for furs. At that time, J. H. Meares, sailing for the English merchants John and Cadman Etches and Co. of London, was heading for Nootka Sound. An interpretation he would have been in competition for Watts for Canton trade may be appropriate. Lady Penrhyn however did not go fur trading. One scenario is that because the crew had scurvy, she went instead to Tahiti for refreshment, then to China for tea, thence home. The other story is that her bottom was unfit to combat ice. The Tahiti connection is fascinating, and several tales arise.

Surgeon Bowes recorded that between 1-6 June, 1788, Capt. Sever before reaching Tahiti named an island after his shipowner, William Curtis. Henry Ligbird Ball named the nearby Macaulay Island (raising the question, did Ball know Macaulay personally?) Historically, and geographically, these names were never to be judged as important as other English place names near Sydney - Nepean, Hawkesbury, Banks, Phillip, King, Piper. But Macaulay has not been overlooked just because Macaulay Island was forgotten. For an intelligent man who had been out with Cook, Lt. Watts has a comparatively under-publicised career. His invisibility has remained in strange harmony with Macaulay's invisibility; his family history is untraced.

On 10 July, 1788, Lady Penrhyn anchored, remaining at Tahiti until 1 August, so Watts arrived there before Bligh and Bounty. Presumably, the Lady's sailors gave Tahitian women massive doses of the pox after infection from the convict women they'd enjoyed between London and Botany Bay... hence the VD rates noticed on Bounty after she left Tahiti. Christian was one sailor requiring treatment.

In London, meanwhile, Duncan Campbell would have been far more interested in recent events in the United States. Virginia at times had vainly tried to defeat the Constitution, which was finally ratified on 25 June, 1788. Not until ratification could the courts deal with importunate British merchants and for example, order planters to settle with merchants such as Campbell. On 1 July, 1788, Bligh wrote to Campbell from the Cape Of Good Hope, at about which time Lady Penrhyn was at Tahiti, where the question arises: did Watts tell the Tahitians of the death of Captain Cook? Yes. Meanwhile the Lady's bottom was examined, and found to be unfit to cope with the ice of Nootka Sound. As she had been built in 1786, and presumably was on her maiden voyage, it is surprising her bottom was so poor. Whatever prompted his decision, Watts after a three-week stay at Tahiti abandoned his Nootka orders and ordered the ship to China.

Tahiti was fated for trouble, including civil war. It was due to Cook's Voyages, as book, and Bligh's breadfruit voyage, plus, the Blackheath Connection, that after 1795, English missionaries came to Tahiti on Duff.

With culture shock, disease and other problems, the birthrates on Tahiti were smashed. From the 1770s, estimates of Tahiti's population were too high, between 121,5000 and Cook's figure of 200,000. William Wilson and others from Duff in 1797 estimated many fewer, say, 16,050, and 20 years later the population was about only 6000-7000. Both the Tahitians and the missionaries knew it was happening due to the psychological impact of Europeans, various diseases including venereal infections, the latter "almost universal". Sailors brought fleas with them, some infected with typhus, known as ships fever, and whole families might be wiped out.

By 8 August. Lady Penrhyn was by Penrhyn Island, named by Capt. Sever. By 15 September, by the Isle of Saypan. On 17 September she refreshed at Tinian. By 15 October she was by Grafton isle. By 19 October, she sailed up Macao Roads, readying to take her cargo of tea. About China, Lady met a ship named Talbot. Then she went home, presumably to the enrichment of Curtis and Macaulay, and possibly William Richards. And to be remembered mainly because she had carried only women to Botany Bay, not because she represented a mystery about the tenor of London's commercial instincts in the Pacific. On Tahiti, on 26 October, 1788. Bligh entered Matavi Bay on Bounty. Bligh was later alarmed to find that Watts had told the natives that their hero, if not demi-god, Capt. Cook, was dead. Bligh attempted to label this a "misunderstanding".
On Lt. Watts informing Tahiti that Cook was dead, see Kennedy, Bligh, p. 59, Note 2, p. 61. Meanwhile it now seems hard to credit that Bligh would have known little about how and why Watts went to the Pacific (for Macaulay), and why he had stopped at Tahiti.

