Launce of Hanover, Jamaica

[MAP OF 1763 -click this link]

“Their respective heirs”

William Launce wrote his last will and testament in 1720 with no hint at all that his young children, whom he wished to be ‘placed to school in England,’[1] would breed such a broad pattern of family interests at the western shore of a small parish in Jamaica and beyond. The ‘North side division of the parish of Westmoreland’,[2] where he lived at Launce’s Bay,[3] would become the new parish of Hanover in 1723, the year that he died, its harbours later familiar to his granddaughter’s husband, Duncan Campbell, ship master and latterly merchant of London. It is from the copy writings in Campbell’s remarkable series of letter books, begun in 1766, that glimpses of the connections amongst his wife’s and his own relatives on the island emerge. The weft was at its stiffest for half a generation, when private and business matters were ambitiously drawn together but slack by the end as misfortune and circumstance brought disappointment and a little rivalry. Some of the principals are simply names in a document, about whom no more is learned when a page is turned, others are more exposed by Campbell’s letters and a few miscellaneous papers.

            Whether there was any link between the William Launce who was granted 336 acres of land in the parish of St. Andrew in 1670[4] and the William who died fifty three years later at the other side of the island is unknown; likewise any connection to another Launce who had been active around these parts, Capt. James Launce of their Majesties’ Ship ‘Reserve’. He had died at sea in 1694 but seemed more concerned with the profits of prize money due to him from service on royal and merchant ships than with rents and profits from ‘messuages and tenements’[5] that he does not specify. His wife Mary became his executrix but no children or relations were named in his will.

            If William acquired nothing from either of these men, he was, nevertheless, not a poor man at his death. Richard Buller, merchant at Bearbinder Lane, London, was charged with the placement of Launce’s children at school in ‘respective parishes’ in England where each parish was to receive £100 over five years for the relief of the poor. A further £100 was to be applied to similar ‘charitable uses’ in his own parish at Jamaica. The children themselves were also to be well endowed upon reaching adulthood: £600 pounds apiece[6] to each daughter, Ann, Rebecca, Martha and Anna Petronella with the two boys, William and James, inheriting equal shares of their father’s real estate. It included perhaps the share of a sugar work designated ‘Launce & Tharp’s New Work’ at Bachelors Hall, near Lucea, on an undated map,[7] and there was certainly a pimento walk, Pimento Hill, overlooking the sea at Launce’s Bay which James Launce would later sell to neighbour and brother-in-law James Crooks.[8] As no separate provision had been made for William Launce’s widow, Mary, it is assumed that she was left to rely on the dower third of estate profits that she would have been entitled to during her lifetime.

            Mary’s daughter Martha Launce remains a wholly unwritten figure, unless she was the ‘Mrs. Martha’ living in London to whom Duncan Campbell relays a message from Jamaica in 1770.[9] Likewise Mary’s eldest son William, unless he was the ‘Captain Launce from Rhode Island’, either come for trade between the two colonies or recently returned home, who was buried in Hanover on the 20^th January, 1763.[10] If Martha’s sister, Rebecca, was indeed schooled in England she came safely home and married, in 1735,[11] Dr. Alexander McCorquodale, lately from Argyll, who owned ‘a tenement of land called Montpelier at Orange Bay’,[12] a mile or so south of Salt Spring, the plantation his brother-in-law Dugald Campbell had acquired in 1736. However, perhaps the climate and situation no longer suited McCorquodale for he returned with his wife to Scotland where he died in 1742. He was 38. No surviving children were recorded but his widow was left with Montpelier, silver and plate, and a full £400 – providing a receipt from Dugald Campbell for Jamaica debts due to her late husband could be duly acted upon. Whether Rebecca remained in Argyll or left again for Jamaica, it is known only that she was still alive in 1767 when brother James intended, by the will he wrote that year, a life annuity of £30 for his ‘sister Rebecca Campbell’.[13] The identity of Rebecca Launce’s second husband and her later whereabouts were not stated but with family, property and friends in Jamaica a return home would appear to have been likely.

