Late in 1731 a life of relentless grinding poverty was miraculously alleviated for an Ayrshire carpenter and his large family. At the doorstep of their cottage was a messenger with a gift of 100 pounds, a small fortune by the measure of the day. The overawed householders, Hugh and Bella Maguire, were informed that their benefactor was a retired ‘nabob’ of great wealth who would visit them soon.
Overjoyed and filled with great expectations, they celebrated. The elder children were sent out to buy a sugar loaf and a bottle of brandy from the local smugglers. The sugar loaf was carefully scooped out and the cavity filled with brandy; whereupon the whole intoxicating concoction was, with the help of large spoons, heartily devoured by all.
Their mysterious benefactor was Bella’s long-lost cousin, James Macrae, one-time East Indiaman captain, pirate hunter, Governor of Madras and now resident of Blackheath, Kent. Isabella had last seen him as a boy, shortly before he absconded aboard a ship clearing out of his homeport of Ayr. He had run away from a life of near starvation, leaving behind his widowed mother, who could barely feed him on her meagre earnings as a washerwoman. As he was her only child, his departure left her to face certain destitution in her old age, had not the Maguires taken her in and cared for her to her dying day. Forty years on, the prodigal son had returned intent on redeeming his name and repaying their kindness and humanity.
As an exceedingly rich man with no immediate family of his own, Macrae’s generosity knew no bounds. The Maguire family were soon installed in their new home, the fine farm of Drumlow, Ochiltree, while their five gifted young children received an education and ‘finishing’ at a boarding school, as befitted their new social status.
A decade later, Macrae returned to Ayrshire to preside over their adult future, acquiring his own estate of Orangefield in the nearby coastal village of Monkton. His first concern was to secure an advantageous marriage for their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who had been working as a farm servant. His choice of suitor was William Cunningham, the impoverished thirteenth Earl of Glencairn. This haughty nobleman set aside his deeply held social scruples to the proposed union when he was informed that her dowry was £45,000 in diamonds, and the Barony of Ochiltree – an estate worth a further £25,000.
Thereafter, Elizabeth, as Countess Glencairn, overcame her husband’s thinly disguised scorn at being married to a ‘violer’s daughter’ (her father Hugh was a well-known sixpenny fiddler at local weddings) to become a greatly respected member of Scottish society. She never forgot her lowly upbringing and set up a school in the area to teach local girls spinning. She and her son, the fourteenth Earl, were much-loved patrons of the local poet Robert Burns and highly influential during his sojourn in Edinburgh.
Macrae successfully repeated this social metamorphosis with the Maguires’ two sons and other two daughters. The eldest son, James, was settled with the great Houston estate in Dumfriesshire, which included the surrounding parish, on the condition that he assumed the surname ‘Macrae’. His younger brother, Hugh, inherited the Drumdow estate from his parents. The middle sister, Margaret, was married to the advocate Charles Erskine of Barjarg (later Lord Justice Clerk), who used her dowry to buy the great Alva estate. Macrae’s favourite, the youngest daughter, christened Macrae Maguire in his honour, was left the residue of his £100,000 fortune and his Orangefield estate, on his death in July 1746.
Macrae died a man redeemed from his actions as a youth, reconciled to his family and honoured by his own people. With his approval, Glencairn loaned £1,500 of Elizabeth’s dowry towards the £5,000 ransom demanded by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s invading Jacobite army to forgo the sacking of Glasgow. Prior to their arrival, Macrae had openly demonstrated his allegiance to the Hanoverian Succession by presenting that town with a grand equestrian statue of his hero, William of Orange. This was erected at Glasgow Cross at a cost of £3,000. Its swivel-mounted metal tail has been a great favourite for generations of children and Hogmanay revellers alike. It can still be seen near Glasgow Cathedral.