1786... The men of Blackheath naturally possessed a variety of links of a personal, social, or of a family nature. Definite business links between them, relating to New South Wales, or, (regarded quite independently, the Pacific), can be established in some cases, as in the case of the whaling promoters, Enderbys, and John St. Barbe. St. Barbe and Macaulay, who lived perhaps 200-300 yards apart at Blackheath. Some of them were Freemasons, in which context their names are locked into both the history of suburban Blackheath, as well as into the history of golfing in Britain. With others of the Blackheathites, it is difficult - if not impossible for lack of relevant facts - to establish evidence on business links which conceivably might have existed between them. Various links might have been expected, but links with Freemasonry on such a scale as they existed are an element new to anyone familiar with the shipping records.

The strong links Blackheathites had with Lloyd's of London is another factor explaining background factors in the commercial exploitation of the Pacific - the Pacific was found less risky than expected, therefore less expensive, meaning... that if the Blackheath men underwrote each others' ships, as seems the case with the whalers, everybody benefited. There is a problem, however, in assessing how secret, or not, the plans of Blackheath men might have been intended to be. Were these plans intended to remain secret, then sufficient information can be gleaned from official papers - if only the Historical Records of New South Wales - for some of their plans to be outlined with reasonable clarity.

Considerable secrecy might have been necessary if some or all of the men of The Blackheath Connection were planning to undermine the dominance of the East India Company. A conspiracy theory here is more entertaining than it is necessary to hold. Without sorting through the implications created by a suggestion of a conspiracy organised by several merchants, one is hard put to explain our present ignorance of their intentions and activities, and so the exercise is helpful. Unless of course, there were so few London merchants interested in the Pacific that secrecy was unnecessary, those interested had no enemy but the East India Company's desire to protect its monopoly charter.

***************

And so ... various little-understood sets of genealogical linkages can be ranged around both the case of the first Campbells on Jamaica, and the legend of the mutiny on the Bounty. The links involve:
(1) The mysteriously unknown parents of Principal Neil Campbell of the College of Glasgow;
(2) The parents of Colonel John Campbell of Black River, Jamaica, such that John Black River becomes an uncle of Principal Neil;
(4) The healthily accurate genealogical line of Henrietta Campbell the wife of Principal Neil;
(5) The links between John Black River and other "first Campbells on Jamaica";
(6) The family history of Duncan Campbell (1726-1803), the prison hulks overseer;
(7) The links between William Bligh and Duncan Campbell;
(8) The descendancy of Duncan Campbell which resulted in the hulks overseer's Letterbooks being brought from England to Australia - where the genealogical trail goes cold from 1938.

The full genealogy entails viewing a considerable geographic sprawl from before, say, 1678, about Glasgow and specific parts of Argyllshire, to London, the Isle of Man, Jamaica, New York at the time of the American Revolution and also Boston, Virginia and Maryland, India, and then to Sydney and then Queensland, eastern Australia, to 1938.
An excellent model for the treatment of such a genealogical/geographic sprawl is Jacob M. Price, 'One Family's Empire: The Russell-Lee-Clerk Connection in Maryland, Britain and India, 1707-1857, Maryland Historical Magazine, Vol. 72. 1977.

The property names used by the first Campbells on Jamaica were: Black River (Colonel John and then his son Colin), New Hope (Peter Campbell and Peter II, one of these Peters being a brother of five siblings), Fish River (Peter or Patrick Campbell died 1739), Orange Bay (John Campbell - while a Col. James Campbell died on Orange Bay in 1744, aged 47 years; and Saltspring in Hanover Parish, Jamaica.

The original family purchase of Saltspring (843 acres) by Dugald Campbell had been on 27 April, 1736, from Richard Quarrell (a name due to live on in the history of quarrels over the ownership of the property). When Rebecca's brother John died in 1782, Saltspring was heavily mortgaged; it seems that Dugald when purchasing had had relatively little capital.

