Janet Schaw

(c. 1731 - c. 1801)

Janet Schaw traveled to the West Indies, the colony of North Carolina, and Portugal before returning home to Scotland in 1776. In colonial America she watched a militia assemble for a review. “I must really laugh while I recollect their figures: two thousand men in their shirts and trousers, preceded by a very ill-beat drum and a fiddler,” she wrote. “They made indeed a most unmartial appearance.” A copy of her epistolary account of her travels was discovered by a British Museum researcher and published for the first time in 1921.