How this Ayrshire-born son of a washerwoman came by his immense wealth is the very stuff of adventure stories. One part of his dynamic career – that in the service of the Honourable East India Company – was the centrepiece of Annuals, compiled in 1863 by J. Talboys Wheeler, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic at the Madras Presidency College. Closer to home, his fairytale patronage of the Maguires captivated local commentators during his lifetime.
It was left, however, to Daniel Defoe, the great historian of Black Flag pirates (writing under the nom de plume Captain Charles Johnson in 1724) to immortalise Macrae as both the defiant victim and the persecutor of some of the most celebrated villains of the time.
Captain Macrae won his place in Defoe’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates by virtue of his heroic deeds on the blood-strewn deck of the 380-ton East Indiaman Cassandra in the Indian Ocean on 17 August 1720.
The Cassandra, on hire to the East India Company, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope with a ‘regular berth’ company ship, the Greenwich, under Captain Richard Kirby and in company with a Dutch Ostend Company ship. They had set aside trade rivalries to sail together as mutual defence against the pirate squadrons that were then heavily infesting African and Indian waters. Their destination was the Isle de Johanna in the Comoros Islands in the northern throat of the Mozambique Channel which separates Africa from the giant island of Madagascar. Once there, they intended to water, before heading out into the relative safety of the Indian Ocean.
At daybreak on 27 July, they approached this emerald jewel of a natural anchorage with trepidation, as it was a haven frequently used by pirates to careen their fouled hulls. To do this they had to unship their cannon, beach their vessel and haul her over on her side to burn off the barnacles and boring worms. As this was the most vulnerable time for a pirate crew, they usually sought a remote island. On this day there was no pirate vessel to be seen in the bay, but on shore they espied a party of fourteen heavily armed Europeans.
From the local islanders, who canoed out to greet them, they found out that these armed men were a hunting party that had detached themselves from the pirate crew of the Indian Queen. This was the flagship of the French pirate Olivier Levasseur of Calais, known to all as ‘La Bouche’ (a corruption of the French word for ‘Buzzard’). He had captured this Dutch East Indiaman (250 ton and 28 guns) off the Guinea Coast but, following a botched attempt to careen her, she now lay wrecked on a reef off the nearby island of Mayotte. The party on Johanna were hunting for fresh provisions while amusing themselves by trying to make contact with the pirates from the great Captain Avery’s crew, who were rumoured to have gone native on this island.
La Bouche, with the remaining forty crew of the Indian Queen, was still on Mayotte, thirty-five miles away. There they were labouring to salvage her guns, main timbers, iron fixtures and rigging to equip a new vessel they were attempting to build from local wood.
Macrae had followed in La Bouche’s wake and witnessed the wanton destruction that he and his kind had wrought on the shipping and slaving stations along the 3,000 miles of the Guinea Coast over the past two years. He did not, therefore, hesitate to call a Council of War on the Cassandra. At that meeting Kirby and his Dutch counterpart swore to support him steadfastly in his plan to sail immediately to Mayotte and eradicate this nest of murderers while the pirates were relatively helpless.
Around midday, they got under way from the sheltered anchorage at Johanna. As the leading Greenwich and the ‘Ostender’ emerged from under the lee of this volcanic island’s lofty peaks to the crack of canvas filling with the oceanic trade winds, there appeared two sails bearing down from the open sea. They were the pirate flotilla led by the infamous Edward England, returning to their island lair after looting a Moorish prize they had carried off to St Mary’s Isle, Madagascar. This barbaric affair involved torturing the passengers for their hidden possessions before butchering all of them.
Macrae on the Cassandra, being last to weigh anchor, was caught making slow headway towards the open sea in the fickle light airs of the bay. As the two pirate ships swooped in to block his escape, England let fly his personal black flag with skull and crossbones from the mainmast of his ship, the Victory (46 guns). Macrae, with a clear view from his quarterdeck, was left in no doubt as to his fate should he offer resistance, as a blood-red flag – the sign that no quarter would be given if he chose to fight – flew from the pirate’s foremast.