By 1784, the Campbells on Jamaica were many... At the Supreme Court of Judicature an assistant judge was John Campbell of Hope. Magistrates for Middlesex, St Mary and St George were David Campbell and Donald Campbell. In Hanover Jamaica in 1784, the Custos and Chief Judge of the Court of Common Pleas was Hon George Spence, Esq, and Hanover notables of 1784 included Dugald Malcolm, George Brissett senior (in the Jamaica Western Division of Horse (militia) including one Lt John Brissett; that militia had four officers named Campbell, while in the Foot, St Mary's and St George's, one Hanover militia had Ensign an Duncan Campbell Jnr, and many officers named Campbell). Other notables were William Mure, William Brown, Robert Kerr, Joseph Brissett, Donald Malcolm, one Duncan Campbell, W. D. Quarrell. Many of these surnames surface as correspondents of Duncan Campbell (in London, died 1803) by 1770.
See Almanack and Register for the Island of Jamaica, 1784, published by Douglass & Aikman.

Ends this article

***************

***************

The genealogical trails traced above are tortuous, and have only been traced due to the generous co-operation of Clan Campbell societies in Scotland, Australia and North America. My greatest debt here is owed to Miss Marion Campbell, of Kilberry, Scotland who provided accurate family trees of her own thirteen-generation line, which I then grafted onto my other information on the line of Duncan Campbell the hulks overseer.

In many ways, because of internal difficulties with their genealogy, the first Campbells on Jamaica and their relatives are best identified by their associations with other family trees - the Somervilles of the area about Glasgow, the Claibornes of Virginia, the Mumfords of Kent, the loyalist Coldens of New York, the Blighs.

Pursuit of these related families requires outlines being given for several more sets of connections... to the Shakespears of London and India, the Colden-Antills of New York, and via Blighs, the O'Connells of Southern Queensland.

As noted above, Ann Campbell married to Shakespear of London.

Family linkages continue in Australia:

The great sprawl of the genealogy of "the first Campbells on Jamaica" continues ... to Australia... partly connected to the family of William Bligh of the Bounty, as follows:

Deposed as governor of New South Wales in 1808, Bligh was replaced by Gov. Lachlan Macquarie, the first NSW military governor. Macquarie had an aide-de-camp, Henry Colden Antill. When Antill arrived at Sydney, he was surprised to meet "a distant cousin", Bligh's daughter Mary. Mary also was surprised, her father's feelings are not recorded. The connections arose thus:

William Bligh had married Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Betham on the Isle of Man. Elizabeth's sister Harriot Betham had married Richard Nicholls Colden of the Loyalist New York family. (Colden genealogy is unfortunately still incomplete.) This Richard Nicholls Colden was son of the surveyor-postmaster of New York, Alexander Colden. Richard's sister Jane married Judge (Major) John Antill, and had at least five children including Henry Colden Antill, aide-de-camp to Gov. Macquarie. Henry Colden Antill stayed in New South Wales, and his family intermarried with the elite Sydney commercial family of merchant Robert Campbell (those Campbells no relation at all with any of the other Argyllshire Campbells noted above as far as is known).

Meanwhile, Mary Bligh also stayed in New South Wales as her father returned to England. Her second husband was Maurice O'Connell, from an Irish family with an incomplete genealogy. An O'Connell descendant married into the family of the Dukes of Beaufort, as seen below:

Descendants of Lt-Gov New York Cadwallader Colden:
1. Lt-Gov. New York Cadwallader Colden (b.1688;d.1776) sp: Alice Christie (m.1715) 2. Surveyor-Postmaster New York, Alexander Colden sp: Miss NOTKNOWN
3. Mary Margaret Colden
3. Judge/Major Hon John Antill (b.1744;d.1815) - spouse unknown
4. Major John Collins Antill (d.1837) sp: Miss Notknown
4. Aide-de-camp to Gov Macquarie, NSW Pastoralist Major Henry Colden Antill (b.1779;d.1852) sp: Eliza WILLS (m.1818;d.1858) 5. NSW Pastoralist John Macquarie Antill (b.1822;d.1900) sp: Jessie Hassall Campbell (b.1834;m.1851;d.1917) 5. James Alexander Antill (b.1834;d.1920) sp: E. C. Poynton (m.1855)
4. Edward Antill 4. Alexander Colden Antill 4. Eliza Hope Antill sp: Cadwallader Colden 3. Elizabeth Colden (d.1824) sp: Sir, General Anthony Farrington, Bart1 (b.1741;m.1776;d.1823)
4. Capt. Charles Colden Farrington (b.1770;d.1796) sp: Caroline Boland (m.1793)
5. Sir Charles Henry Farrington, Bart2 (d.1828) 5. Sir Henry Maturin Farrington, Bart3 sp: Laura Maria had issue Bromley wife2 (m.1805) sp: Clarissa Claringbole wife1 (m.1802)
3. Richard Nicholls Colden New York Surveyor (d.1777) sp: Harriott Henrietta Maria Betham (b.1752;m.(Div))
4. Alexander Colden (b.1775) 4. Cadwallader Robert Colden (b.1776) 2. Botanist Jane Colden (b.1724;d.1766) sp: Widower Dr. William Farquhar (c.1759;m.1759) sp: Peter De Lancey
3. Alice De Lancey (d.1766) sp: Ralph Izard of New York
4. Sarah Izard sp: Gov. Nova Scotia, Gov. South Carolina, William Campbell (b.1732;m.1763;d.1778)
2. David Colden (d.1784) sp: Ann Willett
3. Lawyer, Mayor of New York, Cadwallader David Colden (b.1769;d.1834) sp: Maria Provost
2. Elizabeth Colden sp: Peter De Lancey
3. James De Lancey of the New York Loyalist family (b.1746;d.1804) sp: Martha Tippet.
Ends this genealogy for Colden-Antill of New York

