Need a Body Cry‪?‬

In 1797, William Cathcart, a young Scot from Greenock set out to join the trading House of Bogle and Cathcart in Kingston, Jamaica. There he met Clare Cavayé a beautiful mulatto who had fled with her mother from the unrest in St Domingue to settle in Jamaica. She was to become his mistress and the love of his life. Their close relationship produced three children of which William and Robert survived. Unusually for the times, William had his sons educated in England and returned to Scotland and his inheritance, to settle in Edinburgh's New Town. But what happened to Clare....?


Dorothy Cavaye, a great-great-granddaughter of William Cathcart has researched the large number of family documents, letters and journals to uncover not only the family history, but also to reveal the way of life in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. Slavery was the norm and the French influence under Napoleon a threat to His Majesty's colonies. It is an absorbing account of a Scottish Trading House during difficult times. Written in an entertaining 'historical novel style ' Dorothy brings her antecedents to life so that we feel, by the end, we know them well. The epilogue is especially poignant when in 2000, over 150 descendants of the two boys held a reunion in an Edinburgh Restaurant -formerly William Cathcart's town house!


Family histories are too often an assortment of introspective meanderings to be passed down to the children and beyond, so it is refreshing to read a concise well ordered history of how a remarkable family came into being. Dorothy Cavaye has written of the early days of her family which is one in which every person called Cavaye can trace their line back to one liaison.