So trapped, Macrae swung the Cassandra round to engage them and win the time needed for his consorts to come to his assistance. Under Macrae’s resolute command, his well-manned East Indiaman of thirty cannon had every prospect of holding them at bay. Indeed, his first broadside smashed into the Victory, holing her between ‘wind and water’, forcing England to sheer off on the opposite tack to make emergency repairs and to tend his wounded. The smaller Fancy (40 guns) under the command of England’s hot-tempered and brutal lieutenant, John Taylor (alias Jaspar Seager), now took the lead.
With the die now cast for a bloody fight, Macrae frantically fired his signal cannon for the Greenwich to come to his rescue. Kirby, by now a good league out to sea, ignored all such pleas and chose instead to hove-to with the Ostender to watch the ensuing battle. As Macrae bitterly reported to his superiors later, he basely deserted us and left us engaged with barbarous and inhuman enemies with their Black and Bloody red flags hanging over us and no appearance of escaping being cut to pieces.
Abandoned and committed, Macrae brought the Cassandra round to present her broadside to the closing Fancy, exhorting his officers and men to continue to ply their cannon for their very lives. It was a desperate gamble, as the pirates’ vastly superior numbers would seal their fate should they get alongside. This tactic succeeded in keeping the Fancy at bay for over three hours. By around four o’clock in the afternoon, as the casualties mounted on the pirate bring from the relentless bombardment, the infuriated Taylor ordered his crew to man their sweeps and row the Fancy up to the Cassandra for boarding and the kill. Macrae countered by having his gunners rake her water line, smashing the giant oars to pieces.
England, having completed his running repairs to the Victory, returned to the affray, forcing Macrae to play his last card. This was to run the Cassandra close inshore till she grounded, side-on to his pursuers. As the Fancy had a much shallower draft, Taylor saw his chance finally to get alongside the stationary East Indiaman. As fate would have it, the Fancy hit a sand bar and came to a shuddering halt, half a pistol-shot length from the Cassandra. Stuck with her bow facing the East Indiaman, the pirates could not bring their main cannon to bear. Macrae’s men seized on their opportunity to pour a series of devastating broadsides into the grounded brig. At such close range, the carnage amongst the pirate gunners was so terrible that they were soon forced to abandon the main deck cannons and take cover under hatches.
It was, however, to be a pyrrhic victory for Macrae. He later claimed that, had Kirby joined him, they would easily have taken both pirate vessels. As it was, England on the Victory had now closed sufficiently for his cannons to sweep the Cassandra’s quarterdeck, killing a number of Macrae’s officers. Under this murderous covering fire, England dispatched three boatloads of fresh men over to the Fancy to kedge her off and man her abandoned guns. By five o’clock Kirby, standing on the deck of the Greenwich safely out at sea, had seen enough and sailed away – as Macrae put it, leaving us struggling in the very jaws of Hell.
Two hours later, as the first grappling iron from the Victory swung over the stern of the Cassandra, Macrae gave the order for all hands to abandon ship. Under cover of the swirling acrid smoke from his cannons and incoming grenades, most of his crew – some in the long boats, others swimming – made for the shore.
In the dash for safety, Macrae was forced to leave behind ten dead and three severely wounded crewmen. The latter were cut to pieces within minutes of the first wave of enraged boarders hitting the deck. Out of the combined pirate companies of 500 men, close to 100 of their comrades had been killed by Macrae’s defiant salvoes. This had been the longest and bloodiest engagement of their reign of terror along the African coast. Indeed, this was the most costly encounter with a merchantman in pirate history. It can be taken as certain that, had they laid hands on Macrae and his crew, they would have been massacred out of hand.
As it was, the pirates swarming over the deck of the Cassandra could do little more than shoot wildly into the jungle where their prey had vanished with the fading light. In the ensuing hiatus, their leader, Edward England, skilfully deflected the blame for the whole blood-soaked fiasco with a £2,000 reward for Macrae – dead or alive.
