Travels in Space and Time: Progress, War, and the Historical Mobilities of Scotland’s Enlightenment

ABSTRACT In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) voyaged across space and time. Drawing on ancient fable and contemporary colonial testimony, Ferguson sought to explain the moral implications of historical progress. Although embedded in human nature, progress was subject to almost infinite variation depending on geographical and environmental circumstances. Humanity therefore, was a vast tableau of different stages of human progress, each one in the course of their own development, that would unfold according to the same universal scheme of development. Hence as Ferguson saw it, to travel across the globe and encounter other nations and peoples deemed more or less civilised, was to travel simultaneously in space and in time. What made Ferguson’s navigation of these voyages unique were the circumstances of his Highland origins, and his life-long interest in war. By considering these two aspects of Ferguson’s thought, I will argue that we should regard Ferguson’s Essay as an ‘avatar of Enlightenment’. Avatars of Enlightenment, I contend, embodied simultaneous mobility in space and time, making the global diversity of humanity comprehensible in a universally applicable scheme of historical progress from savagery to civilisation.


Introduction
As Walter Scott remembered it, the one and only time he met the most celebrated poet of his age, Robbie Burns, was in the parlour of his former teacher, the recently retired professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Adam Ferguson. 1 The meeting took place at one of Ferguson's regular soirées with friends and colleagues from the University in April 1787. Burns was then on the cusp of poetic fame and fortune, Scott, a young boy of 15 or 16. Scott later recalled that the handsome young poet was ill at ease among the eminent company of Enlightened intellectuals and so he gave his attention instead to one particular picture hanging on the aged professor's The reference to Minden and to the 'cold' 'Canadian hills' in Langhorne's verse recollected a special date in recent British imperial history: 1759. That was the year in which Britain turned the tide of the Seven Years War from defeat and humiliation to a sequence of uninterrupted victories, not only on the field of Minden in the Netherlands, but at Quebec and the Plains of Abraham in Canada, at Madras and Wandiwash in India, at Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, and at Quiberon Bay off the coast of France. 4 Among the troops whose bloodshed won that string of victories were thousands of Scots soldiers, many drawn from the Highlands of Scotland, deployed in all theatres of this global conflict. 5 Langhorne's pathetic stanza combined with Bunbury's morose print was in effect a plea to the national conscience for pity and support for the orphaned and bereft families of the nation's fallen heroes. 6 But it was more than that. The image was an incitement to Britons to kindle a moral and sentimental attachment to the unfolding geography of empire that was awash with troops such as those Bunbury depicted, their bereaved lovers and families. 7 The print's release in 1783, the year in which Britain faced humiliating defeat by its own rebellious colonies in America, shows how patriotic and military sentiments became ligaments of empire. 8 War was integral to Britain's late eighteenth century Empire as a medium for a geographic, indeed a global, state of mind. 9 The Empire subsisted in an attenuation of the heart drawn out, made mobile in war, across vast oceanic and territorial spaces that were simultaneously experienced, thanks in no small measure to the work of Adam Ferguson, as travels in time. 10 In this paper I will situate Ferguson's reflections on war in relation to his conceptualisation of historical progress. My intention in doing so is to illustrate how war operated as a medium in Ferguson's thought for new forms of mobility that made empire possible in America and well beyond. Sebastian Conrad has recently warned global historians against a preoccupation with mobility. Global history risks making mobility an 'exaggeration' or 'distortion' by implying that 'everyone and everything' was 'on the move, everywhere', rendering the historical past 'into a simple prehistory of globalization'. 11 I will argue in this paper that this is precisely how mobility operated in Ferguson's thought on war. As a Scot and a Highlander, concerned about the moral foundations of historical progress, civilisation, and empire, Ferguson's thought stood at the crossroads between the increasing mobility of global trade and imperial conflict, and a persistent nostalgia for times past. 12 Ferguson's entanglement of spatial with temporal mobility served as a potent foundation for his interweaving of fabrication and myth into the moral and historiographic narrative of civilisation and progress. Historical time as Ferguson presented it thus became an exercise in distorted vision; a narration of modernity that imbibed and combined the fabrications of ancient fable and the fictions of colonial testimony. His presentation of a seamless voyage between spaces and times thus revealed all of humanity's geographical and historical variations simultaneously. This was the achievement of Scottish stadial history, to have unfurled the 'great map of mankind' on which 'there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our view.' 13 It is this simultaneous mobility between places and times that makes Ferguson's celebrated Essay on the History of Civil Society an avatar of Enlightenment. 14

