Jane Jarvis

Jane Jarvis was the twentieth of the twenty-one children of Thomas Jarvis, a former chief justice and Member of the Council of the Island of Antigua, proprietor of one thousand acre estates in the parishes of St. John, St. George, Long Island and Bird Island.  Jarvis’s global story - from Antigua to Bombay, to Macao, to Australia and back to the Isle of Mull in Scotland - casts light on the myriad connections between English endeavours in the West and East Indies.  Aged twenty, Jane travelled to Bombay as a companion to her sister Dorothea, where she met a dashing young Scottish army officer, Lachlan Macquarie.  When she died young from tuberculosis, Lachlan inherited Jane’s £6,000 fortune and used it to buy an estate on the island of Mull, which he named Jarvisfield in her honour. Later, he remarried and became Governor of New South Wales (1810-1822) where he ordered punitive, genocidal, expeditions against Indigenous Australians. Several places in Australia still bear Jane’s name today.