Descendants of William Bligh:
1. NSW Gov., Captain William Bligh (b.1754;d.1817) sp: Elizabeth Betham (b.1753;m.1781;d.1812) 2. Harriet Maria Bligh 2. Mary Bligh (b.1783;d.1864) sp: Major John Putland (d.1808) sp: Lt-Gov Sir Maurice Charles O'Connel (b.1768;m.1810;d.1848) 3. MAURICE CHARLES O'CONNELL (b.1812;d.1879) sp: ELIZABETH LEGEIYT 3. WILLIAM BLIGH O'CONNELL (b.1814) sp: JONES Mary Australia (b.1825;m.1844;d.1858)
4. WILLIAM BLIGH O'CONNELL (b.1852) sp: AMELIA EMILY NISKE (b.1858)
5. LENA O'CONNELL (b.1878) sp: GEORGE DAVIDSON (m.1907;d.1952) 5. JOHN O'CONNELL (b.1879;d.1959) 5. ETHEL O'CONNELL (b.1881) 5. FRANCES O'CONNELL (b.1883) sp: ANDREW MELVILLE HORSBROUGH (m.1908) 5. CHARLES O'CONNELL (b.1885;d.1966) 5. MAURICE BLIGH O'CONNELL (b.1889) sp: MARY BEATRICE MORRISSEY 5. WILLIAM BLIGH O'CONNELL (b.1893;d.1959) sp: CATHERINE BROWNE (m.1934;d.1935) 5. MARY O'CONNELL (b.1895) sp: EGBERT GEORGE ENGLISH (d.1954) 5. CECIL BLIGH O'CONNELL (b.1902) sp: THELMA ADAMS (m.1934)
4. THOMAS O'CONNELL (b.1853;d.1887) 4. MAURICE CHARLES O'CONNELL (b.1855;d.1928) 4. RICHARD MURRAY O'CONNELL (b.1856;d.1923) sp: ANNA MARTHA GEARY (m.1881;d.1890)
5. GEARY O'CONNELL 5. RICHARD STUART O'CONNELL (b.1883;d.1935) sp: ANNE CROPPER (m.1928;d.1956)
3. ROBERT BROWNRIGG O'CONNELL (b.1816;d.1818) 3. ALICE ELIZABETH O'CONNELL (b.1818;d.1892) sp: SOMERSET Henry Charles Capel (b.1816;m.1840;d.1905)
4. CHARLES BRUCE HENRY SOMERSET (b.1841;d.1889) sp: VICTORIA ALICE ANNE FITZGIBBON (m.1862;d.1919)
5. MAY SOMERSET (d.1938) 5. GERALDINE AMY CAROLINE ALICE SOMERSET (d.1943) sp: WLADIMIR DEKOSSIKOWSKY (m.1905;d.1917) 5. ROSE MARGUERITE SOMERSET (d.1942) sp: BASIL GUY OSWALD SMITH (b.1861;m.1893;d.1928) 5. SYBIL MARY BLANCHE SOMERSET (d.1932) sp: GEORGE FREDERICK MOLINEUX-MONTGOMERIE (b.1869;m.1901;d.1915)
4. FITZROY WILLIAM HENRY SOMERSET (b.1845;d.1878) sp: ANNA MARTHA GEARY (m.1869;d.1890)
5. HENRY CHARLES FITZROY SOMERSET (b.1870;d.1940) sp: WINIFRED MARION BARTRAM (m.1920) 5. RAGLAN SOMERSET (b.1872;d.1940) sp: MADELEINE BLANCHE NEWLAND (m.1892) 5. ELIZABETH ALICE SOMERSET (d.1949) 5. HELEN SUSAN SOMERSET (d.1934)