Avatars of Enlightenment
The pairing of Bunbury's print with Langhorne's verse, framed and displayed on the retired professor's parlour wall, also made that image an avatar. 15 Wrapped within it were potent inducements to global mobilities in both space and time. When the Hindu god Vishnu made his descent to earth he did so as one of a number of avatars (variously listed as 10, 24, 108, or beyond number). 16 An avatar is a divine incarnation in physical form. The form allows the deity to cross from the sacred realm to the profane world inhabited by humans. In making this journey, the avatar simultaneously intervenes in the folds of time stretching between distinct cycles of life and death. 17 The avatar is thus the form in whom the divine manifests simultaneously in the anciently slow turning of sacred time, inching eternally from universal creation to destruction and re-creation, and in febrile human historical time experienced as a linear unfolding. 18 Just as Vishnu's avatars were travellers in time, between times, so the avatars of Enlightenment embodied their own aspirations to travel beyond one time into another, making both present. As Brewer and Sebastiani describe it, Enlightened philosophers expressed a 'historical certainty' about the past such that, reasonable conjectures as to its varying patterns coupled with logical deductions about universal human motivations could simultaneously 'embrace every aspect of human progress … ', unlocking the future's secrets. 19 This kind of conviction lay at the heart of Scottish 'philosophical', 'universal' or stadial history which sought nothing less than the discovery of the universal patterns the human species exhibited on its inexorable path of progress. 20 The hungry ambition of philosophical history, as Matthew Birchall's paper in this issue also contends, rendered humanity's spatial spread simultaneously as temporal states of progress or decline. Reading human diversity in Europe and beyond in this way was built on mobilities that were not only spatial, gathering data from travel around the globe, but temporal in interpreting those encountered as variously savage or civilised, or somewhere between. 21 All climes and times could thus be enfolded within one seamless sweep of historical time. 22 The conceit of the Enlightened philosophical traveller was an ability not merely to read 'moments in the past' for timely instruction, but to move between them by 'charting and explaining historical change through continuous time.' 23 The linearity of Enlightened historical time was itself a deliberately distorted field of view. It was premised on a highly selective use of evidence that obscured the co-presence of others (which, as Ingeborg Høvik's and Charmaine Nelson's papers this issue remind us included both First Nations peoples and those enslaved), whose own histories confounded the temporal dispensations that founded European colonies and empires. 24 That distortion was built in to the mixed methods of stadial history, as Linda Andersson Burnett's paper in this issue illustrates. The uncivil, indeed precivil places and peoples of the globe were made subjects of 'natural history', requiring the application of 'scientific' taxonomies of nature, in contrast to those who were considered to possess their own 'civil history … it was the purpose of universal histories to examine and explain.' 25 By harking back to Britain's year of miracles in 1759, the maudlin sentiment of Bunbury's print invited eighteenth century Britons to make their own crossing between worlds and times through the medium of Empire's 'tangle' of peoples and places. 26 It is apposite therefore, that the year Bunbury sentimentally invoked was probably also when Adam Ferguson first met the young James Macpherson, a man who would come to play a significant part in his later life, not least through his partial fabrication of the poems of Ossian. 27 At that time Ferguson was then only five years out from his service (between 1745 and 1754) as a chaplain to one of Scotland's oldest regiments, the 43rd (later the 42nd or 'Black Watch'), and had recently begun work on the book that would secure his intellectual reputation: An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 28 Ferguson's attachment to Macpherson demonstrates how readily the philosopher cleaved to the poet's fabrications to sustain the distortions of perspective that enabled them both to undertake vast travels in space and time. 29

