Donald Trail Leaves Home

A letter has just been found at the Portsmouth Athenaeum (in Portsmouth, New Hampshire), which was carried by Donald Trail on his first voyage as a ship’s captain in 1772. Trail was the master of the Neptune, the ‘commodore’ of Australia’s Second Fleet (1790), which had highest mortality rate in the 80 year history of Australian convict transportation.

He was baptised at Kirkwall on Orkney in February 1751, having been born into an large family of Traills based on the remote Scottish island. (The name was spelled Traill on Orkney, and he changed the spelling several years after leaving the island.)

He would have first gone to sea as a young man, possibly in the service of a wealthy Whitby merchant named Jonas Brown, who was involved in the manufacture of alum there. The production of alum required seaweed (for its potassium), and much of this was sourced from Orkney. Jones owned several ships and found a number of his masters on the island.

In 1772, Jones gave Donald Traill, then only 21 years of age, command of the Hermoine brig, which was to sail from Sunderland to Boston with a cargo of coal. The Portsmouth letter confirms that he touched at Kirkwall en route to Boston.

On the 15th of June 1772, an aging John Traill, one of Donald’s many relatives at Kirkwall, wrote to Robert Traill, another member of the family, who was employed as the Comptroller of His Majesty’s Customs at Portsmouth in New Hampshire. The letter was carried by ‘Captain Donald Traill’. As John Traill explained:

'This will be delivered to you by our Relation & Country man Capt Donald Traill, who has some thoughts of being at Portsmouth, where you recide [sic], and who can inform you of the Sickly condition I am in at present, which prevents me from writing you in my own hand –

'I hope you’ll show the Bearer, who seems to be a well behaved young man, all the Civilities you can. . .' [1]

If we want to really understand the ‘avaricious and unscrupulous’ Donald Trail of Second Fleet notoriety – as opposed to just having a villain from central casting – we need to piece together his life story, and this early letter is one of the parts.

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[1] Whipple Traill Spence Collection, 1728-1809, Portsmouth Athenaeum, MS074, Folder 11.

Cover of the letter carried by Donald Trail to Portsmouth, NH