4. RAGLAN MOLYNEUX BOSCAWEN SOMERSET (b.1855) 4. CAROLINE EMILY ALLWOOD SOMERSET sp: H. BASIL HAYWARD (m.1872) 4. MARY HENRIETTA CHARLOTTE SOMERSET (d.1880) sp: JOHN WILLIAM CLAYTON (m.1862) 4. BLANCHE ISABELLA SOMERSET (d.1922) sp: GEORGE HENRY HOPKINSON (b.1842;m.1866;d.1919)
5. HENRY CHARLES BARWICK HOPKINSON (b.1867;d.1946) sp: MABEL FRANCES LAETITIA PARNELL (m.1898;d.1947) 5. MABEL BLANCHE HOPKINSON (b.1868) 5. CECIL ARTHUR HOPKINSON (b.1870;d.1923) sp: SUSAN MARGARET TAYLOR (b.1880;m.1910;d.1954) 5. HUGH FITZROY HOPKINSON (b.1872;d.1921) 5. SYBIL MARY HOPKINSON (b.1873) sp: JOHN VIKRIS TAYLOR (b.1872;m.1905;d.1956) 5. EVELYN SOMERSET HOPKINSON (b.1875;d.1917) 5. MAURICE PHILIP HOPKINSON (b.1876;d.1911) 5. MYLES STAVELEY HOPKINSON (b.1879;d.1929) sp: ELEANOR WALTER (m.1909)
4. GEORGINA HESTER CORNELIA SOMERSET sp: LIONEL EDMEE JOBERT (m.1872) sp: C. M. SHOWERS (m.1894)
3. CARLO PHILIP O'CONNELL (b.1820;d.1873) sp: ANNE HESTER BALDOCK (m.1847) 3. RICHARD O'CONNELL (b.1821;d.1873) sp: HELEN ROSE BLIGH (b.1825;m.1851;d.1909) 4. JAMES LAURENCE O'CONNELL 3. MARY NANO GODFREY O'CONNELL (b.1823;d.1825)
2. Elizabeth BLIGH sp: Richard BLIGH Barrister-449 2. Frances Ann BLIGH 2. Jane BLIGH 2. Anne Campbell BLIGH (b.1785;d.1844) 2. HARRIET MARIA BLIGH (b.1781;d.1856) sp: HENRY ASTON BARKER (b.1774;m.1802;d.1856) 3. WILLIAM BLIGH BARKER (b.1802;d.1805) 3. HENRY BARKER (b.1804;d.1883) sp: ALBIANA ELIZABETH ANDREWS (m.1839) 3. ELIZABETH CATHERINE BARKER (b.1806;d.1889) sp: GLENNIE William RN (b.1797;m.1833;d.1856)
4. WALTER HENRY GLENNIE (b.1835) sp: LUCY STEPHENS 4. HARRIET MARY GLENNIE (b.1836) 4. WILLIAM GLENNIE (b.1838;d.1861) 4. CATHERINE SOPHIA GLENNIE (b.1839) sp: JOHN INGLES
5. REGINALD JOHN INGLES (b.1866) 5. MARY ELIZABETH INGLES (b.1869) sp: R. C. FOOT 5. CATHERINE INGLES (b.1873) sp: ARTHUR ELLERSHAW (b.1869;d.1929) 5. JOHN ALEXANDER INGLES (b.1875;d.1934) sp: ANNIE MARIE DEASE (b.1888;d.1954) 5. HARRY CLEMENT INGLES (b.1876) sp: ESTELLE BAILEY 5. HELEN INGLES (b.1881) sp: NOEL THOMPSON
4. ISABELLA MARIA GLENNIE (b.1841) 4. ALEXANDER WILLIAM GLENNIE (b.1843;d.1886) 4. MARY ELIZABETH GLENNIE (b.1846) 4. GAVIN HENRY GLENNIE (b.1848;d.1848) 4. MARGARET GAVINIA GLENNIE (b.1849) 4. ELIZABETH ANNE GLENNIE (b.1851) 4. GEORGE FREDERICK GLENNIE (b.1855)