War, History, and Progress
Ferguson and his Essay would come to symbolise the intellectual aspirations of Scotland's Enlightenment to explicate the promise and perils of the historical passage from savagery to civilisation. 30 The Essay was eventually published in 1767, and it rapidly found an avid international readership, issued in seven subsequent editions in Ferguson's lifetime as far afield as America and Switzerland, with translations into German (in 1768) and French (in 1783). 31 By the time of its publication, Ferguson already held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (which he would occupy till his retirement in 1785), and his lectures were among the most popular on offer. 32 In eighteenth century Scotland, moral philosophy stood at the nexus of the narrative structure of civil history and the taxonomic methods of natural history. 33 Ferguson harnessed both to instruct his students, as he had oriented his readers of the Essay, to avow an ethics of Stoical self-command and patriotic service. Moral philosophy illuminated a knowledge of what was universal in human nature by showing how history had enabled that universality to flourish in the civilisation of Europe. 34 Ferguson intended his Essay to be 'a Dissertation on the Vicissitudes incident to Human Society' and at least in part as a 'History of Manners'. 35 This latter phrase is redolent of the uniquely Scottish Enlightenment preoccupation with what Ferguson's one time student, Dugald Stewart, later dubbed 'conjectural history'. This was history that aimed to illustrate how the rise and fall of societies, nations, and national character across time could be charted in the development of commerce and corresponding legal, political, social, intellectual and moral values, practices and institutions. 36 Ferguson's historiography was especially attuned to the ways in which the vibrancy of virtues and manners may be said to wax and wane in relation to broader social developments. In this sense, the distinguishing preoccupation in the Essay was with how the development of modern or civilised societies led to ever more refined politeness and delicacy, but an ever more parlous state of virtue, thanks to the division of labour. 37 There is now a considerable scholarship on the role of the division of labour in Enlightened Scottish political economy and historiography, and on Ferguson's distinctively acute concerns that it would wizen and debase character. 38 These concerns can be related to Ferguson's peculiar biography, the only philosopher among the famed 'literati' of Edinburgh originating from the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. 39 This background was reflected in his nostalgia for ancient Gaelic martial traditions, which of course helps to explain his attachment to Macpherson and to Ossian. Yet nostalgia does not encompass it fully. Ferguson's nine years service as a regimental chaplain embodied both of his characteristic preoccupations: to the Highlands and to war. The only fleeting reference we have to his military service has him reciting Gaelic verse to maintain the morale of his troops under fire. 40 If the story is true, it allows us to gauge the depth of Ferguson's loyalty to notions of archaic Highland martial virtue. It also explains why he might consider deploying fabled archaic virtues crucial to arrest the corruption of modern soldiery inured by the division of labour to a professional abasement to command and drill. 41 While most Enlightened Scots thought that humanity presented a vast tableau of different stages of human progress, each one in the course of their own progress or corruption, Ferguson's navigation of humanity hinged on martial virtues exemplified in the past but also urgently veritable in the present. 42 Ferguson's thought reflected the distinctively Scottish combination of political economy with a scheme of stadial or stage-like historical progress driven by the extension of commerce, the growth of population, and the consolidation of prosperity. 43 First sketched in Adam Smith's lectures on jurisprudence delivered at the University of Glasgow in the early 1760s, this framework of stages, from 'savagery' to 'civilisation,' offered a grid for the classification of peoples as part of a progressive history of the human species. 44 For Ferguson the human species was in process of a universal, linear but reversible historical progress. So it was that Ferguson could speak of his own countrymen and women (Lowland Scots and English) as civilised yet simultaneously on the brink of disastrous corruption. In the midst of that civilisation and corruption, existing simultaneously alongside it, were socalled savage peoples, by which he had in mind two groups in particular: the Indigenous peoples of America and his own Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlanders among whom he not only grew up, but served alongside in the military.
