Smeathman was born in 1742 in the seaside resort of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, a populous and well-built town of just over 2,000 families, with spacious streets and, to the contemporary eye, ‘uniform, neat, and commodious’ houses. Mineral waters had been discovered in the early seventeenth century, and by the mid-eighteenth century Scarborough boasted a large spa, nestling securely beneath south cliff with a wide prospect over the crescentshaped bay. The Welsh naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, who visited en route to Scotland in 1769, was sceptical about the spa water's restorative powers, commenting that for the majority of visitors ‘health is the pretence, but dissipation the end’. In addition to being a ‘place of great gayety’, Scarborough also boasted a variety of fishing grounds. Pennant described hundreds of little fishing boats lined up in rows on the sand, selling their catch of cod or drying and pickling it for the London market.

There was a good deal of shipbuilding in Scarborough, although less than was the case with Whitby to the north. Both towns were nurseries for seamen, with Whitby producing James Cook, soon to be its most famous son. A good proportion of Scarborough's inhabitants were sailors while the rest were fishermen, master mariners, and business folk. That the sailors were prosperous can be seen in the observation of one visitor who described them as ‘well clothed and with large silver buckles on their shoes and watches in their pockets’.2 As far as Pennant could tell, the town's main business appeared to be the hiring out of ships, especially during wartime when the government seldom had ‘less than a hundred in pay’. But the greatest stimulus to the development of Scarborough in the mid-eighteenth century was the massive expansion in the north-eastern coal trade, with three-quarters of the coal from Northumberland and Durham moving to London through the ports of Whitby and Scarborough.