3. WILLIAM BLIGH BARKER (b.1807;d.1862) sp: MARTHA LUCAS (m.1833) 3. ROBERT BARKER (b.1809;d.1809) 3. MARY BARKER (b.1811) sp: NORTH PRITCHARD (m.1847)
2. ELIZABETH BLIGH (b.1786;d.1854) sp: RICHARD BLIGH (b.1785;m.1817;d.1838)
3. RICHARD JOHN BLIGH (b.1819;d.1869) sp: MARIA ISABELLA FENNELL (m.1847;d.1869)
4. ELIZABETH MARY BLIGH (b.1847) 4. RICHARD JOHN BLAKENEY BLIGH (b.1850;d.1925) sp: KATE ANGELA O'KEEFE (b.1845)
5. MARIA ISABELLA BLIGH (d.1916) sp: JOHN THOMSETT 5. EDITH ANNIE BLIGH (d.1919) 5. ALICE BEATRICE BLIGH (b.1880;d.1974) sp: JACK HOPPER (m.1921) 5. WILLIAM RICHARD BLIGH (b.1881;d.1964) sp: DOROTHY MAUDE BRADHURST (m.1932) 5. RUBY BLIGH (b.1884;d.1973) 5. DOROTHY BLIGH (b.1884;d.1884) 5. GWEN BLIGH (d.1970) 5. BERTIE IVO BLIGH (b.1889;d.1946) sp: MARY LUCY CORCORAN (m.1913) 5. EDWARD PARNELL BLIGH (d.1918) 5. KATHLEEN BLIGH (d.1977) sp: MARTIN O'GRADY 5. MAURICE O'CONNELL BLIGH sp: OLIVE GREIG (b.1906;m.1924)
4. ELIZA EMILY BLIGH (b.1851;d.1852) 4. NEVILLE BLIGH (b.1855) 4. ALICE ROSE BLIGH (b.1857;d.1950) sp: PERCIVAL SYDNEY OAKES (b.1860;m.1888;d.1918)
5. MAURICE O'CONNELL OAKES (b.1889;d.1946) sp: DORA EMMA ADOLPHUS (b.1896;d.1985) 5. KENDRICK O'CONNELL OAKES (b.1892) sp: NANCY WINIFRED MANSFIELD (b.1896) 5. ENID MADELINE OAKES sp: CRESWELL HALL (m.1920)
4. EDITH AGNES BLIGH (b.1858;d.1939) sp: HERBERT HAMILTON OAKES (b.1859;m.1886;d.1906)
5. EUNICE GERTRUDE BLIGH OAKES (b.1887;d.1936) sp: CLARENCE CHARLES BAYLY (m.1913) 5. EDITH GLADYS BLIGH OAKES (b.1888;d.1889) 5. GORDON BLIGH OAKES (b.1890;d.1892) 5. DOROTHY EDITH BLIGH OAKES (b.1890;d.1964) sp: HENRY JACKSON MORSE 5. RUSSELL BLIGH OAKES (b.1891;d.1892) 5. FENNELL BLIGH OAKES (b.1891) 5. IRENE BLIGH OAKES (b.1893;d.1970) 5. MILLICENT VERA BLIGH OAKES (b.1894;d.1896) 4. WILLIAM O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1859;d.1900) 4. ARTHUR FRANCIS BLIGH (b.1860;d.1867) 3. FRANCES ANNE BLIGH (b.1820;d.1863)
3. MARY JANE BLIGH (b.1822;d.1921) sp: GEORGE HORACE NUTTING (b.1805;m.1841;d.1873)
4. ROSE STANLEY NUTTING sp: D. BETJAMON 4. HERBERT NUTTING sp: Lucy UNKNOWN 4. WILLIAM CHARLES NUTTING (b.1856;d.1944) sp: ANNIE BRADFORD (b.1859;m.1881;d.1921)
