Michael Scott, who was born at Cowlairs, on the outskirts of Glasgow, on October 30, 1789, was the son of Allan Scott, a Glasgow merchant and owner of a small estate at Cowlairs. After being educated at the high school and the university of Glasgow, he came in 1806 to Jamaica to manage several estates. Four years later he entered in Kingston a business the nature of which compelled him to travel frequently both by sea and road. He visited the neighbouring islands, especially Cuba and the Spanish Main, and the experiences of tropical scenery and nautical life thus gained formed the basis of his “Log.” In 1817 he returned to Scotland, and in the following year he married Margaret, daughter of Robert Bogle, of Gilmore Hill, a merchant in Glasgow. He returned to Jamaica immediately afterwards, but left the island finally in 1822, and, settling in Glasgow, became a partner in his father-in-law’s firm, Bogle, Harris and Co., of Glasgow, and Bogle, Douglas and Co., of Maracaybo. He died in Glasgow on November 7, 1835. It was in 1829, we learn from Mowbray Morris’s introduction to the edition of 1895, that the “Log” began to make its appearance in “Blackwood’s Magazine” as a disconnected series of sketches, published intermittently as the author supplied them, or as the editor found it convenient to print them. Blackwood, while keenly alive to their value, was urgent, we are told, with the author to give these sketches some connecting link, which, without binding him to the strict rules of narrative composition, would add a strain of personal and continuous interest to the movement of the story. The young midshipman accordingly began to cut a more conspicuous figure; and in July 1832 the title of “Tom Cringle’s Log” was prefixed to what is now the eighth but was then called the eleventh chapter. Henceforward the “Log” proceeded regularly each month, with but one intermission, to its conclusion in August 1833; and in that year it appeared in volume form in Philadelphia, in what was probably an unauthorised edition. Mowbray Morris gives 1834 as the year of its first appearance as a book; the “Dictionary of National Biography” says 1836; Allibone gives 1833. Both the “Log” and its successor, “The Cruise of the Midge,” were highly praised at the time, and Coleridge, in his “Table Talk,” called them “most excellent.” Scott so successfully concealed his identity that he was dead before his authorship of “Tom Cringle” was known. It was attributed to Captain Chamier, to Captain Marryat, and to Professor Wilson, to whom it was ascribed in a German edition published at Brunswick in 1839. From internal evidence it is clear that the events in this story synchronise, if they are not identical, with Scott’s own travels.