At first light the following day Macrae, despite a musket-ball wound to his head, led his bedraggled and exhausted men on a day-long forced march. Their destination was the main native village some twenty-five miles inland from the scene of the sea battle. He must have visited this place and made allies on a previous voyage, for this was the court of the African ‘King’ of the island who gave them not only food and shelter, but his royal protection from the pursuing pirates. As his men recovered in a concealed place, Macrae had his native hosts put it out that he had died of his wounds during the trek through the jungle. On hearing this story, his pirate pursuers gave up their manhunt and returned to the Cassandra to claim their share of the spoils.
Ten days later, the remarkable Macrae retraced his footsteps and audaciously presented himself to the pirates on board the Cassandra. He was counting on the passage of time and their pleasure at finding on board the East India Company’s annual investment of £75,000 to curb their bloodlust long enough for him to negotiate a ransom for his ship and what he could of its valuable cargo of trade goods.
Macrae’s astonishing display of bravery, returning alone and unarmed, greatly impressed Edward England and many of his crew. But not so with the more ruthless John Taylor, who spoke for the aggrieved faction that was for cutting him down where he stood. As Daniel Defoe recounted, at the critical moment in this contest of wills, a Fellow with a terrible pair of whiskers, and a wooden Leg, being stuck round with Pistols, like the Man in the Almanack with Darts, came swearing & vapouring upon the quarterdeck. Placing himself between Macrae and his would be executioners, he shook the Scottish captain’s hand, heartily bellowing, Shew me the man that offers to hurt Captain Macrae and I’ll stand to him, for an honester fellow I never sailed with!
There were others amongst the assembled Brethren who also knew and respected him, sufficient to end the dispute and save his life. Such widespread recognition strongly suggests that, as a younger man, Macrae had once sailed the Caribbean with this kind of company. This theory gains further support from the fact that, not only was he spared, but later a mellow drunken Taylor whimsically agreed to let him have the badly shot-through Fancy and some of the bulk cargo out of the Cassandra. This munificence was later to prove a grave error of judgement for many of the ‘Blades of Fortune’ then assembled on the deck of the Cassandra.
Macrae’s sense of survival dictated that he should extract himself while Taylor was still intoxicated. Once ashore he kept out of sight during the days the pirates took to convert his old command to serve as a pirate ship. On completion, England transferred his flag to the Cassandra while Taylor moved up to command his patched-up and leaky old Victory.
On the morning of 3 September, as they pulled up their anchors to get under way, Macrae made one more appearance. His mission was to plead for the release of his second mate, John Lazenby, whom they had managed to lay hands on and ‘forced’ to join their company as their pilot for their intended cruise of the Malabar Coast of India. Macrae was unsuccessful with this request.
On their departure Macrae immediately summoned his crew from their hiding places and set them to work on the Fancy. Using materials abandoned by the pirates, they got her hull into a barely seaworthy condition to resume their voyage to Bombay, under a jury-rig and flying discarded old canvas.
Macrae’s powers of command and seamanship were, once again, put to the test. Becalmed for much of the time out in the expanse of the Indian Ocean, they endured a passage of forty-eight days. During that time in the searing heat, he strictly rationed his destitute and half-crazed crew to a pint of water a day per man.
On his arrival at Bombay (16 November) he lodged his report of the loss of the Cassandra with the governor. It was at odds with that submitted earlier by Kirby who claimed he had tacked the Greenwich back into the bay to aid Macrae, only to find the Cassandra already aground. Kirby also stated that he had been chased back out to sea by a pirate vessel that almost got within cannon range of the Greenwich. To escape its clutches he had to cut adrift the long boat and a yawl he was towing and crowd on all sail. During the chase he lost his main topmast along with two seamen.
There was no official inquiry as to the discrepancies between the two accounts. The damage, however, was done and Kirby’s reputation lay in tatters. He was later reported to have died of shame the following August whilst ashore at Bandar Abbas.
