Alexander Cuming

Sir Alexander Cuming, 2nd Baronet (1691–1775) was a Scottish adventurer to North America; he returned to Britain with a delegation of Cherokee chiefs.

[2] (He had several sisters and a half-brother, James Cuming of Breda, by his father's second wife)[3] In 1714 he was called to the Scottish bar, and also held a captain's commission in the Russian army.

[2] In 1729 Cuming was led, supposedly by a dream of his wife's, to undertake a voyage to America, with the object of visiting the Cherokee mountains on the borders of South Carolina and Virginia.

In a letter from South Carolina, bearing the date 12 June 1730, an extract from which is given in the Edinburgh Weekly Journal for 16 September, he is directly accused of having defrauded the settlers of large sums of money and other property by means of fictitious promissory notes.

He remained there until 1765, when, on 30 December of that year, he was nominated a poor brother of the London Charterhouse by Archbishop Secker, and took up residence in the hospital on 3 January 1766.

Their son, who succeeded to the title, was a captain in the army, but became mentally ill, and died some time before 1796 in poverty, in the neighbourhood of Red Lion Street, Whitechapel.