EARLY IN 1800 a group of sixteen young men left Inverness hoping to make their fortunes from the cotton plantations of Demerara and Berbice on the north coast of South America. In April of the following year a carpenter named James Fraser, who had been in Berbice since the mid-1790s, wrote home reporting the death of one of them, his own brother Sandy, who had had to borrow the five pounds he needed to make the journey, and he added the warning that ‘there is only two of the fifteen who came out with him in life’. By September, James Fraser himself was dead and the news in Inverness was that all but one of the sixteen young men had ‘dropt into their Graves’. Yet, despite this, a third and last brother, Simon, was on his way to the colony. That the deaths of so many did not deter others is the paradox of much Scottish involvement in the Caribbean.

Since 1796, when British forces had accepted the surrender of the three adjoining Dutch colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice – which would unite as British Guiana in 1831 and now form the Republic of Guyana – the region had held an allure which, notwithstanding these and many other deaths, continued to draw young men to it. According to Henry Dalton, the British colony's first historian writing in the 1850s, many who came were ‘of the Gaelic race’ and ‘of humble extraction, uneducated, and glad to accept any opening that presented itself’. Charles Waterton, an eminent naturalist whose family were plantation owners and who himself spent time in Guyana, later recalled how ‘shoals’ of poor Scotsmen had arrived in Berbice hoping for sudden wealth and of how once, according to what he has heard, ‘forty of them lay on the beach and drank rum until they were all dead’. No doubt this was an exaggeration but the story suggests that the influx of young Scots had left its mark on the popular imagination. It was common to call these men ‘adventurers’ and, because a number of the ‘early adventurers’ had come from northern Scotland, the attraction of Guyana was especially strongly felt in and around Inverness, the largest town in the Highlands.