Macrae’s tenacity and martial talent were not lost on the Honourable Masters of Bombay, then the principal ‘factory’ of the East India Company on the west coast. The timing of his arrival was fortuitous as they were in desperate need of such a man. Only days before, their fleet of locally-built oared galleys led by four fully-armed East Indiamen – London, Britannia, Defiance and Revenge (towing the massive floating gun battery Phrahm) – had suffered a humiliating retreat from before the fortress of Gheriah. This was the stronghold of the great Indian warlord and pirate king, Congalee Angria. His domain stretched some 250 miles along the Malabar Coast and was protected by some forty forts.
Their retreat had turned to a rout on their way back to Bombay when, during the night, they ran into England, Taylor and La Bouche. Macrae’s old adversaries had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Cassandra and the Victory in search of richer prey. Whilst they had no intention of linking up with Angria, the company’s admiral, an incompetent clerical administrator by the name of Brown, assumed otherwise and ordered his fleet to stand away.
This submissive manoeuvre emboldened England who, though out-gunned and outnumbered, seized the opportunity to run his two ships down their line, pouring broadsides into the London. Her commander, the timorous Captain Upton, refused to fire a shot in reply or engage without Brown’s express approval and security for all such damage as the ship might sustain.
This farce turned into a general panic when Brown, instead of issuing battle orders, decided to scatter his fleet to minimise losses to capture. To expedite his escape he cast off the giant gun battery barge after it was set ablaze. His actions enraged the vast majority of the officers and men and caused an immediate collapse of morale throughout the fleet.
It was a disaster that exposed the company’s naval weakness and ineptitude to rival European companies, native enemies and would-be allies alike. To retrieve this dire situation, the highly competent Governor Boone of Bombay ordered Brown back to sea immediately, but with Macrae in effective command. Brown’s face-saving order was to confront and defeat these pirates at all costs. Macrae’s first act was to unleash the fighting spirit of his commanders by relegating Brown to the role of bystander.
At the first sight of his quarry, Macrae had his fleet cleared for action and bore down under a full press of canvas to engage. England and his pirates had recently found out who was now hunting them from the very drunken John Fawkes, master of a small trading vessel they had boarded. Knowing full well what Macrae was capable of, they ran for it in a tempest of passion. During the ensuing three-hour chase, the pirates exloited their superior numbers and seamanship to work their sails to full advantage and so made good their escape.
Expelled from Indian waters, they skulked back towards Mauritius. Lazenby, the forced pilot, later gave evidence to the East India Company directors that the pirates spent much of their time discussing what tortures they would inflict on Macrae, should they fall in with him again. It was during this heated debate that Taylor seized the moment: the villain that we treated so civilly as to give him a ship and other presents, and now to come armed against us? He ought to be hanged, and since we cannot shew our resentment on him let us hang the dogs who wish him well if clear, Damn England! With the support of other malcontents this challenge was put to the vote. The result of this pirate-style democracy was that England was deposed and, with three others (no doubt the one-legged pirate included), marooned on the wildest coast of Mauritius.
Once rid of their discredited leader, Taylor transferred his flag to the Cassandra, which he renamed the Victory, while La Bouche was elected captain of his old charge. Under their new leaders, the pirates’ luck changed, and in a most spectacular way. They fell in with the dismasted and badly storm-damaged Portuguese galleon, Nostra Senhro de Cabo, in the harbour of Isle Bourbon (La Réunion). It was eight in the morning of 8 April when they attacked her from both sides. They met with little resistance as most of her seventy guns had been jettisoned in the typhoon.
She was the richest prize ever taken in pirate history. Apart from the 200 slaves on board, she was laden with a fortune in diamonds (valued at £500,000) and precious objects (£375,000) belonging to the retiring Viceroy of Goa, the Conde de Ericeira. When added to the booty they already had from the Cassandra and their other prizes, the grand total of their haul was in excess of one million pounds.
