He later pursued an active business career in London, becoming London director of a Scottish insurance society, and a lively promoter of the colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and of other useful public undertakings.
He published an account in the London and Shetland Journal of a journey in the Orkney Isles in 1839.
On 23 December 1848 he married Emma Anne, the widow of 'Romeo' Coates, who had been run over and killed in the previous February.
He died at the Alexandra Hotel, Hyde Park on 12 September 1879, aged 74.
[1] In 1864 Boyd published a pamphlet about Australia, where his disgraced fraudulent slaver brother had settled.