A Kilmarnock book kept Burns from Jamaica
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), Scotland’s national poet, nearly sailed to work as a plantation book-keeper near Port Antonio for thirty pounds a year. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect—the Kilmarnock volume of 31 July 1786—sold at three shillings and redirected him toward Edinburgh instead.
Eldest of seven, he was born in a house his father William Burnes built in Alloway, two miles south of Ayr, and baptised the next day at the Auld Kirk. Poverty and heavy farm labour at Mount Oliphant and later Lochlea left a weakened body; schooling was patchy, supplemented by his father’s Manual of Christian Belief and tutor John Murdoch’s Latin and French. At fifteen he was principal labourer; harvest helper Nelly Kilpatrick inspired his first poem. He joined Tarbolton’s Masonic lodge St David on 4 July 1781, botched a flax-dressing venture when the shop burned at New Year, and with brother Gilbert struggled on Mossgiel farm after their father’s 1784 death.
Financial failure pushed him toward Patrick Douglas’s Jamaican sugar estates—Burns himself called the post that of “a poor Negro driver.” Meanwhile Jean Armour carried twins; her father tore up a marriage paper the same April day John Wilson printed subscription proposals. Mary Campbell, “Highland Mary,” may have plighted troth with him before dying of typhus in October 1786. The Kilmarnock success—and a letter from Thomas Blacklock urging a second edition—stopped the Greenock chest mid-journey. He postponed emigration on 1 September after learning of the twins’ birth.
Writing in Scots, light Scots-English, and blunt standard English, he gathered and reworked folk song. “Auld Lang Syne,” “Tam o’ Shanter,” “To a Mouse,” and “A Red, Red Rose” still travel the diaspora; in 2009 STV viewers named him the greatest Scot. Romantic pioneer, liberal and socialist touchstone, he remains Rabbie—the voice that almost left for the Indies and stayed to define a nation.
Source: Robert Burns
