Port Antonio today
1786 was the most critical year in the life of Robert Burns – he was 27 and would be dead in 10 years. The half-mad King George III was on the throne and there had been considerable hostility towards Scots.
In England, repercussions from the 1745 rebellion had produced a London backlash against all things Scottish – Scots being seen as treacherous mendicants. Not unlike today in the London press. Boswell describes a night at a London theatre when two Highland officers came in and the audience rose and shouted out at them ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out! Out! Out!’. The cartoons of Scots were vile and racist.
It was against this backdrop that Burns in 1786 faced his own personal challenges, including penury (the farm he shared with his brother was losing money). He recently had a child from his maid (in total 13? children: 9 from within the blanket), he had Jean Armour pregnant with twins, and Mary Campbell (Highland Mary) was also to become pregnant that year.
It was a cold January when nothing grows and farming becomes painful: everything and everybody seemed against him. He was being prosecuted by the Kirk and publicly condemned for his fornication by being made to sit in the kirk’s creepie chair – a stool for sinners. He writes in a state of some anxiety to a friend John Arnott in February of 1786. (The dedicated work of the late Professor Alexander ‘Sandy’ Kinghorn needs to be recognised in the use of the following letters. I had the fortunate experience of meeting him while we both worked in Jamaica in the 70s.)
Having read all of these letters quite recently from a variety of sources I began to ask myself, Did our Rabbie really intend migrating to Jamaica? Was it not a poet’s plea for attention to his misery – a crie de cour? "Look if you don’t help me I’ll run away!".
Already the holy beagles, the houghmagandie pack, begin to sniff the scent, and I expect every moment to see them cast off and hear them after me in full cry, but I am an old fox, I shall give them dodging and doubling for it and by an bye – I intend to earth among the mountains of Jamaica.
He writes to a friend David Brice in May on his romantic trials with Bonnie Jean Armour:
I have tried often to forget her: I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riot, Mason meetings, drinking matches and other mischiefs, to drive her out of my head, but all in vain; and now for the grand cure: the Ship is on her way that is to take me out to Jamaica; and then farewell dear old Scotland and farewell dear ungrateful Jean for never, never will I see you more! You will have heard that I am going to commence Poet in print and soon my works go to the press. I expect it will be a volume of about 200 pages. It is just the last foolish action I’m intent to do: and then turn a wise man as fast as possible.
The only solace he had was in his writing and he had enough songs and poems to make a book, he thought. But no money to have it published. In that same January, Burns did two things. He allowed himself to be persuaded by his good friend (and brother Mason) Gavin Hamilton to let him, Hamilton, take the poems and see if he could get them printed. And two, he would escape from his troubles and take a job as a book-keeper in Jamaica on a plantation near Port Antonio called Springbank, owned by the brother of Dr Douglas, a friend from Ayrshire – Mr Charles Douglas.
In June he writes to John Richmond:
I have orders within three weeks at the farthest to repair aboard the Nancy with Capn Smith from the Clyde to Jamaica and to call at Antigua…Armour has got a warrant to throw me in jail till I find security for an enormous sum… I know you will throw execration on her head but spare the poor, ill advised girl for my sake; tho may all the furies that rend the injured enraged Lovers bosom, await the old haridan, her Mother, until her latest hour!! For heavens sake burn this letter and never show it to a living creature – I write it in a moment of rage, reflecting on my miserable situation – exiled, abandoned forlorn…
(He was to marry the ‘ill- advised girl’ Jean Armour two years later.) But in July he writes again to David Brice:
I am now fixed to go for the West Indies in October.
Four days later he writes to James Smith of Mauchline who himself had migrated to Jamaica:
I went to Dr Douglas yesterday fully resolved to take the opportunity of Capt Smith: but I found the Doctor with a Mr and Mrs White, both from Jamaica and they have deranged my plans altogether. They assure him to send me from Sav to Pt Antonio will cost my master Charles Douglas upwards of £50; besides running the risk of throwing myself into a pleuritic fever in consequence of hard travelling in the sun. On these accounts he refuses sending me with Smith, but a vessel from Greenock the first of September right for the place of my destination, the capt is an intimate friend of Mr Gavin Hamilton and as good a fellow as heart would wish with him I am destined to go.
So, now it is September, he is going and straight to Pt Antonio. Burns had negotiated a three-year contract at a wage of £30 a year with Charles Douglas as field manager – called a book-keeper. (Twice what he would earn in Scotland plus free board and lodgings along with free rum and free housekeepers). He would have to be out in the fields or the boiling house like a gaffer or foreman. He would also work under the new Slave Acts of 1786 which made legal the most despicable anti-human practices. So many young European field staff (book keepers) died within three years, often through ‘imprudence and intemperate living in low debauchery’.
Burns firmly believed he would never see his native land again. So he wrote in June:
Farewell, my friends, farewell, my foes! My peace with these, my love with those. The bursting tears my heart declare – Farewell the bonnie banks of Ayr!
