Muir of Huntershill, C. Bewley: Hardback: 1st Edition: Scots History: Adventure

Muir of Huntershill: A Scottish Patriot's Adventures Around the World

By Christina Bewley.

Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981. First Edition. Hardback cover with dustjacket (unclipped), 212 pages. Black & white illustration and photography included.

CONDITION
Overall very good condition, just some scuff marks and slight yellowing to the gloss dustjacket - see photos. No names or writing.

Thomas Muir was a brave and true Scot whose campaign for more rights for his fellow-citizens led in the 1790s to his
transportation to Australia as a political prisoner. From there he escaped on board an American ship which took him
on an adventurous journey across the Pacific, and eventually returned to Europe SO determinedly opposed to the English who had unjustly dominated his native land and punished him that he ended his young life plotting for the
invasion of Britain by the French Revolutionary armies. Patriot and traitor.

The obelisk to the memory of Muir and his fellows martyred in the cause of political justice is a salient point in
Edinburgh's horizon, but few know the story of the men it commemorates. Christina Bewley (nee Muir), in her crisp and clear-eyed account, both corrects and amplifies earlier lives of Muir and coolly sets out the achievements (and the errors) of the movement for reform in Scotland that was so harshly repressed by the Establishment, notably in the notoriously rigged trials of Thomas Muir and the Revd Thomas Palmer.

Mrs. Bewley has moreover an entertaining and exciting story to retail. Muir, amiable idealistic, and not a little an innocent at large, moves from the respectable and erudite background of his home at Huntershill near Glasgow, to associate with the passionate 'United Irishmen' and the radical Tom Paine and other revolutionaries in Paris, and then to organize the rashly named Convention' of the Scottish Friends of the People in Edinburgh in 1792.

After his savage sentence of 14 years transportation, he is thrown into the crude and picaresque company of convicts and their military escorts in the hulks and on an eventful voyage out to become one of the early settlers of the future city of Sydney. His travels after his escape make him one of the first Europeans encountered, sometimes with hostility and sometimes hospitality, by South Sea Islanders and the Red Indians of Nootka Sound on the West Coast of America. Courteously treated at first by the Spanish in Mexico, he is shipped back by them across the Atlantic, only to lose an eye in a naval engagement off Cape Trafalgar and to be welcomed by the French as one of the foreign heroes of the Revolution. What a life!

In retrospect, however, he emerges as a hitherto neglected pioneer of constitutional reform in Britain.

(Bindery shelves)