            James Launce’s wife, a figure without even a name, had a daughter, Ann, who by 1767 had married one Joshua Newell, presumably related to the Thomas Newell who had been a witness to William Launce’s will. Joshua Newell himself had settled in the parish of Portland at Hermitage, a plantation laid out within the total of 440 acres of Crown land that had been granted to himself, Jameson and Josiah Newell between 1745 and 1750.[14] As the only child of her parents, Ann Newell duly inherited whatever her father possessed when he died,[15] which likely included property in Hanover, Hopewell estate, in the hills between Salt Spring and Prospect, and close to Green Island harbour from where Duncan Campbell’s ships later dispatched produce to London.[16] Like his father before him, James Launce had an urge for philanthropy at his death but was rather more constrained in his giving. Twenty pounds was the limit he set for a tomb ‘in the parish of Hackny’ and for the ‘maintenance of four poor familys in said parish’.[17] He was, however, buried in the garden of his son-in-law’s house at Hermitage.[18] The family name in Hanover may have died with James Launce but  the influence of it’s personal ties continued amongst his nephews and nieces. It also survived as a forename in later generations.

            Of William Launce’s two remaining daughters not much more is known but, for similar reasons, their children and grandchildren appear more often on record. The youngest Launce, Anna Petronella, became the wife of James Crooks of Crooks Cove sugar plantation, a short step across Launce’s River, immediately south of Launces Bay and bordering, in part, the pimento walk that had once belonged to his wife’s family. An infant daughter, Ann, already with her, Anna Petronella expected the birth of another child when her husband died at the age of 32 in 1740 and a son given his father’s name arrived a few months later. However, Ann and James Crooks the younger were not the last of Anna Petronella’s children for the young widow married one Richard McKenzie by whom there were three more daughters and another son: Rebecca, Susannah, Deborah and Richard. It is possible that McKenzie, so far just a name in the Anglican parish registers,[19] was overseer at Crooks Cove and lived there with his wife, for an old house by the shore is still known by a few, very old inhabitants of the locality as ‘the McKenzie house’, but for no reason that any can recall.

            The eldest Launce girl, Ann, found a strength of numbers in influence as the wife of Dugald Campbell of Salt Spring whose plantation was but one of four neighbouring and related family sugar works spread out between Green Island and Orange Bay: Salt Spring itself, Salem, Fish River and Orange Bay, all of them belonging to cousins of her husband. Campbelton was laid out a little later for additional family land also lay around and about,[20] and yet more Campbell cousins were planters and merchants in neighbouring parishes. Two of Ann Launce’s children, John and Rebecca, were to knot threads, personal and commercial amongst the cousins who were William & Mary Launce’s grandchildren, and their respective spouses. By 1768, one of the unmarried McKenzie daughters was possibly running her family’s household in the absence of parents for ‘parcels of sundries’ to a ‘Miss. McKenzie’ were dispatched from London by cousin Rebecca Campbell, all at the expense of her brother John Salt Spring.[21] Domestic trivia, perhaps, but indicative of attachments by no means diminished in the separation by sea, attachments that would serve otherwise.

“The uses of friends and relatives”

[LETTER TO JAMES CROOKS THE YOUNGER, 1766 - click this link]

With the century half gone, when the last children of the Launce’s youngest daughter Anna Petronella McKenzie were appearing, their older grandchildren began to set up on their own account. Whilst James Launce’s daughter, Ann had become Mrs. Joshua Newell, Rebecca Campbell was taken off to London in 1753, having married in Hanover[22] mariner Duncan Campbell. London, too, became the later destination for her sisters, Douglass and Deborah. Ann Crooks was discovered in 1756[23] by John Dickson, a millwright lately come from Edinburgh, her brother James married in the next decade, one Sarah, whose parents are yet unknown and her half sister, Rebecca McKenzie, met John Rankin in 1767. During the next quarter of a century or so the cousins’ interests were increasingly governed by the axis between John Campbell at Salt Spring and his sister’s husband at 4 Mincing Lane in London,[24] domestic concerns being overtaken by expectations of ‘a natural confidence…in the commercial way’.[25]