In addition to this personal experience, it is notable that Ferguson probably imbibed highly selective, if not completely fabricated testimony on both groups from the same source, his friend James Macpherson. The relations between the two men were of long duration, but the hinge on which their relations turned were the much disputed poems of Ossian whose composition by Macpherson coincided with Ferguson's writing of his Essay. Macpherson's fame built following the publication of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland in 1760, followed by the two epics Fingal in 1762, and Temora in 1763, and the collected edition The Works of Ossian in 1765. The ties between the two men were so tight that some imagined the Professor had a hand in Macpherson's astonishing fabrications. 45 The poems supposedly consisted in the recollections of the aged and blind warrior bard, Ossian, who in the late third century looked back on a now passed era of heroic struggle and composed the epic cycle of poems in oral form. 46 Ferguson was one among a group of Scots intellectuals who enthusiastically defended Ossian's authenticity, and mined the poems for historical evidence. 47 The poems seemed to affirm to them the terrible animosity, the intimate violence, but also the nobility of sentiment and martial virtue indigenous to uncivilised, even savage Highland warriors. 48 For Ferguson, war and its waging held a key to unlocking the connection between the moral condition and historical contingency of humanity. As he presented it in his lectures on moral philosophy at Edinburgh, humanity was born to war and peace; the perpetual necessities of the former and the historical impermanence of the latter provided a stage for displaying human character. 49 Humanity was one species, but many nations and races distinguished physically from one another, yet differentiated principally by moral accomplishments. These were differences that were not biological or physical so much as they were social or cultural. What mattered in setting one group apart from another was their moral exertion; their capacity to emulate the greatest of all human virtues (courage, fortitude, and compassion), the most ennobling of qualities of mind and character (reason, ingenuity, and intelligence). Perhaps unsurprisingly for a former soldier, Ferguson considered warfare the chief means by which a people could demonstrate these moral qualities in the active exertion of will and character.
For all its undisputed terror and trauma, Ferguson argued, wars do 'not always proceed from an intention to injure; and … even the best qualities of men, their candour, as well as their resolution, may operate in the midst of their quarrels.' 50 War was as often associated with the best or 'most amiable qualities of our nature' as it was with the worst or most 'unfavourable'. Wars, … often furnish a scene for the exercise of our greatest abilities. They are sentiments of generosity and self-denial that animate the warrior in defence of his country … 51 Ferguson was far from blind as to the negative effects of war, and of the role of unsocial and even 'unhappy and detestable passions; malice, hatred, and rage' so often vented in war. And yet, his view was unequivocal: 'in the practice of violence and stratagem' lay 'the most illustrious career of human virtue.' 52 The crucial point was not simply that war called forth the noblest of sentiments, but that the sentiments war inspired varied with the broader historical development of nations and societies. Yet it was only civilised modern Europeans who had: … mingled politeness with the use of the sword; we have learned to make war under the stipulations of treaties … This is, perhaps, the principal characteristic, on which, among modern nations, we bestow the epithets of civilized or of polished. 53 Despite that, Ferguson also argued that the savage wars fought 'in the woods of America' (as he put it), or those fought by warriors in Europe's archaic past, retained their own crude virtues. 54 War among savage peoples was determined by the nature of their social existence as 'rude nations and separate clans' or '[s]mall and simple tribes' pursuing a subsistence economy by means of hunting and gathering in the absence of private property, settled government, or formal law codes. 55 Under these circumstances, all wars were tribal or national wars 'animated with the most implacable hatred', by spurious claims to 'superiority' and 'indiscriminate contempt and aversion'. 56 These wars were 'perpetual', resulting from a permanent 'hostile intention' felt toward all other tribes and clans. Though intractable, they were not interested wars. They were not fought for territorial aggrandizement, empire, or resources, but for no other reasons than 'the point of honour, and a desire to continue the struggle their fathers maintained.' 57 War waged in these conditions was fought according to the dictates of untrammelled nature; passion was the predominant motive; planning and organisation were largely absent; numbers were small, command temporary and exercised by consent; cruelty abounded, but so too did the martial virtues of courage, fortitude, intrepidity, and stoic independence. 