The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he published the Kilmarnock _Poems_ to pay his passage-money, but his own contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland, to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight. Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the subscription for the _Poems_ was well under way. Negotiations were then almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock to Savannah-la-Mar in the _Nancy_, sailing about September 1. Then returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and when the captain of the _Nancy_ notified him that the ship was about to sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The _Nancy_ sailed without him, and he transferred his booking to the _Bell_, which was to sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.