By 1766, Duncan Campbell, prospering in partnership as a London merchant and shipping contractor, had persuaded relations in Jamaica to a bold proposal. Shared profit in the joint owning of a ship was the first aim and ‘a compleat little ship…well calculated for the trade’,[26] was duly bought and fitted out in London. It was named Orange Bay. John Crooks and John Dickson each took a share of this ‘floating estate’,[27] the latter having taken up the former Campbell sugar work at Salem through the offices of his wife’s cousin, John Campbell Salt Spring. One added benefit for the Jamaica shareholders was a preferential conveyance of their plantation produce to London markets, another was a source of credit in Campbell himself who was willing to back his wife’s Launce connections, and Campbell cousins who chose to accept, if they in return consigned sugars to him for sale. In 1771, on the recommendation of John Salt Spring and John Dickson, James Launce’s son-in-law, Joshua Newell, also opened his account with Duncan who could now rely, at the least, on sugar and rum shipments from Salt Spring, Fish River, Orange Bay, Salem, and Hopewell in Hanover as well as Hermitage in Portland.

He relied, too, on the ‘guidance and regulation’ of John Salt Spring to manage the Jamaica side of the venture which grew to include farther family and friends at other plantations on the island who used what influence they had, directly and indirectly, to dispatch ‘without loss of time’ his expanding, small fleet of ships,[28] preferably with their own goods on board. The many hundreds of letters exchanged between London and Jamaica directed the operation in good times and bad. The causes of its withering some fifteen years later were economic and personal, the American war having a most marked effect, so too death. With the death of Ann Dickson in 1769, her husband’s head for affairs declined sufficiently for him to later sell Salem, although he got ‘price enough’ thanks to advice from Duncan and John Salt Spring. The event and its consequence were reminders of ever present disappointments.

A few fraught years for the Launce connected cousins were to follow the happy occasion of a London wedding in November 1774. John and Rebecca Campbell’s youngest sister, Douglass, had found a husband in Dr. John Sherwen[29] of Enfield but Rebecca herself, already ailing, was ‘taken sudden ill’ and died within a month, leaving Duncan wholly despondent and almost incapable for some time. Whilst suffering ‘a severe indisposition’[30] early in the new year, news of ‘poor Mr. Crooks’[31] also having died became the cause of added anxiety for him. Concerned about future affairs at Crooks Cove, and the state of its account, some small reassurance later came with the understanding that John Salt Spring and John Dickson were executors to the estate, the latter taking over its stewardship in addition to his management of Hopewell for the Newells.  However, the following year heard yet more bad news. The report of Joshua Newell’s death, in late 1775, was soon followed by confirmation of open conflict in North America, the timing of which occasioned Duncan to secure his large credit to John Salt Spring by way of a mortgage. Had John Dickson not rid himself of Salem he would have been obliged to do the same. 1776 also saw the death in Hanover[32] of its coroner, John Rankin, husband to Rebecca, Anna Petronella Launce’s eldest daughter by Richard McKenzie. The one item of relief in this bleak period for wider family affairs came with the marriage of Anna’s daughter Deborah McKenzie to Dr. John Paterson[33] who would prove to be a late but steady ally to his wife’s relations. The Patersons had use of the house at Montpelier which had belonged to his wife’s aunt, Rebecca (Launce) McCorquodale[34] before taking up Baulk plantation near Lucea.

‘On the head of business’, the deaths of John Salt Spring and John Dickson within a few months of each other in 1782 closed the accounts on what might have been a better venture for all in less contentious times. Campbell died in Connecticut, the ship carrying him to London having been taken by American privateers; Dickson was buried at Davis’ Cove in Hanover, the wharf and tenement which was the centre of his trade as a merchant and millwright. If ‘foreign adventures’[35] at Jamaica did not rise to the jaunty expectations of Duncan’s early correspondence, and if there were tensions on the way, relatives were nevertheless well taken care of in London and Jamaica. Whilst his copy letters deal ostensibly with business matters, they are also peppered with talk of family occasions and of the next generation, ‘the young folks’ - his own children and those of their ‘Launce’ cousins coming to adulthood from 1770. The private letters he sometimes refers to were not copied but there is enough on record about family minutiae.

