Janet Schaw, from Journal of a Lady of Quality: Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776

Janet Schaw (c.1737–c.1801) was from Edinburgh, and this journey through Britain’s Atlantic colonies was taken while accompanying her brother, Alexander, who was to take up a customs post at St. Christopher in the West Indies. She sailed from the Firth of Forth on October 1774, landing in Antigua in December, and sailed on to America in February 1775. She left America in November and arrived in Lisbon in December 1775. The Scots were deeply involved in colonial settlement and governance and the military overseas in the eighteenth century, and her journey took her through a network of Scottish connections within the British empire: her other brother, Robert, owned the plantation in North Carolina ‘Schawfield’, which he bought in 1772–73.