5. EVELYN NUTTING (b.1883) 5. GEORGE NUTTING (b.1884) 5. GERALD NUTTING (b.1886;d.1951) sp: EILLEEN BRETT (b.1891;m.1920;d.1990) 5. JOHN NUTTING (b.1888) 5. FRANCES LUCY NUTTING- (b.1892) 5. ERNEST NUTTING (b.1892) 5. RICHARD NUTTING (b.1897)
4. ALICE NUTTING 4. PHILLIP NUTTING 4. FRANCES NUTTING sp:Mr. BARKER 4. HORACE NUTTING (b.1859) 4. JOHN BLIGH NUTTING (b.1864) sp: CHARLOTTE LUCY O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1864;d.1962) 4. EARNEST STANLEY NUTTING sp: JENNIE BANKS HUMBLE
5. HELEN BLIGH NUTTING sp: SELWYN BLACKBURNE 5. FRANCES NUTTING 5. ELIZABETH BLIGH NUTTING 5. ROBERT BARKER NUTTING sp: OLIVE BECK 5. MARY BLIGH NUTTING sp: PADDY GREER
4. LOUIS WALTER NUTTING sp: Henrieta UNKNOWN
5. AUDREY BLIGH NUTTING sp: DARE CREAGH COGSWELL
3. HELEN ROSE BLIGH (b.1825;d.1909) sp: RICHARD O'CONNELL (b.1821;m.1851;d.1873)
4. JAMES LAURENCE O'CONNELL 3. WILLIAM RUSSELL WILSON BLIGH (b.1827;d.1914) 3. GRACE JANE CAMPBELL BLIGH (b.1831;d.1885) 3. JOHN O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1834;d.1880) sp: CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH DICK (m.1863;d.1876)
4. CHARLOTTE LUCY O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1864;d.1962) sp: JOHN BLIGH NUTTING (b.1864) 4. LANCELOT JOHN STANLEY BLIGH (b.1866;d.1920) 4. HAROLD FRANCIS BLIGH (b.1870;d.1949) sp: MARJORY ELIZABETH GRANT (b.1890;m.1912;d.1952)
5. HAROLD ANDREW BLIGH (b.1914;d.1984) sp: MURIAL BURNS 5. JOHN O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1916) sp: CATHERINE MORRIS (b.1912;m.1935) 5. WILLIAM CHARLES BLIGH (b.1919;d.1982) sp: EVELYN MAY WEITEMEYER (m.1942) 5. CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH BLIGH (b.1922) sp: GEORGE MILLER sp: KAREL NOTEK (m.1957) 5. MARGARET RUTH O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1924) sp: JACK PARDON (d.1942) 4. EDWARD ALEXANDER BLIGH (b.1873;d.1878) 4. MARGARET RUTH O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1874) 4. LILLIE O'CONNELL BLIGH (b.1877) sp: NORMAN G. CLAPPERTON
2. JANE BLIGH (b.1788;d.1875) 2. FRANCES BLIGH (b.1788;d.1862) 2. ANNE CAMPBELL BLIGH (b.1791;d.1843) 2. WILLIAM BLIGH (b.1795;d.1795) 2. HENRY BLIGH (b.1795;d.1795)
(Ends this descendancy from William Bligh of the Bounty.)