58 Savage war was waged without restriction or lenity, 'beyond the bounds of moderation', subject to wild swings of passion from 'dejection' to 'elation' without the 'uniform application of prudence'. 59 Ferguson condemned the fact that the 'amiable plea of humanity was little regarded' in these wars among savages, abhorring their frequently ending in wholesale enslavement. 60 Seen in this light, Homer's or Ossian's: … ancient nations have but a sorry plea for esteem with the inhabitants of modern Europe, who profess to carry the civilities of peace into the practice of war; and who value the praise of indiscriminate lenity at a higher rate than even that of military prowess, or the love of their country. And yet they have, in other respects, merited and obtained our praise. Their ardent attachment to their country; their contempt of suffering, and of death, in its cause; their manly apprehensions of personal independence, which rendered every individual, even under tottering establishments, and imperfect laws, the guardian of freedom to his fellow citizens; their activity of mind; in short, their penetration, the ability of their conduct, and force of their spirit, have gained the first rank among nations. 61 Ferguson praised the 'bold, impetuous, artful' and indefatigable savage warriors, whose cruelty was directed against other tribes or nations, while 'solitary traveler[s]' were treated with kindness and generosity. The 'ferocity of spirit' among Europe's ancient Huns and Celts made them cruel and fierce, but capable of great redeeming virtues. When finally 'subdued by the policy and more regular warfare of the Romans', he wrote, their love of independence made them readier to seek death than accept subjection. 62

Fabrications: Homeric, Ossianic, American
'The artless song of the savage, the heroic legend of the bard', Ferguson wrote in the Essay, have a simple but 'magnificent beauty' capable of inspiring the emulation of martial virtue. Ferguson here connected the songs of 'savages' and the legends of ancient 'bards' as illustrative of a historical 'savagery' that was both long past and colonially present. Ferguson's analogy between the warfare of Indigenous Americans and of Homer's and Ossian's heroes drew heavily on the same source. In revising his third edition of the Essay in 1768 Ferguson included a footnote referring his readers to the relevant source on 'savage' martial virtue: 'See Translations of Gallic Poetry, by James M'Pherson.' 63 Macpherson and Ferguson shared a profound admiration for Homer, whose status as a source of historical truth had been well established by the Marischal College (Aberdeen) Professor of Greek (1723-1757), Thomas Blackwell. Blackwell's Enquiry Into the Life and Writings of Homer had exerted a powerful influence on a variety of figures, among them a young Marischal student, James Macpherson. 64 As Ferguson described it, Homer's 'heroic fable' was illustrative of a savage 'state of society' in which the powerful 'emotions' of 'heated imagination' were as yet unchecked by civil refinements. 65 For this reason, both Homer and Ossian could be accepted as reliable guides, as Ferguson's contemporary and Macpherson's mentor Hugh Blair expressed it, to the 'resembling times' each poet supposedly lived in. The historian must approach such works not as a 'mere annalist of Facts', Blair wrote, but as a student of the poet's art 'to embellish truth with beautiful, probable, and useful fictions.' 66 Blair's and Ferguson's meaning was perfectly literal, 'fiction may be admitted to vouch for the genius of nations, while history has nothing to offer … Greek fable … throws light on an age of which no other record remains.' 67 Hence it was that the Iliad, Ossian's epics, and 'every ancient poem' provided clear proof of the 'superior force, courage, and address' of the savage if heroic warrior who 'takes every advantage of an enemy, to kill with safety to himself', who is driven 'by a principle of revenge', and 'never stayed … [by] remorse or compassion.' 68 For Ferguson the contrast between the heroic exertion of Homer's or Ossian's warriors, and modern soldiery trained only to emulate submission to command was both a historical and moral parable. 69 The contrast however, did admit important gradations. While the intrepidity and courage of 'savage' American warriors in his own day was analogous to Homeric or Ossianic virtue, it was not identical. Defenders of Ossian's authenticity such as Ferguson and Lord Kames read in the Homer and Ossian a refinement of sentiment, of noble honour, that they believed had founded traditions of chivalry, liberty, and national identity in Scotland and Europe. 