He also wrote verses on a Scotch bard who had gone to the West Indies in which his two predominant themes are found:
The bonnie lasses weel may miss him;
And in their dear petitions place him, wi tearful ee
For weel I wat they’ll sairly miss him that’s owre the sea ….
He ne’er was gien to great misguiding
Yet coin his pouches wad nae bide in
Wi him it ne’er was hiding he dealt it free
The muse was a that he took his pride in, that’s owre the sea.
Jamaica bodies use him weel an nap him in a cozie biel
Ye’ll find him aye a dainty chiel and fu a glee
He wad nae wrang the very deil that’s owre the sea.
He went to his Masonic lodge meeting in June (where strangely he accepted a post of depute master – a senior position for someone leaving shortly).
Adieu! A heart-warm fond adieu Dear brothers of the mystic tie
Ye favoured, ye enlightened few Companions of my social joy
Tho I to foreign lands must hie Pursuing Fortunes sliddry ba’
With melting heart and brimful eye I’ll mind yu still, tho far awa
A last request permit me here When yearly you assemble a
One round – I ask it with a tear To him, the Bard that’s far awa
Meanwhile Burns found relief – with another woman, Mary Campbell or ‘Highland Mary’. Burns became so infatuated with her that he resolved that when he sailed for Jamaica, Mary would sail with him. He needed only the £20 to purchase tickets for them both. And he would get it.
Will ye go to the Indies my Mary And leave auld Scotias shore; Will ye go to the Indies my Mary Across the Atlantic roar; Oh sweet grows the lime and the orange And the apple on the pine; But awe the charms o the Indies Can never equal thine.
Then Burns on 1 September informs John Richmond unconvincingly:
I am still here in status quo tho I well expected to have been on my way over the Atlantic by this time. The Nancy in which I was to have gone, did not give me warning enough… two days notice was too little for me to wind up my AFFAIRS and go for Greenock. I am now a passenger aboard the Bell, Captn Cathcart who sails the end of this month. I am under little apprehension now about Armour – The warrant is still in existence but some of the first Gentlemen in the country have offered to befriend me – I have called on her once again of late as she at this moment is threatened with the pangs of approaching travail and I assure you my dear friend I cannot help being anxious, very anxious for her situation. She would gladly now embrace that offer she once rejected, but it shall never more be in her power.
Then, on 3 September, Jean Armour gave birth to twins, Jean and Robert. But the other good news came just weeks before he was due to sail. His manuscript ‘Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’ that had gone to Kilmarnock with Gavin Hamilton, was published by Bro John Wilson of Kilmarnock on 31 July. They were sold at the cost of three shillings per copy. 612 copies were printed but only after 350 had been subscribed for in advance and paid for by fellow masons from St John’s Lodge Kilwinning in Kilmarnock.
Bro Wilson the printer might have been a mason but he was a businessman and for publishing poetry he wanted money up front. But he got it. Burns used to visit this lodge in Kilmarnock and so they knew of his talent. The edition was sold out in just over a month after publication. The news spread to the literary hot-bed of Edinburgh where in a series of reviews (Edinburgh was full of papers and small magazines) Burns was hailed as ‘genius’: ‘The author is indeed a striking example of native genius bursting through the obscurity of poverty and the obstructions of laborious life’.
In a letter on 26 September to John Kennedy:
My departure is uncertain but I do not think it will be till after harvest again. I had just taken the last farewell of a few friends, my chest was on the road to Greenock – I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia when Dr Blacklock’s opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a 2nd edition fired me so much that I posted away to the city.
Robert Burns arrived in Edinburgh to substantial popular and critical acclaim. Fortunately Burns didn’t migrate to Jamaica as part of the gold rush, the emigration fever, when sugar was king in the Caribbean and in Glasgow, earning many Scots’ great fortunes.
(Professor Tom Devine has provided in some detail the ownership of Caribbean plantations by Glasgow – West India merchants. (An 18th-century business elite: Glasgow West India Merchants c1750-1815 in the Scottish Historical Review April 1978.)
The names are familiar to Glasgwegians: Buchanan, the Dennistouns (father and sons) Houston, Glassford, McCall, Dunmore, MacKay, McDowall, Stirling and so many more. Sugar imports to Glasgow climbed from approx 120,000 cwts in 1785 to 200,000 cwts by 1800. Significant Scottish capital accumulation took place directly from Glasgow-West Indian trade, especially after the American Independence rupture of 1776. Would Burns have survived the lifestyle? Scotland did send hundreds of doctors to the plantations.
Doctors were a vital part of the plantation system in the Caribbean because of the incredible level of forced-labour morbidity and death from disease. (30 to 40% of new enslaved Africans died within four years.) Scots died from yellow fever and dysentery but also from drink. ‘Planters have created a society, extravagant, loose, morally and culturally debased. Drunkenness was endemic, the very custom of the country, and fornication, adultery, incest and petty violence routine. Only rapid repentance and a rejection of the sins of Sodom can save them.’
But Burns didn’t go to Jamaica. And for that we must be very thankful. Jamaica’s loss is the world’s gain. Instead Robert Burns went to Edinburgh – and stardom.
Thom Cross is a writer and dramatist
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