Like countless others, he showed a level of enterprise and ambition that was thought impossible by officials like the commissioners of the annexed estates. This was epitomised by people like Thomas Fraser, the author of the opening quotation and a modest entrepreneur from Inverness-shire, whose ventures took him to Grenada and St Vincent.
Many hoped that their involvement in the Caribbean would enhance their lives, and those of their families. This was the Age of Improvement, a period marked by profound technological change and intellectual development, but for many Highlanders it was also the age of survival. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Highland communities, through families, individuals and professional networks, became so entangled with the colonial world that their very survival came to depend upon the connections being forged in the Caribbean. By the middle of the eighteenth century many people had recognised that what was happening was not, in fact, really about the Highlands or even about Scotland, but a consequence of the larger and more pressing project of building and securing an empire.
Culloden, a bloody battle that culminated in the death of between 1,500 and 2,000 Jacobite soldiers near Inverness in 1746, was an important turning point for the Highlands, but there had been many tremors before it to signal that changes were afoot. Scattered across Scotland in various archives lie letters, wills and other documents relating to the lives and experiences of Highlanders who had made the decision to go to the Caribbean at a time when their communities, which were located in Britain’s northernmost region, were convulsing from the aftershocks of Culloden. Inclosed you have on a slip of paper the notes I promised to send you, I send it you for the purpose of giving you some idea of my little affairs in this country in case any accident happening to me that you may be able to render a service to my children y eldest boy Simon is now going on four years old e goes to school and I hope he will read and write a little before he is sent home which I mean to do if possible when he is seven years old I understand you have a very good academy in your town furnished with good teachers in several branches of Education, if it pleases the Almighty to spare me to see my three boys able to shift themselves I shall think myself the happiest of mortals.
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