70 Ferguson described the ancient warriors of the Aegean, as well as the 'ancient Gauls and Britons' described by Tacitus and Caesar, as the 'fierce nations of Europe' whose 'wild and lawless' liberty and martial virtue ensured that Europe did not fall entirely under the sway of the despotic, barbarous corruption of the Tartars in Asia. 71 Ferguson's depiction of the 'rude nations' inhabiting America and other colonial domains was far more equivocal. His information was drawn from the doubtful testimony of publications by missionaries, administrators, and soldiers who eagerly retailed the pitiless tortures and unredeemable cruelties of colonial warfare as if they were indigenous to America. Ferguson most likely had ready access to these sources in his own extensive library, as well as the University of Edinburgh Library, and before that in the Advocates Library in which he had served as librarian from 1757 to 1759. 72 But it is in the third edition of the Essay published in 1768 that Ferguson tantalisingly refers to other unnamed sources on America, This account of Rude Nations, in most points of importance, so far as it relates to the original North Americans, is not founded so much on the testimony of this or of the other writers cited, as it is on the concurring representations of living witnesses, who, in the course of trade, of war, and of treaties, have had ample occasion to observe the manners of that people. 73 Two things are interesting about this footnote. The first is that Ferguson refers to the 'concurring representations of living witnesses' implying that he was drawing on the spoken (or at least not printed) testimony of more than one person with first hand American experience. Second, Ferguson implies this testimony has greater weight in informing his view of native American nations than the standard published sources he also cited. There is now probably no way of ascertaining the identity of these unnamed sources, but there are some interesting possibilities. Ferguson was personally connected to a range of people who had experience of global travel and encounter. Indeed, the city of Edinburgh was filled with such people. Yet there is one group to whom Ferguson scholars have paid almost no attention: and these were the members of his former regiment, the 42 nd . 74 The 'Black Watch' was sent to America and the West Indies in 1756 (only two years after Ferguson's retirement) to fight the French and their Indigenous American allies. After an arduous campaign, the regiment returned to garrison duty in Ireland in 1767. 75 Many of those sent to America would have known Ferguson. By a rough estimation there were over 100 soldiers and officers of the 42nd in America whose tenure in the regiment pre-dated Ferguson's regimental retirement in 1754. 76 We also know that as late as the early 1800s there were very venerable former members of the regiment who held strong memories of Ferguson and provided the only scant but striking details we have of his military service. 77 Throughout their time in America, members of the 42nd had ample opportunity to observe and interact with Indigenous Americans, and especially with Indigenous warriors with and against whom they fought. 78 There is however, no more than circumstantial evidence of a viable link between Ferguson and his former military comrades.
The Memoirs and Adventures of Robert Kirk is the only published source (albeit in 1770, well after the first three editions of Ferguson's Essay were published) by a former member of the regiment that provides any indication of the kind of judgments that Scots soldiers made of their Indigenous allies and foes. 79 By its nature, this is an atypical source written by a man whose experiences were unusual. Even more unusual is that some years before the publication of his narrative in 1770, there is just a chance that he had an opportunity to pass on his experiences of savage war in America to the same source on whom Ferguson relied for testimony about Ossianic war, James Macpherson. Robert Kirk originally served in America with the 77 th (Montgomerie's) Regiment in which he participated in the disastrous British assault on fort Duquesne in September 1758, whereupon he was apparently captured and adopted by the Shawnee spending about eight months moving through their territory. 80 Kirk then managed to escape and re-join his regiment for the assault on forts Carrillon and St Frederic. After that he claims to have served with Colonel Robert Rogers irregular force, and to have been part of the genocidal raid on the Abenaki nation at fort Saint Francis in 1759. Kirk then appears to have soldiered throughout 1759-60 as both a regular and irregular fighter, and to have spent some months absent without leave and in military prison in 1761-62. Transferred sometime after this to the 42nd, Kirk subsequently fought under Colonel Bouquet at the battle of Bushy Run in 1763, and later accompanied Captain Thomas Stirling and 100 men of the 42nd down the Mississippi, to take possession of fort de Chartres in 1765. Following that he continued on down the Mississippi to Pensacola, in the new British colony of West Florida, in March 1766. 81 It is this latter journey that potentially brings him into Macpherson's and Ferguson's orbit.