Lazenby was finally released at Isle Bourbon, by which time he reckoned that there were some 240 pirates left from the two companies that took the Cassandra. Each of these pirates’ share was a staggering 5,000 guineas in gold and 42 diamonds. He also remarked that one pirate, not content with his lot, used his pistol butt to shatter one very large stone he was given, so that he could boast that he had more diamonds than his shipmates.
By then the game was all but up. Under tremendous political pressure from the Mogul Court and the desperate pleas of the East India Company, the British government finally responded. Commodore Thomas Matthews was dispatched with a naval squadron of four warships with orders to eradicate the pirate nests.
At St Augustine’s Bay on the western shore of Madagascar, Matthews left a letter stating his orders and intentions for the commanders of his cruisers who had been scattered by a storm when rounding the Cape of Good Hope. When Taylor and La Bouche arrived at St Augustine, the natives unwittingly handed this letter over to them, as they were European captains.
So forewarned, Taylor had the good sense to quit the pirate business whilst ahead and cleared out of the Indian Ocean on the new Victory (ex-Cassandra) in December 1722. His last act of piracy was to bombard a Dutch fort on the West African coast before he crossed the Atlantic.
Back in Caribbean waters, Taylor tried to negotiate a pardon with the Governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Rutland, but was refused. Thereafter, he used his immense booty to procure a pardon from the Spanish Governor of Porto Bello on the Isthmus of Darien. To secure the deal, he also offered his vessel and services to the notorious Guarda Costa to hunt interloping dyewood loggers along the Bay of Campechy.
La Bouche stayed on in the Indian Ocean and managed to evade his pursuers, reportedly burying most of his treasure on one of the Seychelles islands. He then tried to emulate his old sailing partner, Christopher Condent, and buy a pardon from the French Governor of Isle Bourbon, after burning the very leaky ‘old’ Victory at Madagascar. It was not long, however, before he was back to his old ways and was eventually captured after a fierce battle with a French frigate. He was hanged for piracy at Isle Bourbon in July 1730. He left behind a cryptic note as to the location of his treasure hoard that has yet to be deciphered.
The marooned England and his fellow companions managed to build a small boat and sail around the coast of Mauritius to the main port. From there they eventually made it back to St Mary’s Isle, Madagascar, where they lived on the charity of their fellow pirates. England died soon afterwards at New Mathelege (Masselege) whilst being entertained by an old shipmate and ‘King of Madagascar’, James Plantain.
‘Lord’ Plantain was born at Chocolate Hole, Jamaica, and had served his time with the Brethren at New Providence. He was on the Fancy with Taylor when the Cassandra was taken, and retired soon afterwards to settle in Madagascar with a harem, a Scotsman and a Dane. The fate of the one-legged saviour of Macrae remains a mystery to this day.
Macrae, having saved the Company’s tenuous hold on Malabar Coast from an on slaught of pirates, was rewarded with a special commission as a ‘Superintendent’ of the Company. He was also given the task of sorting out their wayward settlement on the west coast of Sumatra. This mission allowed him to pursue his dual interests of weeding out rank corruption and chasing pirates.
Such was his effectiveness in these primary tasks that he was appointed to the presidency of Fort St David (south of Madras) on his return. This position in the ‘land service’ placed him directly in line to succeed to the presidency of Madras, the second most important British factory in India after Bombay. He did not have to wait for long, as this office became vacant in January 1725. For the next five years he set about restoring the company’s credibility with the native rulers and traders, and hence its profitability.
In doing so, however, he made many enemies who insidiously worked, in both Bombay and London, to tarnish his name and reputation. By late 1730 he had had enough, and resigned his highly lucrative commission to retire to Scotland.
His skirmishes with pirates, however, were not over. On his homeward voyage his ship was taken, off the coast of West Africa. In the general confusion, Macrae managed to hide his personal cache of diamonds before stepping forward to negotiate a very small ransom on behalf of the company for such a valuable ship and cargo.