***************

A note on Scottish place names mentioned above:

We are here dealing with Campbells from specific areas of Scotland - and we do not have to deal with any Campbells of the Breadalbane sept of the Clan. Our Campbells are all of the Argyll, the major sept of the clan.

The places involved become clearer if a line is drawn horizontally on a map of Scotland at Peebles. To the west, off the coast, lies the southern-most tip of the Island of Islay. Ziggzagging, proceeding north or Peebles, we encounter the place-names of Kilmarnock, Renfrew, Bute, Rothesay, Paisley, Glasgow, the port of Greenock, Tarbert, Dumbarton, Loch Fyne, Inverary. We need go no further north than Fort William. The Loch Fyne area is especially important.

The relevant Campbell family people to be considered have been mentioned in citations including: (1) Auchinbrek - per Notes from Marion Campbell Kilberry: (Achinbrek, &c) means "speckled, rockstrewn field". There is the Auchinbrek Genealogy, written in the 1740s, later published in J. R. N. MacPhuil, Highland Papers, Vol. IV, Scottish History Society, 3rd Series, XXII, Edinburgh, 1934., with a complete account of the Campbells of Kilduskland including John Campbell (of Black River, Jamaica). (I am indebted to Dr Lorne Campbell of London for guidance on these points.)

(2) Cowal, at the head of Loch Striven west of Dunoon. Kilfinan is the western side of Cowal Peninsula, outer Loch Fyne. Otter (means, sandspit) a narrows between outer and inner Loch Fyne. Silvercraigs is close to Otter on the western shore of Loch Fyne.
(2a) Dunoon, a castle was in Dunoon is on the west side of the Clyde River, facing Gourock. Stuck is Stuc, or, upstanding rocky landmark, on the western side of Loch Eck, a freshwater loch running north from near Dunoon.
(3) Attichuan is the western shore of lower Loch Fyne, about two miles south of Lochgilphead. Poltalloch was the centre of large C18th/C19th estates amassed from the proceeds of various West Indian and American trade; has a ruined house to the northern side of Loch Crinan west of Lochgilphead. Barbreck is head of Loch Craignish, halfway between Lochgilphead and Oban.
(4) Claonairigh Claonairigh (4) (Claonairi/Clunary) is on the western sides of upper Loch Fyne, near Pennymore.
(5) Pennymore was important in mediaeval times and later, with bridges over Douglas Water on the Lochgilphead-Inverary Road.
(5a) Fernoch is a place of alder trees, a frequently-used name; this one is probably at the head of Loch Gilp close to...
(5b) Kilmory: Achindarroch means Field of Oaks, a shore on the Loch Gilp facing Kilmory.

Advertisement

Ardgaddan, can't be located. Glen Aray (Glenary) runs inland, northerly from Inverary to Loch Awe, also designated as "Highland Charge" (meaning, a Gaelic-speaking congregation) of a church alongside the "Lowland Charge" (for Anglo-Scots) built within a burgh of Inverary.
Kilmory - there are many places of this name; this one is the east shore of Loch Gilp, the inlet at the top of the outer Loch Fyne, where the inner Loch Fyne trending away north-easterly nearby.
(6) Minard/Knockbuy - Knockbuy is now Minard, on inner Loch Fyne, western side, halfway between Lochgilphead and Inverary. Glassary was a parish which ran from Minard/Knockbuy to Loch Gilp and westward of Glassary Glen to Loch Awe; its main church and administration centre was Kilmichael Glassary. Kaimes is a western shore of Inner Loch Fyne, near Loch Gair and between Loch Gilp and (6) Minard.
(7) Kilberry - Kilberry is about the outer west coast at a point of the bulge of Knapdale, between West Loch Tarbet and Loch Caolisport. Ormsary is the northerly edge of Kilberry holdings, on the eastern shore of Loch Caolisport.
(8) Torblaren - Torblaren is a farm close to Kilmichael Glassary near the mouth of the fertile Glassary Glen. Lag (Lagg) is in Glassary Glen upstream from Torblaren. Kilmichael Glassary is a parochial centre, a former Land Court, and important cattle-dealing Tryst [meeting place], its career ending with the railway reached Oban; it faced Torblaren across a fertile valley.
(9) Kilduskland is the western shore of Loch Gilp, facing Kilmory.
(10) Pennymore - Pennymore (10) is the western shore of inner Loch Fyne and east of Furnace village [which may be shown on a map].
(11) Tarbert Lochfyne Tarbet Lochfyne.
(12) - Tarbet means portage, so it is added to many placenames (Tarbert, Tarbat), so Lochfyne or any particular place is added to reduce confusion. One place Tarbert was on an isthmus between east and west lochs, used as a crossing place from olden times. There was a royal castle, entrusted to the earls of Argyll who installed local leaders such as MacAllisters as captains of the Castle, MacAllisters beings a branch of the Macdonalds Lords of the Isles. Torblaren is a farm close to Kilmichael Glassary near the mouth of the fertile Glassary Glen.
Knap is south-west headland of Loch Sween near Castle Sween. Largie was an important MacDonald holding in western Kintyre, facing the Isle of Gigha, and represents the surviving line of the Lords of the Isles.

Advertisement