Richardson finds that Kirk's record of his captivity is 'unremarkable' in freely incorporating material borrowed from other well-known sources. 82 Whether authentic or borrowed, Kirk praised Indigenous American virtuesincluding forgiveness and generosity while also retailing blood-curdling accounts of the cruelties of frontier conflict. 83 If any of it is to be believed, Kirk undertook multiple navigations along the frontier in America through geographical terrains (such as rivers and forests), spatial domains (Shawnee villages, military forts, and colonial towns), and across cultural and linguistic divides between Europeans and First Nations. The narrative complicated this spatial and linguistic navigation by suggesting that it also traversed a moral terrain of inescapable savagery. 84 Kirk did not hesitate to condemn the 'inhumanity of these savages', but nor did he provide any comforting sanitising of European frontier conflict. 85 Rogers' raid on St Francis was a 'calamity, dreadful indeed', but it was deserved in his view as a just chastisement of an inveterate enemy. His further tale of Rogers and his fellow Rangers sustaining themselves by cannibalising one of their female First Nations captives suggested another descent into horrendous savagery. Steele is doubtful about the veracity of Kirk's captivity narrative, suggesting his emphases on morally compromising tales of violence and cannibalism were deliberately selected for shocking effect. 86 Whatever literary merit lay in these published exaggerations or fabrications, his journey down the Mississippi potentially brought the real Kirk, survivor of multiple crossings and conflicts, witness and participant in frontier savagery, into contact with another literary embellisher, James Macpherson.
Macpherson was then based at Pensacola: the nascent capital of the recently formed colony of West Florida (part of the spoils of Britain's conquests from the Seven Years' War), where he served as secretary to the colony's Governor, and another of Adam Ferguson's close friends, George Johnstone. 87 It was largely due to the literary fame achieved by the publication of the poems of Ossian that Macpherson had been appointed in 1763 Johnstone's secretary. Macpherson departed for West Florida in 1764 and in his short sojourn in the colony served Johnstone as advisor, magistrate, and member of the provincial council in the colony's capital, Pensacola. Part of his duties involved him in the management of the frontier by seeking First Nations compliance and acquiescence in trade that would guarantee further cessions of more land in semi-regular treaty negotiations. 88 While Macpherson was in the colony there were at least three such 'Indian congresses' at which he was likely to have been present: at Mobile in 1764, and at Pensacola on 26th May and 4th June 1765. The outcome of these congresses were formal treaties. 89 Macpherson however, soon departed from the colony bearing Johnstone's treaties back to Britain early in 1766. 90 Though his stay in America was brief, Macpherson stood at the cross-roads of multiple mobilitiesof people, ideas and texts across vast territorial and oceanic domains, through a variety of cultural and linguistic protocols, within and between imperial and colonial rivalries. Macpherson was thus in a unique position to read America and Americans through the lenses of Ferguson's own ideas and an inflected (even confected) nostalgia for Highland warriors that he had done so much to sustain. Macpherson was also the most likely conduit by which American experienceeither his own or just possibly those of Scots soldiers such as Robert Kirkcould have been filtered back to Ferguson. If these experiences did not quite reach Ferguson in time for the first edition in 1767, they could have by the third in 1768; enabling the author of An Essay on the History of Civil Society to refer in his footnote to those with personal knowledge of First Nations Americans gained in 'trade, war and treaties'. 91

Conclusion
I began the paper by suggesting that we should approach Ferguson's Essay not just as a text but as an avatar of Enlightenment. Mobility shaped its very formationboth the mobility of spatial encounter between peoples, and the temporal mobility implied in Ferguson's progressive view of humanity. Ferguson's arguments, themselves products of Britain's global reach, offered contemporary readers a way to travel the world in both space and time. Laid out on its pages was a panoply of humanity spread across the globe yet inhabiting simultaneously very different eras of historical progress made visible by increasing mobility. Historians of science have spoken of the 'dizzying array of literary technologies' that enabled Early Modern Europeans to mediate their ignorance, to suppress rival non-European knowledges, and to buttress their own incomplete theories and conclusions. 92 As Suman Seth's essay in this issue attests, mobility was at the heart of Enlightenment medicine and natural history. The fictional leaps and bounds Ferguson accomplished were integral to his understanding of history as progress, of space and time as simultaneously traversable domains, and of humanity as universal. It is precisely for these reasons that Ferguson's Essay was of use to those for whom travel through the medium of empire was experienced in both spatial and temporal terms at once.
