Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson, who was carried off from Aberdeen, and sold for a slave.

CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE OF A SCOTTISH BOOKSELLER

Later edition. Engraved frontispiece. 12mo. Later half calf over paste paper covered boards, expertly recased. Scattered soiling and toning with. Contemporary ink ownership inscription to ffep of "George Brown 1812". vi, 138pp. Edinburgh, printed by J. Tod & Son, Forrester's Wynd, for W. Coke, Bookseller, Leith,

A scarce early nineteenth-century Scottish edition of this remarkable captivity narrative. 

 

Peter Williamson (1730-1799) was abducted at age ten in Aberdeenshire, and transported to the American plantations, barely surviving a shipwreck en route. There he was sold into a period of indentured servitude (described by him as slavery), after which he purchase his own smallholding and married in Pennsylvania. Misfortune followed him, however, and he was once again captured, this time by a raiding party of Delaware Indians. He spent four months in the custody of this French-allied group, before he escaped and enlisted with the British Colonial forces. He saw action on the Northern frontier, before a third capture by the French, who loaded him onto a ship and transported him back to Britain as an act of truce. 

 

After landing in Plymouth in 1757 he was discharged from the army, and started his long journey home to Aberdeen. He ran out of money at York, and published the first edition of these memoirs as a source of income, under the title French and Indian Cruelty Exemplified in the life and various Vicissitudes of Peter Williamson. The book was an instant success.

 

When he finally arrived in Aberdeen, to his dismay he was "prosecuted for libel by merchants for his account of the kidnapping in which he exposed the role played by local magistrates and businessmen. He was at once convicted, fined and banished from the city, while his tract, which had passed through several editions in Glasgow, London and Edinburgh, was ordered to be burnt by the public hangman at the market cross. In response Williamson brought legal action against the magistrates in Aberdeen, and in 1762 was awarded £100 damages by the court of session" (ODNB).

 

This not inconsiderable sum allowed Williamson to settle in Edinburgh, and establish himself as a bookseller, publisher, inventor and proprietor of 'Indian Peter's Coffee Room'. A savvy self-publicist, he would often don his pseudo-Native garb and became something of a fixture on the Edinburgh scene. He even established a penny postal system for the city, later taken over by the government, for which he was comfortably remunerated. 

 

The present text is a posthumous revision of the 1757 first appearance of his autobiography, with the addition of an engraved frontispiece portrait of Williamson "in the dress of a Delaware Indian". The quality of this engraving is a little more naive than the 1801 Aberdeen first thus, and as such may indicate that this Edinburgh printing is a pirated version. The contraption illustrated above the portrait is likely the portable printing press invented by Williamson.

 

8 copies of this edition found through OCLC: NYPL, Newberry, Ohio Hist, U. Houston, U. Virginia, U. Aberdeen, NLS. Not in BL. No copy in RBH since 1941. 

 

Sabin, 104481. .

Stock Code: 245693