Battle of St. Lucia

On December 15, 1778, the British Royal Navy fought the French Navy, as part of the Battle of American Independence.  The English, under Samuel Barrington, won this battle.  St. Lucia, in the West Indies, ended up being the last home of someone known to Walter Scott; General David Stewart of Garth.

From Mr. Croftangry introduces another tale (the Two Drovers), in Walter Scott’s “Chronicles of the Canongate”, comes the following text and note on Stewart of Garth:

‘…Much might have been made at an earlier time, out of the history of a Highland regiment, and the singular revolution of ideas which must have taken place in the minds of those who composed it, when exchanging their native hills for the battle-fields of the Continent, and their simple , and sometimes indolent domestic habits, for the regular exertions demanded by modern discipline.  There is Mrs. Grant of Laggan, has drawn the manners, customs, and superstitions of the mountains in their natural unsophisticated state; and my friend, General Stewart of Garth*, in giving the real history of the Highland regiments, has rendered any attempt to fill up the sketch with fancy-colouring extremely rash and precarious….

* The gallant and amiable author of the History of the Highland Regiments, in whose services his own share had been great, went out Governor of St. Lucia in 1828, and died in that island on the 18^th of December, 1829, - no man more regretted, or perhaps by a wider circle of friends and acquaintance…’