Ferguson's Essay was itself transported, travelled widely, and contributed not a little to the unfolding of colonisation across the globe, well beyond Britain's shores, across the Atlantic, and far further than America. Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society had the dubious distinction of being the only work of Enlightenment philosophy to have made the oceanic crossing to Australia with the First Fleet of permanent convict colonists in 1788, and to have made the first known circumnavigation of the landmass in 1801-02. We know the book was carried on both voyages because it was referred to by two of its readers: the Marine Lieutenant Watkin Tench (who journeyed with the First Fleet), and the Edinburgh trained natural historian and surgeon, Robert Brown (who accompanied Matthew Flinders on the voyage around Australia). What they took from the text is interesting in itself. Tench was an intelligent and generally humane colonist, yet he castigated as idle and fanciful the Rousseauian fable of a peaceful, innocent and benign humanity in the 'state of nature'. His hostility to Rousseau was lifted straight from the pages of the Essay in which Ferguson had made the same criticisms of the French philosopher for failing to understand the 'natural' condition of humanity. 93 Ferguson argued trenchantly that humanity must not be studied in the abstract, a priori as Rousseau had, but in relation to authentic records of both historical truth and colonial accuracy. 94 Brown read Ferguson as he crossed the Atlantic en route to Australia while he pondered the physical, moral, and historical diversity of the human species, seeking for clues in the emergent discourse on race and in Ferguson's account of progressive human nature. 95 Brown wrote that he read 'the 2 first chapters of Ferguson on Civil Society. On the State of Nature & on Self preservation', but that he had preceded it with the translator's preface to 'Billardiere's Voyage in search of La Peyrouse'. 96 This latter text is an especially significant reference as it was precisely here that Ferguson and his Essay were invoked to explain the method of moral philosophy. The moral philosopher traced 'the advances' of the human 'species through its various gradations from savage to civilized life', drawing 'from voyages and travels, the facts' about savage humanity illuminating 'conclusions respecting the social, intellectual, and moral progress of Man.' 97 Yet even as Brown sought guidance in the authority of Ferguson on savage life, he also turned to Ferguson's former colleague and co-defender of the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, Hugh 'Blairs Lectures on Rhetoric'. 98 Both Tench and Brown appear to have turned to Ferguson's Essay precisely because it was an avatar of Enlightenment. Both men were then in transit to or had arrived in a spatial domain largely unknown to Europeans in which encounters with resident Indigenous populations were thought of as confrontations with peoples not just from another place, but another time. As Brown's use of both Blair and Ferguson, and Tench's reflections on Rousseau's state of nature attest, their minds were attuned to the enduring relevance of fable and fiction. Both could be illustrative of the challenge presented by colonial and imperial travel, of moving through global spaces and historical times. Each man's reading of Ferguson's Essay led them to consider qualities of universally shared human nature, but also the degree to which they were variably expressed under the differing influences of climate, environment, and isolation. In these global and colonial journeys of Ferguson's Essay lies the final dimension of its status as avatar of Enlightenment. It was a physical embodiment of mobility that made mobility possible by making its own crossing between domains. That history of mobility and ideas offers us a different perspective on the intellectual history of Enlightenment: a vision not solely taken up with texts and their influence, a tale not only of their composition and publication, but one that begins with their journeys and the story of where they were read, in transit, en route, at sea, between worlds and through time. Correspondence of Adam  Ferguson,27. 36. Sebastiani,The Scottish Enlightenment,[133][134][135][136]Whelan,Enlightenment Political Thought,[51][52][53]. Oz-Salzberger, "Civil Society in the Scottish Enlightenment," 58-83. Also, Pocock, "Cambridge Paradigms," 235-52. 38. For instance, Sebastiani,"National Characters and Race,[193][194][199][200]Hill,Passionate Society,"Ferguson the Highlander,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]Dziennik,The Fatal Land,[199][200][201]