How Macrae amassed his incredible cache of diamonds has never been explained. In his letters home from India in September 1727 to his fellow Scot and mentor, John Drummond of Quarrell, he claimed he was impoverished. This predicament he blamed squarely on the onerous duties of the two years he had already spent as governor of the presidency of Madras (with a £500 annual salary): as for my remitting money home … I don’t expect great matters if I stay here this seven years, the work I have to do, and what remains incumbent on me, make it impracticable to gett much money.
The reality would seem somewhat different, as he also enquired after the diamond, the finest little stone I have ever seen here, that he had sent as a present to Drummond. This was, no doubt, a placatory gesture as Drummond was a director of the Honourable East India Company and had recently reprimanded him for taking diamonds as presents from the local merchants.
What is clear from his letters is that he had already collected a circle of fellow Scots around him, a number of whom he dispatched on independent trading missions to China. In reporting these highly lucrative ventures, he portrayed himself to their mentor as a long-suffering patriarch, only looking out for their best interests.
A case in question was that of the imprudence of Mr Campbell whose solo attempt at diamond dealing had left him grossly overdrawn on his credit, on which Drummond stood guarantor. Macrae blamed much of Campbell’s monetary problems on the latter’s very young vain, empty Flirt of a wife. Macrae’s solution was to pack Campbell off on the East Indiaman Shawburn, with 2,000 pagodas (gold coins) on yet another six-month trading venture to China. Campbell went as second supercargo under my brother Captain John Hunter and watched over by the purser Mr Wedderburn. Campbell left very reluctantly and in bad humour. In his absence, Macrae, out of pure friendship, made it his duty to visit the young wife to counsel her on her waywardness.
These selfless social duties aside, Macrae was an ardent reformer. In his first year in office as President of Madras, he greatly reduced expenditure and thoroughly revised slack practices at the mint. He also introduced a new and more realistic exchange rate between gold and silver. He saw it as his civic duty to set up the first Protestant mission in Madras in 1726. The following year he had the city and its suburbs surveyed, in advance of tackling the public sanitation problem that was the cause of the soaring death rate.
As the champion of good business, he set about curbing the wanton excesses of his short-sighted predecessors. Rather than swindle and abuse the local native merchants, he introduced radical reforms that ensured fair dealing and legal recourse. Such popular measures, no doubt, explain their gifts of diamonds to him.
In his self-appointed role as the company’s anti-corruption crusader, he made it his business to confront the notorious sharp practices of his senior, Mr Walsh, the recently appointed Governor of Bombay. To do this, he personally sailed the thousand miles round southern India from Madras to Bombay. He arrived just as Walsh was about to sail for Britain. In a matter of days Macrae exposed to the governing council the elaborate web of false book-keeping that Walsh had devised to cover his extortion and fraudulent activities.
Having once again saved the Company from a humiliating scandal, Macrae received their gratitude while the disgraced Walsh was sent home without his ill-gotten fortune. His replacement, Robert Cowan, was a Scot from Macrae’s circle.
Back in London, the much-aggrived Walsh worked relentlessly to turn the tables on Macrae, accusing him of gross misconduct and misappropriation. Macrae had anticipated such mischief and tried to defend himself with Drummond by denouncing Walsh first, who no doubt will bespatter me for the hardship done him … I assure you he is a composition of falsehood and Jesuitical hipocrisy and I re[al]ly take him to be as Very a knave as ever serv’d: disserv’d: the Company, for he’s one that will stick at nothing to gett money.
Despite this pre-emptive strike, Walsh’s allegations, when added to those of others, had the desired effect and the Court of Directors ordered an investigation into Macrae’s activities. At the centre of their inquiry was the behaviour of his chief Dubash – Gooda Anconda – over whom he was meant to have firm control. This native ruler was notorious for corruption and oppression among his own people.
Although Macrae survived their inquiries with his reputation largely intact, it undermined his commitment to his appointment. In February 1730 he wrote to Drummond announcing his intention to resign: Your last letter hath quite tired me of this station & hope to get leave to quit it with the next shipping. I could with patience bear all the little Artifices made use of to make me leave the Government till this last shock wherein the Malice & Lies invented by my Enemies and industriously improv’d by a friend of yours, hath impos’d so far on the Court of Directors, as to make them write so many biting reflections against me.
