From Lismore to Barbados: The Gaelic Caribbean Travel Journal and Verse of Dugald MacNicol (1791-1844)

Recent events around the world have caused communities, countries, and public institutions such as universities, museums etc, to reassess the enduring historical legacy of imperial enterprises, including the slave trade and processes of colonisation. In Scotland, especially, there has been a profound re-examination of the legacy of slavery. To date, this has focused on Anglophone Scotland and has paid little attention to the experience of Gaelic speakers, experiences which have the potential to complicate, nuance and add to our understanding of the role of Scots in the British imperial enterprise.

Dugald MacNicol (1791-1844) was born on the Isle of Lismore off the west coast of Scotland where his father, the renowned Gaelic scholar Rev. Donald MacNicol, was minister. Commissioned in his teens as an officer in the Royal West India Rangers, Dugald took off for the Caribbean. He would spend much of the rest of his life in Barbados, rising eventually to the rank of Major. Exceptionally, for someone of his rank, MacNicol settled in Barbados where he entered a life-long unmarried relationship with Joanna Franklin, described as 'a free coloured woman', with whom he had seven children. He returned to Argyll several times on furlough, and finally, shortly before he died, to make his will and set his affairs in order. When he died in 1844, he left his seven mixed-race children and their mother a significant fortune. Both this legacy, and and other factors speak to a relationship of warmth and trust between the couple; there is evidence that he went to some lengths to prevent his Scottish relatives from disinheriting her and their children. Nonetheless, like most Europeans residing in the Caribbean, MacNicol participated in the slavery system: in 1836, he received compensation of £19.8s.4d for the freeing of one enslaved person, and surviving records show he had earlier owned a further four enslaved people.

MacNicol's Gaelic journal, kept between 1809 and 1813, documents his everyday life in Gaelic-speaking Argyll and the Clyde estuary prior to securing an army commission, his preparations for departure in Glasgow, his journey to Barbados, and his early years in the West Indies. Written from the perspective of a young man just embarking on his professional career, the journal offers a unique Gaelic perspective on social life in the early 19th century Highlands, and the engagement of Scottish Gaels with the Atlantic colonial world. The journal is preserved in the National Library of Scotland, among a large collection of family papers, including literary material once belonging to his father, in a valuable collection known as the 'MacNicol Collection'. MacNicol also composed verse in both Argyll and the West Indies throughout the 1810s. These songs offer a point of contrast with his prose account of his travels found in his journal; the songs are often filled with melancholy and homesickness but some also offer more critical and insightful commentary on the rapid social change taking place in the Highlands (Kidd 2010; Leask & Ó Muircheartaigh 2022).

While MacNicol's journal and some of the poetry was printed at the start of the 20th century, their Victorian editor, Rev. Dr George Henderson (1866-1912), expunged much of the detail he found objectionable. He further misread numerous details in the admittedly difficult Gaelic and made no attempt to provide a translation or contextual information. This project will edit, translate and annotate MacNicol's writings as well as examining his writings from three broad disciplinary perspectives (Literary and Textual; Linguistic (including the question of Gaelic literacy); Historical). This project opens up a little-known archive of Gaelic material written in the Caribbean which is of importance, not only in its Gaelic or Scottish context, but also in the broader context of the British imperial enterprise in the early 19th century.