Janet Schaw

Janet Schaw, traveller and diarist, was born between 1730 and 1740 in Lauriston Edinburgh. The third cousin, once removed of Sir Walter Scott, she was born into an old Scottish family. Little is known about her early life, but during her travels to the Antigua, St. Christopher, North Carolina, and Portugal in 1774–1776, she kept a journal, "blessedly unaware that as she jotted down her opinions and descriptions that she was a writing for posterity a document of rare interest and importance, now which as far as we know, and especially as it bears on the Scottish phase of American colonial history, is unique". After her return to Britain she lived in Edinburgh and Plymouth, where she met King George III and Queen Charlotte. Janet died in 1800. Early life Little is known of Janet's early life, since the place and date of her birth are unclear, although she probably spent many years at Lauriston Yards, a fourteen-acre farm just outside Edinburgh, and had at least two brothers. The elder brother, Robert, was lost to Janet from childhood when he travelled at a young age to the American colonies, and the younger, Alexander (known as Sandie), accompanied her on her eventual voyage to those colonies. Their parents, Gideon Schaw of Lauriston, the Register of Tobacco in Edinburgh, and Anne Rutherfurd of Bowland, married in Edinburgh in 1723. However, upon Gideon's death in 1772, his affairs were such that Alexander had to sell the Lauriston estate. Janet would have lived in Edinburgh at the time of the Edinburgh Enlightenment. When the ship in which she was travelling to the West Indies broached at sea, she calmed one of the children, Fanny, by getting her to read the nearest book, which she later realised was Elements of Criticism by Lord Kames. Travels to the West Indies and US In 1774–1776, she sailed from Burntisland in Fife board The Jamaica Packet to St. Kitts and Antigua, in the West Indies, then to North and South Carolina, returning to Edinburgh via Portugal in 1776. She kept a journal of her travels which was discovered in the British Library in 1904 and published as Journal of a Lady of Quality Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina and Portugal in the Years 1774 -1776.