THE FIRST HISTORIAN OF Jamaica, Edward Long, writing on the eve of the American War of Independence, thought it necessary to dedicate a section in his History of Jamaica to the Scots as, ‘Jamaica indeed is greatly indebted to North Britain as very near one third of the [white] inhabitants are either natives of that country or descendants from those who were’. If his calculation of the total white population on the island is correct, the number of Scots on the island in the mid-1770s numbered between 5,000 and 6,000. More followed with the exodus of loyalists from the rebellious American colonies, and the final wave of sojourners during the last two decades of the ‘golden era’ in sugar when most of the large trading houses of Glasgow switched their shipping resources from the American to the West Indies trades.

As an English-born colonial administrator, Long was plainly impressed, not only by their diligence but also by their clannishness and loyalty to the old homeland. He was certain that the social cohesion it engendered when abroad was the key to their survival on first arriving on Jamaica in the first half of the eighteenth century, and their rapid advancement thereafter:

Long, however, did not mention the haemorrhage of many of the new arrivals, wiped out by deadly diseases before they could become established. Succeeding in the Caribbean entailed many risks as well as opportunities, and the evidence of surviving wills and testaments lodged in Scottish courts suggests that those who achieved real wealth were very much in the minority. What follows focuses on the successful. Those who failed or died in the attempt would repay further study.