             There was rather more coming and going across the ocean by the ‘young folks’ than might have been supposed. A great believer in the ‘salutary effects of…a sea voyage’,[36] Duncan had sent his eldest daughter, Henrietta, to Jamaica in the company of her aunt Douglass and uncle John Salt Spring, not doubting that she would ‘meet with every mark of civility’[37] from his friends there in 1772. Daughter Rebecca and son ‘Jack’ later took the trip but the journeying was very much in both directions. Seven of Ann Dickson’s eight children, after their mother’s death, were removed  like their grandmother Anna Petronella to schooling abroad, all but three returning as time followed. It might have been only a close family matter but Duncan, at times, chose to be involved in correspondence with Scotland and Jamaica on their behalf. Ann’s daughter Elizabeth’s return to Jamaica in 1773 was entirely a London arrangement for her, time being passed in town and in the country at Hawley, Rebecca Campbell ‘settling her with what necessaries are wanting’.[38] Similar courtesy was given to the widows who came to England with their young families in 1778, Ann Newell and Rebecca Rankin finding advice, introductions and assistance with accommodation, the latter eventually settling in Enfield where cousin Douglass Sherwen lived. The arrivals of the Crooks children to be put to school were also guided from Mincing Lane, two of the boys[39] being boarded at Bristol in the care of a Mr. Simpson whilst Ann (Nancy) and Sarah lodged with their aunt, Mrs. Rankin, who already had nephew George Dickson with her. The unexpected funeral of Nancy Crooks within weeks of her arrival in December 1789 was also in Duncan’s hands, so too the funding on account of London expenses for his late wife’s relations from the island.

In all the letters here exchanged there appear two enigmatic figures, one Lady Clerk with whom Sarah Crooks spent time, and one Mrs. Millar, who later took in her ‘cousin’ George Dickson.[40] In 1771, Duncan had first written to a Mr. Millar, not known to him and then in charge of Salt Spring during John Campbell’s absence, mentioning ‘the connection between you and my brother-in-law’,[41] but in later letters to James Millar in Jamaica nothing more is revealed.  Any correspondence to Lady Clerk was not copied.

“Some employment”

Perhaps it was fortuitous that the unwinding of Duncan Campbell’s once optimistic ‘foreign adventure’ coincided with the coming of age of a number of second generation cousins who began scattering to employment in various parts. Duncan’s eldest son Dugald, about to sail to Hanover for plantation experience with his uncle John, instead remained in London to learn from his father’s business - news of sister Rebecca’s death there in 1781, followed by the death of his uncle less than a year later forced a change of plan. In 1787 Salt Spring became Duncan’s property by a Chancery judgement in Jamaica, the mortgage of 1776 and other debts amounting to more than £11, 700.[42] Dugald eventually arrived to take charge some time before 1792 but did not find the planting business easy, Duncan refusing to subsidise the plantation any farther. Inheriting the estate in 1803, he borrowed from his late father’s clerk, James Boyick, by way of a mortgage,[43] and made it his home until 1817 when he died on a voyage to Bristol. Jack, like his father, turned to seafaring and Henrietta’s marriage to Glasgow and Jamaica merchant Colin Campbell ended in divorce in 1790.[44]

            Richard Crooks made his way to Edinburgh university, becoming a doctor in 1793[45] but his later whereabouts are untraced. Sister Sarah, at Duncan Campbell’s insistence, came home to Jamaica where she married, in 1784, George Malcolm of Argyle who was also in a merchant partnership with his brother Donald at Green Island and Lucea. She died eleven years later leaving two sons, John and James, only the former surviving to take over at Argyle estate in 1813. John Crooks, before the death of his guardian John Dickson, was already of an age to inherit and take over the Crooks Cove plantation, the interests of his mother’s new husband, Dr. Thomas Brown, notwithstanding. He too found himself having to rely on borrowed money, much of it from cousin Richard Dickson. By 1811, with others also pressing for their money,[46] he surrendered the plantation in a Chancery suit begun in 1807, cousin Richard Dickson buying out the other creditors and taking possession of Crooks Cove by default[47].