Unlike Walsh, Macrae left behind no personal records of his financial dealings for his successor to scrutinise. Since the death of the company-appointed secretary, poor Pyat, in May 1727, from drinking punch to great excess, followed by a bout of consuming Madeira & water to most Exorbitant degree, Macrae had taken upon himself the onerous task of keeping his own accounts.
He resigned from the presidency in December 1730 and sailed from Madras (21 January 1731) with a fortune estimated at £100,000 sterling (the equivalent today of in excess of £10 million), of which £45,000 was in pouches of diamonds on his person as he boarded. It would seem that his services to the company came at a high price.
Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, was an indirect beneficiary of the Macrae legacy. The latter’s great financial investment in the social promotion of his two favourite Maguire sisters, the eldest Elizabeth and the youngest Macrae, came to timely fruition just as the bard contemplated his move from his native Ayrshire.
Macrae Maguire’s husband, the impetuous James Dalrymple of Orangefield, was an ardent local supporter of the bard. Burns wrote of him: I have found a worthy warm friend and described him in a (suppressed) stanza in The Vision as:
The owner of a pleasant spot
Near sandy wilds, I last did note
A heart too warm, a pulse too hot
At times o’er ran;
But large in every feature wrote,
Appeared the man.
Dalrymple took it upon himself to organise the bard’s pony-ride to Edinburgh and armed him with a personal letter of introduction to his brother-in-law James, fourteenth Earl of Glencairn.
James was Elizabeth Maguire’s second son, who had succeeded to his father’s title in 1775 after the death of his elder brother. He too was a great admirer of Burns, after his factor had first called his attention to the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems (published in 1760). It was James, in company with his mother Elizabeth, the dowager Countess, who gave Burns a warm welcome and smoothed his passage into Edinburgh society.
Burns was deeply influenced by him, finding both a compassionate patron and mentor, whose worth and brotherly kindness to me I shall remember when time will be no more. In practical terms, Glencairn was highly instrumental in advancing Burns as a publishing poet. He introduced him to his old tutor and travelling companion, William Creech, who arranged the publication of the extended Edinburgh Edition of his poems. Underwriting its success was very much the handiwork of the Glencairns. His mother, Elizabeth, bought 124 copies, while James cajoled the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt universally, one and all to subscribe for a further hundred copies.
Even after Edinburgh had tired of Burns, and he had returned to Ayrshire and farming (May 1787), Glencairn remained his sponsor. It was to him that Burns turned to secure his appointment to the Excise Service as a riding officer along the wild coast of Dumfriesshire. Burns sought to repay his weight of obligation to Glencairn by composing Verses to be written below a Noble Earl’s Pictures in his honour. This Glencairn declined.
In late January 1791 Glencairn took gravely ill after landing at Falmouth from a passage from Lisbon and died soon afterwards. On hearing of his patron’s untimely death, Burns was moved to write one of his most poignant laments, the last two stanzas of which are:
O! why has worth so short a date,
While villains ripen grey with time?
Must thou, the noble, gen’rous, great,
Fall in bold manhood’s hardy prime
Why did I live to see that day –
A day to me so full of woe?
O! had I met the mortal shaft
That laid my benefactor low.
The bridegroom may forget his bride
Was made his wedded wife yestreen:
The monarch may forget the crown
That on his head on hour has been:
The mother may forget the child
That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;
But I’ll remember thee, Glencairn
And a’ that thou hast done for me!
In that year Glencairn’s brother-in-law, James Dalrymple, was declared bankrupt and the Orangefield estate sold to meet his creditors. So ended the influence of Macrae’s legacy on Scottish culture. The name Glencairn, however, lived on, as Burns christened his fourth son (born January 1794) James Glencairn Burns in memory of his patron.