            Elizabeth Dickson had died in Hanover two years before Rebecca Campbell. Her eldest brother, John, removed to Kingston to practise law, married there but died at Davis’ Cove in 1801 leaving no children. Brother Richard, although the youngest surviving brother in Jamaica, led the fraternal partnership of ‘Richard Dickson & Co.’ merchants at Davis’ Cove in 1781[48] and seems to have had the kind of head for business which Duncan might have approved of; having been able to support John Crooks with credit, he also acquired the neighbouring estate of Samuell’s Cove. He died in 1821, the owner of a conjoined Cousins Cove estate and Dickson & Co. of Lucea shipping out sugars and rum for himself and others, including his junior cousin John Malcolm.[49] Neither Richard Dickson nor Dugald Campbell married but both had children by their housekeeper mistresses. Dugald was faithful to the one mistress, Susanna Johnson,[50] having four children by her, Richard met, in all, four women in his life[51] who gave him ten children.

            Deborah Paterson died in Hanover four months before her niece Rebecca Campbell in 1781, and the death of Dr. John Paterson followed eight years later, ‘universally regretted’ according to the parish register. Their children, all below the age of eleven, were perhaps put out to their father’s relatives in Aberdeenshire for daughters Deborah and Ann Rebecca later married in Scotland, John and Thomas Burnett respectively. Their elder brother, John, married Juliana Brown, daughter of William & Mary Brown of Kew in Hanover, but he died in 1801 before his own daughter, Ann Mary, was born. She later married John Palmer of Rose Hall and Palmyra in St. James’ parish.

            Rebecca Rankin died in England late in 1797[52], about the time that her daughter Ann became the second wife of Joseph Brisset[53] of Hanover whose father, George, had been a correspondent of Duncan Campbell. Ann had the one son, Joseph, in 1800 before her husband died in 1807 and by 1823 she, her son Joseph and his wife Mary Scarlett, together with their infant son Joseph, were to be found at Content estate in Hanover.[54] There also was one John Rankin, aged  21, perhaps Ann’s nephew, a son of one of her three brothers whose baptisms were recorded but nothing else. She died eight years later at Horsham in England.[55]

Loose ends

James Crooks the elder, d.1740

James had a sister Elizabeth, the wife of (Thomas?) George, parents of his nephew Thomas George. The George plantation was at Industry, Green Island, [see map of 1763] later owned by William Fleming (one of Duncan Campbell’s correspondents) and his wife Catherine Eleanor Nagtergaal. James Crooks also states in his will that William Rhodes James was a ‘kinsman’ but nothing more has yet emerged.

John Tharp

The Launce/Tharp partnership in the sugar work by Bachelors Hall may explain why

1.) John Tharp took a small share in Duncan’s ship Orange Bay

2.) Duncan hoped to engage Tharp in more business [1769] but was disappointed

William Tharp

Not mentioned in the text as no definite links have been made to the above. “Of Hanover parish”, his will [PROB 11/743, written 1737, proved in London 1745] names: two sons, John and William; no specific property; a wife Ann; executors Philip Haughton & Richard Haughton; witnesses Valentine Haughton & Edward Chambers.

James Launce

Although James Launce’s will was proved in London in 1775, it had been written in 1767, brief and functional with no detail about property and other relations, as if he soon expected death. As he does not figure in Duncan Campbell’s early correspondence from 1766, it is possible that James Launce died soon after writing the will; it is highly unlikely that Duncan would not have included his wife’s uncle in his plans for Jamaica trade and this maybe another reason why John Tharp initially came in.

Martha Launce

The ‘Mrs Martha’ referred to by Duncan Campbell in 1770 may be one and the same as ‘Mrs. Newell’s aunt’ in London expecting money from Jamaica, who was mentioned in a letter to Joshua Newell of 12^th December 1772.